The Office of Strategic Services (OSS), was created during the Second World War to be a central collector, producer, and disseminator of foreign intelligence. Its secondary role of clandestine warfare did not come easily. One OSS unit, Detachment 101, surmounted numerous problems to become a model clandestine and special operations unit able to create its own indigenous army that waged war behind Japanese lines in Burma. This study uses previously unexplored primary source materials from the OSS records held by the U.S. National Archives to examine the unit and its organizational changes from 1942 to 1945. Detachment 101 succeeded in the China-Burma-India Theater (CBI) for the simple reason that it was able to function independent of immediate control from either the U.S. Army or OSS main headquarters. Source documents reveal that the unit’s commander was left on his own to decide how the unit would operate, and how to incorporate various OSS branches and capabilities into its operational matrix. The CBI’s lack of resources dictated that the Detachment 101 had to streamline its efforts to be successful. Its officers needed to get acquainted with the entire operation and then integrate their disparate elements into where they best fit as the whole. An exploration of the documents reveals that each of the unit’s two commanders molded the unit into an organization that reflected their personalities. Colonel Carl F. Eifler, was bold and impetuous and modeled the group to accomplish any task—even if it could not. Colonel William R. Peers, focused the group’s efforts on assisting the north Burma campaign. Under his direction, the unit rapidly became a much more cohesive unit able to help the Allies win control of north Burma. His direction was instrumental in Detachment 101’s first real test; the Myitkyina Campaign. Examination of the primary documents uncovers that by the end of the war, the unit had become so successful and so flexible that it was the only ground combat unit fighting in north Burma, and was able to adopt a variety of dissimilar missions. Although other OSS combat operations gave exceptional service, none was as central to the conduct of an entire campaign as was Detachment 101.

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Sweden’s role during the Second World War has been a matter that has been under much debate since the war’s end in 1945. The debate has however ebbed and flowed and established a discourse that Sweden was forced to give in to German demands and did so to avoid conflict that would have severely damaged Sweden. However, in 1991 a Swedish journalist Maria-Pia Boëthius published a book known as Heder och Samvete in which she explained that the Swedish concessions to Germany during the war were made out of profit rather than giving in to German demands. This sparked a debate that ended with the establishment that Sweden compromised and even broke its neutrality in favor to gain profit from the war. This project investigates how Swedish schoolbooks have chosen to depict this piece of history and whether Maria-Pia Boëthius’s book has influenced them or not.

abstract: The first official history of the Great Patriotic War appeared in the Soviet Union in 1960-1965. It evolved into a six-volume set that elicited both praise and criticism from the reading public. This dissertation examines the creation of the historiographical narrative of the Great Patriotic War in the decade following de-Stalinization in 1956. The debates historians, Party and state representatives engaged in, including the responses they received from reviewers and readers, shed new light on the relationship between the government, those who wrote state-sponsored narratives, and the reading public. The narrative examined here shows the importance and value placed on the war effort, and explores how aspects of the Stalinist period were retained during the Thaw. By focusing on previously unexplored archival material, which documents debates and editorial decisions, an examination of how officials sought to control the state’s explanation of events, motivations and consequences of the war can be examined in-depth. To date, the periodization, terminology and areas of concentration that define the course of the Great Patriotic War are fixated on topics that Stalin’s war narrative favored, assigning significance to events according to Stalinist preferences rather than objective analysis. My study of the war’s historiography shows how contentious its memory became at every level, making it difficult to clearly discern who represented and opposed the party line throughout Soviet society. The author argues that the collective memory of the war, as propagated by the state, became so all-encompassing that it was often the preferred version, infiltrating individual memories and displacing or blending with personal recollections and factual documentation. Because the war touched the entire population of the Soviet Union, its story became the foundational myth of the USSR, replacing the October Revolution, and was used as a legitimizing tool by Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev. Most recently, it has experienced a revival in the post-Soviet period by Vladimir Putin as a way to unify Russia and build popular support for his administration. Viewing how the public interacted with representatives of the state over the creation of the official history of the war suggests that like no other event, war compels any state, even a totalitarian state, to reexamine its foundations, historical memory, foreign and domestic policies and views on censorship. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation History 2016

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This dissertation proposes that the work produced by black writers between the end of the Depression and the end ofWorld War II, specifically that ofEllison, Himes and Petry--and to the degree that it influenced the others, that ofWright--comprises a distinct period in African American literature. Their work is characterized by a concern with the implications of the war for the self-determination of African Americans within the United States and for people of colour worldwide. In addition, these writers explored the effects of the war effort, particularly ofthe second Great Migration ofblack Americans from South to North, on the cultural and political strategies of African Americans as a whole. These migrants, the majority of whom had been employed as agricultural or domestic labourers in the South, entered into industrial occupations and left service work in private homes in unprecedented numbers. In their prewar role within a neo-feudal southern economy characterized by white power over the labouring black body, these workers were seen by many contemporary commentators, and particularly those aligned with the American Left, as conforming to a socio-economic category of the "folk." In the South, the black folk had developed strategies for survival and resistance, many of which were contained in their folklore. As these migrants entered into industrial relations of production and a concomitant working-class consciousness in a war-driven economy, African American writers, intellectuals, and workers were faced with the question of the degree to which this folk "past" was usable in the present. In the work ofEllison, Himes and Petry, the figure of the black folk in the urban-industrial environment, as it e/merged with the working class, became the embodied site for an examination of the massive cultural and political shifts engendered by World War II. In addition, each ofthese writers employed black folklore as a strategy in the struggle for Mrican American selfdetermination within the United States during the war. / This dissertation proposes that the work produced by black writers between the end of the Depression and the end ofWorld War II, specifically that ofEllison, Himes and Petry--and to the degree that it influenced the others, that ofWright--comprises a distinct period in African American literature. Their work is characterized by a concern with the implications of the war for the self-determination of African Americans within the United States and for people of colour worldwide. In addition, these writers explored the effects of the war effort, particularly ofthe second Great Migration ofblack Americans from South to North, on the cultural and political strategies of African Americans as a whole. These migrants, the majority of whom had been employed as agricultural or domestic labourers in the South, entered into industrial occupations and left service work in private homes in unprecedented numbers. In their prewar role within a neo-feudal southern economy characterized by white power over the labouring black body, these workers were seen by many contemporary commentators, and particularly those aligned with the American Left, as conforming to a socio-economic category of the "folk." In the South, the black folk had developed strategies for survival and resistance, many of which were contained in their folklore. As these migrants entered into industrial relations of production and a concomitant working-class consciousness in a war-driven economy, African American writers, intellectuals, and workers were faced with the question of the degree to which this folk "past" was usable in the present. In the work ofEllison, Himes and Petry, the figure of the black folk in the urban-industrial environment, as it e/merged with the working class, became the embodied site for an examination of the massive cultural and political shifts engendered by World War II. In addition, each ofthese writers employed black folklore as a strategy in the struggle for Mrican American selfdetermination within the United States during the war. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This paper examines the role and scope of the American public’s opinion on European Jews in the 1930’s and 1940’s. Significant attention is placed on several aspects of American politics and public perceptions at this time. The ideas that developed from the Great Depression through World War II on refugees and immigrants are closely scrutinized. The approach to this study focuses on sources from renowned Holocaust scholars including Raul Hilberg, David S. Wyman, Martin Gilbert, Henry Feingold, Hadley Cantril, Robert Divine, and Deborah E. Lipstadt to name a select few of the authors referenced. Several newspapers and journals such as the New York Times, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The Washington Post, The Christian Century, The Nation, and the New Republic are referenced. The areas of focus are on public attitude, governmental involvement, Jewish leadership in the United States, and military capabilities. Conclusions of this study include apathy from participating parties, the inability to organize strong rescue support, and the refusal to lower the immigration restrictions of the time.

This thesis explores, through fictional storytelling, the cultural duality of individuals inhabiting Singapore prior to World War II. The primary locale in many of these stories-an actual residence known as Eu Villa-interconnects each narrative and helps to uncover the hybridization of a Chinese family (and servants) living in a British colony. Many of the stories are imparted from different perspectives: wives, children and amahs, each of them pieced together to bridge the space between Chinese heritage overlaid and intermixed with British culture. In this way, the stories of this thesis reflect on the history that preceded the distinct multiculturalism of contemporary Singapore.

Thesis (M.A.)--Miami University, Dept. of History, 2009. / Title from first page of PDF document. Includes bibliographical references (p. 50-52).