Cornell University Press 2023 Military Studies Magazine

March 2023

MILITARY STUDIES

A CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

ExplorE our Military StudiES BookS

Point your smartphone camera at the QR code below or click it to view all our forthcoming, new, and previously published in our Military studies subject area.

THE EXCERPT

Deep Dive

The craft arrived at its destination on a summer day in 2016 guided by science, folklore, and intuition. Tim Caza pulled back the throttle, and his twenty-five-foot research vessel, Voyager, powered down and began idling toward the coordinates. The water that day was calm, making the task somewhat easier. So, too, did the help Caza had enlisted for the mission: John McLaughlin, a retired volunteer fire chief and body-recovery diver, who was climbing around the cuddy and onto the bow. Caza, with an eye on the GPS, shifted into neutral. As the boat drifted over the designated point, he signaled to McLaughlin, and a moment later the anchor was overboard, the rode running from the chain locker. Caza cut the power, and the engine noise gave way to the patter of wavelets against the hull and a general sense of stillness. They were within sight of the southeastern shore of Lake Ontario in only ninety feet of water, even though generations of conventional wisdom placed the object of their search somewhere to the west and in much deeper water.

Caza and McLaughlin, both broad at the shoulder, moved about the crowded little boat with practiced steps, the conversation turning to the task at hand. Caza ducked below and reappeared a moment later with his diving kit. McLaughlin, in his mid-seventies, was still a capable diver but knew well the hazards of uncharted wrecks, even for individuals in their physical prime. The plan was for McLaughlin to remain in the boat and spot Caza, who was twenty years younger, with a drop camera. McLaughlin had gear if the need arose, but he was happy to leave the frogging to a younger man. Above all he was there to witness the discovery. For the occasion he had brought an American flag, pristinely folded and sealed in clear immersible plastic.

It was early July, and along the shoreline, some miles off, occupants of seasonal cottages were in the midst of a weeklong celebration of Independence Day. Flags were in abundance, both those stirring languidly in the offshore breeze and the dollar-store variety that seemed especially suited to the clutches of small children. Though it was still only midmorning, the heat was building, and youths were dragging inflatables down to the water, over pebbly beaches, past remnants of campfires where on previous evenings parents, uncles, aunts, and neighbors had set off fireworks. Adults—those not joining the children on the beach—would now be drawn to porches and lawn chairs with coffee or iced tea or maybe a bloody Mary.

The cottages—locally known as “camps”—were for the most part built in the post–World War II boom years, some of them styled after twostory beach houses but most little more than bungalows or trailers with decks and awnings. Harking to an era when waterfront property could be bought on a working-class salary and developed on fifty-foot lots by a generation flush with victory, they remain remarkably unchanged to this day, sharing an eclectic charm, general mustiness from being shuttered from Labor Day to Memorial Day, and an unbroken view to the horizon. That view—as sensational as the camps are modest—is an ever-changing flourish of light on water: fireworks, sunsets, lightning storms, constellations parading around the North Star or, on days like this, the sun burning colors from a vast empty sky into ponderous depths. It’s this stunning view—sometimes serene, sometimes sensational—that captivates generation after generation, though few are aware of the wreckage it conceals. Caza’s boat, roughly the size and shape of a sport-fishing charter, might

have been observable on this clear day for anybody who cared to look through binoculars. Still, it would have registered as no more than a speck on the horizon, its singularity of purpose lost on the observer.

It was at this point on the horizon, on a previous outing, where the long train of empty lakebed visible on Caza’s sonar screen had yielded to something of impressive dimensions. As the image scrolled into view, Caza had known immediately it wasn’t a shipwreck. And while ill-defined and obscured by sediment, it was too uniform to be a natural feature of the lake’s bottom. Geometric shapes amid shadowy features suggested parity of form. With much to cover that day, Caza had taken several screen shots, logged the coordinates, and continued with his survey.

It wasn’t until after Caza had returned home that he began to fully grasp the potential of his discovery. McLaughlin, a friend and neighbor, had stopped by to have a look. After examining the sonar image, McLaughlin produced a folder with diagrams of a four-engine aircraft. He placed one illustrating the aircraft’s proportions viewed from above next to the sonar image. As he rotated one image to align with the other, the confusion of shapes depicted in grainy monochrome on the lake’s bottom took on sudden coherence. The exposed section of its centerpiece and, most vividly, a lattice pattern on its top matched the nosepiece and cockpit canopy of the aircraft in the diagram. McLaughlin pointed out shapes protruding from the sediment—engines at the leading edge of the wing.

“Looks like the Twenty-Four,” McLaughlin had said, returning his reading glasses to his shirt pocket. Discoveries did not tend to inspire demonstrative enthusiasm in the body-recovery diver. A find isn’t a find, he is fond of noting, until “a diver can reach out and touch it.”

The object they were trying to reach was a B-24 Liberator bomber that had vanished with a crew of eight after taking off from the Westover Army base in Massachusetts at the height of the Second World War. “The Twenty-Four” was last heard circling low over Oswego County in a snowstorm in the early morning hours of February 18, 1944. For seventy-four years it had defied searches from the Adirondack Mountains to the depths of Lake Ontario, first by the US military, later by recreational divers, and, in an apparent attempt to exhaust all possibilities, a group of dowsers and mystics enlisted by private parties to channel the aircraft’s whereabouts.

The Liberator is fabulous both for what it was and what it represents. There is arguably no item that more singularly illustrates the country’s rise

Figures 1.1–1.3. A sonar image recorded by Tim Caza in 2016 matches outlines of the front section of a B-24 possibly buried in sediment in eastern Lake Ontario. Sonar record courtesy of Tim Caza, collage by Mike Bechthold.

to engineering and manufacturing prominence while leading, in more than a figurative sense, the war effort.1 Engineered by Consolidated Aircraft under urgent deadlines for a war where, for the first time in history, air supremacy was counted as a deciding factor, the Liberator could go farther, faster, with more payload than other bombers of its day—attributes that would carry the fight in Europe and the Pacific well behind enemy lines. “It would be an exaggeration to say the B-24 won the war for the Allies,” writes historian Steven Ambrose. “But don’t ask how they could have won the war without it.”2

The plane’s capabilities were unique, though its legacy ultimately rests with an unprecedented manufacturing feat. As the American home front tooled up for war, the Liberator became the centerpiece of aircraft development. Between 1941 and 1945, some 18,500 were produced, more than any other military aircraft in history. Rosie the Riveter rolled up her sleeves and got busy on B-24 lines, including a Ford Motor Company

McLaughlin had seen a lot of things and people who tragic end at the bottom of rivers, quarries, and lakes, Four remained in a league of its own. The plane itself, lesser part of an ambition—a pilgrimage may be a better that he had been pursuing for close to forty years. The military had called off the search over upstate March 3, 1944, two weeks after the airmen were last heard which time it was all but certain, wherever they ended survived. None of the bodies of the craft’s eight crew had At the time, many tens of thousands of men were dying on multiple fronts of the war, and tens of thousands more needed to replace them. All those men required training. neither time nor resources to continue the search then, lacked incentive to do so later. The lost airmen, but for were young and single; they left behind grieving mothers all regions of the country, but no direct descendants to pursue fate and final resting place. Now the mothers and fathers long dead and gone. So were sisters, brothers, and cousins. and Caza, returning to the site on that July day with a folded in a way, surrogates.

Figure 1.4. At the height of the war, Liberators roll off the line at Willow Run, the converted Ford Motor Company assembly plant in southern Michigan. More Liberators were produced than any other military plane in history, but few exist today. National Archives and Records Administration.

As Voyager tugged at her anchor, Caza prepared for the sortment of gleaming tanks and regulators. The air bore

factory a half mile long and a quarter mile wide near Detroit where Henry Ford’s auto assembly line was scaled up for production of the thirty-sixthousand-pound bomber. To be sure, the Liberator was not the only famous warplane to carry the day.3 But if the war was said to be won in the factories, the B-24 was exhibit A.

With so many of them rolling off the line back then, it is striking how few exist now. Like most of the country’s prodigious surplus arsenal that survived the war, the B-24s were valued mostly as scrap. Only thirteen are known to still exist; of those, two are airworthy.4 The story of the unrecovered plane in upstate New York, no more than a dusky memory at best, was possibly less preserved than the plane itself by the time Caza and McLaughlin prepared for the dive. Few possessed reliable knowledge of the circumstances under which it disappeared, and fewer still pretended to know anything about its crew.

McLaughlin had seen a lot of things and people who had come to a tragic end at the bottom of rivers, quarries, and lakes, but the TwentyFour remained in a league of its own. The plane itself, however, was the lesser part of an ambition—a pilgrimage may be a better way to put it— that he had been pursuing for close to forty years.

The military had called off the search over upstate New York on March 3, 1944, two weeks after the airmen were last heard from and by which time it was all but certain, wherever they ended up, they had not survived. None of the bodies of the craft’s eight crew had been recovered. At the time, many tens of thousands of men were dying and disappearing on multiple fronts of the war, and tens of thousands more were urgently needed to replace them. All those men required training. The military had neither time nor resources to continue the search then, and apparently lacked incentive to do so later. The lost airmen, but for one exception, were young and single; they left behind grieving mothers and fathers from all regions of the country, but no direct descendants to pursue their precise fate and final resting place. Now the mothers and fathers of the crew were long dead and gone. So were sisters, brothers, and cousins. McLaughlin and Caza, returning to the site on that July day with a folded flag, were, in a way, surrogates.

As Voyager tugged at her anchor, Caza prepared for the dive amid an assortment of gleaming tanks and regulators. The air bore the aroma of

Three QuesTions wiTh SUZANNE SUTHERLAND author of The Rise of the Military Entrepreneur

1. What is your favorite anecdote from your research for this book?

On one of my research trips to Vienna, I encountered an archival document that revealed that Montecuccoli, the central figure of my book, had attended a wedding ceremony at the Augustinian Church in the Hofburg. Later that day, I sat in a pew inside the same church. At one point, I got up and lit a votive candle. Sitting within an intimate, quiet space that Montecuccoli had once visited was a peaceful moment that allowed me to reflect on what it means to bring people of the past

narrative. I wanted to produce a book that presented them in their entirety, including not just battlefield experiences but also politics, beliefs, motivations, social networks, scholarly interests, and more. There were times when I felt panicked about how to do it, but I realize now that the project just needed time to grow. It was important to keep putting one foot in front of the other, and to take breaks from time to time.

back to life in research and writing. I recognized how profoundly silent the dead are and that, as a living person with a pen in hand, I carry a huge responsibility and privilege. That moment confirmed for me that I wasn’t interested in depicting military entrepreneurs as either heroes or villains, but simply wanted to capture their experiences of the world accurately—accurately enough that they might recognize themselves in my text.

2. What do you wish you had known when you started writing your book that you know now?

When I started writing, I was overwhelmed by the demand of weaving together the many different pieces of information I had gathered about military entrepreneurs into a coherent

3. How do you wish you could change your field?

The number one thing we need in History (as in all Humanities disciplines) is more funding and support. I teach at a large regional comprehensive university that has recently transitioned to R2 status. Many faculty at these kinds of institutions are doing world-class research but do not receive enough support to write books. Articles are great, but books provide a special kind of depth and comprehensiveness. It takes extraordinary focus over a long period of time to write a book and is nearly impossible to do without paid time off from teaching and administration duties.

Articles are great, but books provide a special kind of depth and comprehensiveness.

AuThors in ConversATion, feATuring series ediTor, Judy wu

And AmAndA BoCzAr, AuThor of An AmeriCAn BroThel

The United States in the World podcast

Cornell University Press

The following is a transcript of an episode of Authors in Coversation, the United States in the World podcast from Cornell University Press. It has been transcribed using AI software. Any typos, errors, or inconsistencies may be the result of the transcription or the natural pattern of the human voice and speech. If you wish to listen to the origial, search 1869 podcast through whicever podcast service you prefer.

Welcome to Authors in Conversation, The United States in the World Series Podcast from Cornell University Press. I’m so excited to be talking to you today about your book. My name is Judy Wu. I’m one of the series editors for the US in the World series published by Cornell University Press. And I’m so happy to be here with Amanda Boczar. She’s the author of An American Brothel: Sex and Diplomacy during the Vietnam War. And it just came out in 2022. So congratulations, Amanda.

Thank you, it’s great to be hear talking to you.

Well, I wanted to ask you, what inspired you to write this book?

Yeah, I think like a lot of projects, it started, you know, someplace a little bit different. This was not the book I plan to write when I first started kind of visualizing what my dissertation and then first book was going to be. And I knew that I wanted to do something in social history. And I thought that I wanted to do Vietnam War era, I did my MA thesis focused around Lyndon Johnson. And I just kind of really fell in love with the social aspects of studying the war, but wanted to stay connected to foreign relations. And over time, I just kept coming back to this idea of how do civilians impact war in different ways. And this focus on non state actors, and every source I ever looked at, seemed to mention in some way, women or girlfriends or prostitutes or some interaction with South Vietnamese women in some way, usually through the lens of an American soldier. And I wanted to know, you know, this is so prevalent, and it’s been studied and other wars, but it hadn’t been studied for Vietnam, and, you know, a monograph, length, reflection. And so I was just hoping to kind of dive into that a little bit. And over time, it took on, you know, multiple different lenses into these types of relationships. And I found that, like, friendship became a really fruitful avenue to study, I looked at sexual assault and rape, I looked at issues, you know, what happens afterwards, when there are, you know, mixed race children, and there are orphans and other types of issues that happened. And so it became, in some ways, a much bigger project than I had kind of foreseen it becoming. But I was, once I kind of started seeing all the pieces, I felt like I needed to keep them together. And so that’s how it kind of took on all of those lenses into one book.

That’s great, thank you so much. I want to just read one of your really fantastic many passages in your book. But I thought this one was es-

pecially powerful. So you write on page 16: “Sex and war overlapped in unexpected places during Vietnam, including the Americans strategy of maintaining a large rear echelon force, North Vietnam’s anti-American propaganda campaigns, and the constant barrage of media coverage on life in Vietnam.” And so that, I think, just gets at some of the larger implications of the social and intimate relationships that you’re that you’re describing. I was wondering if you could say a little bit more about what you think are the big takeaways, the big arguments of your work?

Yeah, I think that, you know, what I was getting to there and just kept coming back was, again, this prevalence, it’s mentioned kind of everywhere, and I wanted to see how far it went. And very quickly, I realized that went all the way up in the United States to the top, and it was talked about among, you know, leadership in South Vietnam, as well. And they had a lot of concerns and starting, you know, even before, like major American escalation in the early 60s, you have the Diem family, and they’re all extremely concerned about American behavior on the on the ground. North Vietnam uses this a lot as well throughout the entire conflict. And they’re able to kind of talk about, you know, what is it that American soldiers are doing here? You know, from a political stance, but also a cultural stance, what are the cultural impacts going to be? And so all of these factors kind of play into each other. And when you get back to how are American soldiers being trained, there’s definitely this cultural expectation that like there will be women, there will they will be available as if that is some sort of commodity that is expected. And that really factors into expectations soldiers have on the ground when they arrive. Plus, when they arrive, they’re staying in cities at the beginning, and you arrive into Saigon. And there are not very many men left there are fighting. And so a lot of the people that you’re working with, at the bases or in the bars are women. So you just have general human interactions that are happening and leading to these relationships. And so once I started to kind of recognize that they were moving soldiers based on relationships with civilians and civilian women, they’re, you know, they’re creating multimillion dollar bases outside of cities, just to kind of stave off issues like venereal disease or, you know, cultural impacts, you know, issues with soldiers being drunk in the streets, those kinds of things that are happening. So they’re, they’re playing into each other. And I think, you know, just seeing how much of an impact that you know, daily behavior of these non state actors as well as soldiers are having on the way that the military is framing their positioning and how the government’s are framing, you know, both their war efforts, and the rationale for their war efforts, was really interesting to me and became kind of that main focus. And so I think that just kind of focusing on that foreign relations bit was a kept drawing me back and kept it from becoming like a straightforward, just kind of like study into soldiers or things that it all was connected.

Thank you so much. I was interested in, in what, which scholars, which historical classical trends shaped your methodological approach in devel-

Judy

oping the study?

Yeah, I thought about this question a lot over the years, if I could pin it down to a few, but I think I took because I came at it from a lot of different angles, I was trying to study from, you know, an American military perspective, a foreign relations perspective, I was also trying to understand the Vietnamese perspective as best that I could, and from gender studies from all these different entrees, and it became so many different scholars whose work I was trying to piece together into something that was, you know, a coherent book. And I think a lot of this really hinges on, you know, my primary mentor during my dissertation who was hanging when, and, you know, she takes an international approach in her research and everything that she does, and she really pushed me to do international research. And so from the start, I had plans that this book had to be, you know, research coming out of, you know, Australian sources, British sources, looking at French sources, looking at Vietnamese sources, looking at American sources. And so I wanted to find as many avenues into this as I could. And I think she had a lot of, you know, a lot of a role to play in and just thinking of how to frame a book like this. When I started looking at how to structure the book, I was really influenced by the scholars who had done this type of a study for other conflicts. So you know, Mary Louise Roberts’s book had just come out of what soldiers do, which is just such a great like, look at World War Two, and prostitution, and dating and rape during that conflict, and she’s able to address all those issues. So well, that was really inspirational for me. And she, of course, builds on the great work from Petra Goedde and Maria Hohn and Katharine Moon, for the Korean War. And so all of their work is just really influential for what I do. And when I think about, you know, Vietnam War studies, bringing in different roles of, you know, cultural elements from Mark Bradley, or studies of gender from, you know, Heather Stur, Kara Vuic, yourself, of course. And then, you know, I really also wanted to study soldiers experiences, because so many of my sources came from from soldiers themselves. So I thought it was important to see how people have studied those. So of course, you you know, Kyle Longley and Christian Appy’s works are super important for getting to that. And then I, while I was editing the book, I was teaching up at West Point and had the opportunity to spend a whole lot of time with a whole lot of soldiers. And so just getting into their mindset and thinking about how they work and how they study. And that kind of thing was really fun. So, yeah, it was definitely on the shoulders of many, many giants to put together something that comes from this many perspectives. But it was great to have so much to work with.

Thank you so much. I was wondering if you can talk a little bit about your favorite finds, especially as you’re describing the multiple archives that you visited, like are there certain perspectives that emerge only because you visit that particular archive? Were there particular stories that sort of surprised you?

Judy

Yeah, I I think the I wasn’t originally planning to have a chapter on sexual assault and rape. And when I went to the National Archives, I, I didn’t expect to find too much. I hadn’t found a lot in the sources. i There had been a lot of work done on the lie. That’s where the bulk of the court marshals come from. There’s only I believe it’s about 30 total court marshals that are completed related to sexual assault throughout the entirety of the war. And that conflict had been written about quite a bit. So I hadn’t planned to do a whole chapter. And when I went to the National Archives in College Park, they had some military police blotters. And I was able to pull a couple of years starting around 68. And it was from a small town, a little bit north of Saigon. And it was just basically the daily records where the police would military place, American military police would write kind of what had happened throughout the day. And as I’m flipping through them, I just start realizing that so many of the accounts that they’re writing about our accounts of assault, they’re very rarely really called that. Sometimes it would be called, like violence or just like disturbance. And then the write up would be something that would clearly indicate sexual assault, like a woman whose clothes had been ripped off, and she was bleeding, or had just different elements and factors that that you can piece together as this is what it was, but they weren’t writing it. And going through these, these please plotters, you know, I was able to find so many accounts of this, that it made me start thinking about different terms to search with, and different approaches. And recognizing that just because it’s not a court martial, you know, doesn’t mean people aren’t writing about it, it’s written somewhere. And so I was able to start pulling in different types of sources. And that led me into a lot of anti-war movement: publications that had been published in South Vietnam, particularly from like the Vietnamese women’s union, and those types of organizations, and they would often cite their sources, and you’d be able to track that and find more things and talking to different people over time, piece things together. I also had the opportunity to interview lately Haislip, about her experiences with assault throughout the war and rape. And she was able to give me some really enlightening perspectives on how to approach the issue and how to write about something that was deemed as again, just as prevalent, as you know, prostitution throughout the war, but hadn’t been written about even close to as much or as frequently or even made as light of and film. Of course, it was, prostitution is already a taboo topic, when you’re trying to find it in the archives, and rape and assault is even more so. So those those documents really took me in a direction that I hadn’t initially planned on going in. But I’m really glad that I did. Because I think it’s so important to give voice where you can to those victims, and try to piece together how that fits into this overall conflict, for sure.

Thank you so much. You are mentioning oral histories. And you also talk in the book about how you’re writing about a taboo topic. And especially when people are recounting uncomfortable experiences in their lives, that they may be reluctant to share insights about their own actions or

the actions of others. I was wonder if you can say a little bit more about maybe some of the challenges of doing oral histories? And then what did you What did you make of those challenges?

Yeah, I, if, if I was going to start this book over, that would definitely be the avenue that I would, I would push harder to get. It would be more oral histories. And I had trouble I got a couple of interviews from different people, and several of them, after having the interview would say please don’t use any of this, you know, or don’t use my name. And then it’s very hard to use it as a reliable source if I can’t actually quote someone. And so it starts to become more difficult to use them, people became really nervous to talk about these experiences, even, you know, just, you know, day to day occurrences or dating that they, if they dated someone I didn’t have any one other than lately Haislip who’s who spoke to me about sexual assault. I had hoped to do some more oral histories when I was in Vietnam for some research. And none of them panned out. None of my offers were accepted. And I’ve known some people who have done, you know, great work in this area. And I’ve cited a few in the book. And I think that that’s, that’s something that should be being captured is more oral histories, more interviews with Vietnamese women in particular about their experiences. And, and I think, you know, the biggest challenge is the length, you need the language skills, and you need to build trust, and you need time, you know, to be there in Vietnam, you can’t fly in and just say, hey, or call someone and hey, do this interview with me. You got to build this relationship and show how the work is going to be used. And I just think that would be a great project for someone to take on.

Thank you for sharing that. You mentioned in the book that prostitution looms large that that is really where the bulk of concern and discourse lies. But you also mentioned earlier that you found friendship to be a really interesting topic to explore. So I was wondering if you wanted to say more about either prostitution or about friendship?

Yeah. I think prostitution looms so large because it becomes really easy to parody and film. It’s, we have so many accounts of it, people talk about the sensational. And for many people, this idea of prostitution is a sensational topic. They, they don’t view it as like a normal or mundane thing. And they want to, you know, address it. And so every soldier writing home to his buddies, or writing his memoir is going to talk about his experiences, if he were to have visited a prostitute, or if he didn’t, and he wants to write about it anyway. And so you see a lot of that. It’s also something that I think American politicians were able to kind of easily grab onto as being like, Oh, this illicit practice, right, this thing that Americans are doing. And so if you have a stance against the war, and that’s where the title of the book and American brothel comes from, is this Fulbright quote, where he’s saying that all of Vietnam is turning into an American brothel. And it becomes this big war of like, How dare you say that, like, that’s, it’s offensive to everyone involved to use this terminology. And so,

you know, Fulbright throws it out there. And it just becomes kind of this like, shocking moment for so many people trying to understand what’s happening in Vietnam. Like, how dare you say, Americans are doing this, how dare you put this on the whole nation of Vietnam and, and so it’s this back and forth, and it’d be, but it gets people’s attention. And I think that’s why prostitution kind of plays such a big role. It’s also a really easy commodity to trade in, in the middle of a war. And so it becomes a way to make money for a lot of people and not even particularly the women who are working as prostitutes, but people who are employing them, or finding ways to put them in a position where they must work as prostitutes in order to pay off certain debts. And so you have, you have this, this kind of culture that’s being built up and then becomes easy to sensationalized after the fact and culture. And so it just takes up a lot of people’s mental energy when they’re thinking about what’s life like for soldiers on the ground. And then on the other hand, you have these friendships, and you have women who are working in bases and just kind of have relationships with with soldiers and kind of a passing nature, you have a lot of American women who are serving carefully talks about all the different roles that women are playing in the war. And when they’re over there, they’re building relationships with Vietnamese women, and they’re doing outreach, and they’re talking. And those kinds of things can get lost. And it becomes really easy to create, you know, Vietnamese woman as an other, rather than Vietnamese woman as an equal and someone who’s also, you know, fighting for freedom and having a stance and just trying to survive throughout this conflict that they’re living through. And so I wanted to make sure to, like engage with those relationships. They’re not written about as much and they’re definitely not reflected as much in popular culture, but they’re happening. And if you look at, you know, throughout the sources, people often talk about, oh, yeah, this was this person that I knew, or I met with them regularly, or I talked to them. And so I think it just comes down a lot to how we remember the war becomes a lot of you know, what people are studying from it in different ways. And so pulling together all those different parts, I think, is really important.

It’s really wonderful that you can shed light on these dynamics. I also wanted to ask you, because obviously, a lot of the focus of the book and also at that time is on the figure of the Vietnamese woman. But there’s also American perceptions and assumptions about Vietnamese men. And so I was wondering if you can talk a little bit about both about both aspects.

Yeah, this is something that I, you know, wanted to engage with more and I worked with, especially as I was revising into into the book and thinking about Olga drawers work on how she writes about her Chi Minh. And this idea of like, if you know, the effeminate Vietnamese man from the perspective of of a white American male, right. And, of course, all of this is pushed out on the public from Lyndon Johnson in the early 60s and how he’s describing Asian masculinity. And so, it’s really inter-

esting to see how American soldiers kind of engage with those ideas, and they seem much more comfortable talking about Asian women than they do about Asian men as it goes through. But I think like politicians and Johnson in particular, he just finds it really easy to try to undermine Vietnamese men as much as he can’t by bringing up ideas of of gender and sexuality and how they compare to Americans in his own view of the world. It’s definitely you know, a stark contrast to to how they want to describe, you know, Americans out there, and I think they use that for a lot of propaganda reasons.

Thank you so much. I’m curious about your perception of the field of us in the world, diplomatic history, military history. Do you think there’s still resistance to thinking about how central sexuality and intimacy is to the understanding of the conduct of war? The conduct diplomacy? And why? If that’s the case, why do you think that’s the case? Do you think it’s changed? You know, how do you think it’s a change?

Oh, that’s an interesting question. When you think about it, like, how have the fields changed? And I’m also thinking, how have public response to that changed and these ideas, and so I found, you know, I’ve been probably presenting about issues of sexuality and military history for a decade now or so. And I’ve never faced too much resistance, you know, and in conference presentations, or even to my publications, necessarily, maybe once in a while, someone will be like, yeah, what’s the point, but very rarely, I think that the field is pretty accepting. I’m not sure that everyone in the field is going to jump in and write about it, you know, like, I’m not sure that it’s becoming the most popular avenue into this, or why certain people will choose to write about military history, or foreign relations. But I think that it’s got merit, and people are recognizing the merit to it. And I think that if there is still resistance, that it’s definitely waning, or at least polite. I think. When I went to West Point, I worked on some some textbooks of integrating gender and sexuality into, you know, the curriculum of how do we study warfare. And that was more interesting, you know, breaching these issues with, you know, a bunch of 18 year olds, primarily male, talking to them about why they need to understand military history through a gender and sexuality lens. And that led to some really fun debates with students and getting them to consider these things from the outset. And so I think from an academic perspective, for the most part, you know, the fields are, are welcoming to it, I see a lot of panels when I go to conferences now that will engage with issues of gender and sexuality. And even though they’re not the majority of the panels, and I don’t think they ever will be. But it is, I think there’s definitely a more welcome field than there may have been a decade ago.

I just want to wrap up by asking you if you have any advice for first time authors.

Judy AmAndA Judy AmAndA

Keep it organized, yeah, it takes a lot longer to put out a book than than I ever realized it would see, and the time it took me from wrapping the first draft of the book, to having the book published this year, I’ve probably three different jobs, five different houses a baby a pandemic. And so, you know, when you’re thinking of like, Oh, I really want to add this element, you know, I’m revising, I want to build up this chapter that was here before, I know, I researched this, this or that place, and then you’ve got to find, you know, your hard drive that had it. And the hard drives are, of course, not labeled. They’re just in a stack. So I think just really good record keeping of where your research is, like, know where your research is, keep it organized, keep it linked to what you’ve got going on. And when it comes to the actual, you know, writing of the book, I think everyone has advice for writers, and, but everyone’s really different and how they write. And you got to find what works for you and try out multiple things till you find it. I think I, when I first started working, I read a lot of books of like, how to be a good writer, and then I would try them. And that would be like, Oh, that’s not working. I must not be a good writer. And so I was like, Oh, I better try something different. And I and I ended up finding that I worked really well by writing in big chunks. I knew other people who had to write consistently, you know, a couple hundred words a day. But I built I built some accountability among some friends. And so I had my best friend and I would trade like pager days back and forth when we’d get stuck in a rut and we wouldn’t do anything. So just find someone who’s willing to at least accept your work. Like I don’t think she ever opened a single file I sent her. But she you know, it was someone to receive it each day to make sure I was writing something when I’d really get stuck. And then one day I’d wake up and I’d write 30 pages because that’s just the style of writing that I do. So it’s just you got to find what works for you. Don’t take it too hard if you don’t do exactly what the how to write well book tells you how to write, so...

I know you’re starting a new position. I was wondering do you want to share what’s in your future either for that position or perhaps if you have new research projects that you have in mind

Yeah. So I’ve, I’ve left kind of the teaching track in academia, and I’m going to be the curator for digital collections at University of South Florida. And so I found all that archival research I found that I really liked it and really appreciated being in the archives and, and working with primary sources on a daily basis. And so doing a lot with with digitizing those primary sources, making them available to scholars, and accessible as much as possible. And I’m still doing research in military history. I just had a chapter come out on on sexuality and violence in the American military, and, you know, balancing balancing those worlds and having a lot of fun.

Thank you so much, Amanda. That was fantastic.

Thank you.

Judy

Thank you for listening to Authors in Conversation, The United States in the World Series Podcast from Cornell University Press.

THE EXCERPT

Introduction Where the Story of Chemical Warfare and World War II Began

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time, But someone still was yelling out and stumbling And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.— Dim through the misty panes and thick green light, As under a g reen sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight, He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin; If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-cor rupted lungs, Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Wilfrid Owen, “Dulce et Decorum Est”

Wilfrid Owen’s poem describes the ravages of a World War I gas attack on soldiers, conveying not only the physical trauma of the victim but also the emotional impact on his watching comrade. The unwilling observer is helpless to assist the dying man and fr anticly attempts to protect himself by donning a respirator.1 It is hard even more than one hundred years later not to recoil at Owen’s account. The excerpt effectively represents the human suffering that underlies popular associations with poison gas and helps illustrate its nature as an intangible as well as physical weapon. After World War I, gas engendered so much fear about its potential f uture use that societies agonized about it during the peacetime of the interwar period as well as during the fighting in World War II. How they interacted with gas and how the idea, potential, and reality of gas influenced them during that period is the focus of this book: chemical warfare can cause mental, emotional, and physical damage whether it is deployed or threatened. Its very presence

in the global arsenal means that its role in World War II must be examined to understand both the conflict and the actions of those who strove to prevent its release or manage the suffering it could deliver. Gas can cause individual pain, but societies, militaries, diplomats, politicians, and others decide whether and when it can be deployed.

This book examines the experiences of the World War II Western Allies— Britain, the United States, and Canada—with gas. The Western Allies may not have released gas physically as a weapon, but the perception that chemical weapons (hereafter abbreviated as CW) threatened them and their cobelligerents, and the debates about joint retaliation protocols as well as when to release gas all proved costly in terms of fear, cost, supplies, time, and expertise.2 Gas was not used in the traditional or expected way, but it was a powerf ul weapon that influenced behavior in World War II. Britain, the United States, and Canada’s experiences with CW offer new insights into one of the potentially devastating aspects of World War II, as well as lessons about the power of and restraints possible for a rogue weapon that is on the rise in the contemporary world. This book also ties together the legal, social, political, and military factors that shaped decisions to keep a weapon that is one of the symbols of World War I from becoming a leading tool of the deadliest war in modern history.

On May 29, 1945, the acting secretary of state, Joseph Grew, met with the secretary of war, Henry Stimson, about ending the war with Japan. General George Marshall was in attendance, as was the assistant secretary of war John J. McCoy. McCoy recorded Marshall’s assertion that his goal “to avoid the attrition we were suffering from such fanatical but hopeless defense methods [by the Japanese] requires new tactics.” Marshall, according to McCoy, “also spoke of gas and the possibility of using it in a limited degree, say on the outlying islands where operations were now going on or were about to take place. He spoke of the type of gas that might be employed. It did not need to be our newest and most potent—just drench them and sicken them so that the fight would be taken out of them.”3 Recommendations would follow. Of course, what really followed—just ten weeks later—was the atomic bomb, making the consideration of gas use in Japan moot.

In fact, those who lived during the interwar period—from politicians to soldiers, from laymen to disarmament supporters—expected f uture wars to be filled with gas attacks, ones that targeted civilians as well as military men. Logic based on gas use in past wars supported this conviction. World War I, well within the memory of those in power in the 1920s and 1930s, had hosted the advent and escalation of gas warfare. Colonial conflicts in Ethiopia and Morocco in the decades that followed the Great War illustrated that gas,

although disliked by many, remained in the arsenal. Of course, any major war that followed would involve gas; that was simple logic.

The opposite emotion—in par ticular, fear—also suppor ted assumptions about f uture gas use. World War I had been brutal. The introduction of modern technologies, such as airplanes, and the erosion of limitations, such as the general sanctity of civilians, led to deeper and wider destructiveness that continued even after the war ended.4 While Britain witnessed zeppelins bombing London in World War I, the world beheld planes bombarding Guernica in the Spanish Civil War. The pattern seemed clear. These were horrifying developments, and it made sense that they inspired actions, including efforts to ban gas through the Geneva Gas Protocol, and words, such as Lord Halsbury’s apocalyptic novel featuring a gas war, 1944. 5 With these examples as guides, there was a conviction that the next war would use gas.6

But it did not. World War II contained almost unimaginable horrors, and air power certainly became a prominent part of it, but the conflict did not include regular poison gas attacks on the battlefield or an enemy’s home front. There were experiments and periodic uses by the Japanese in China between 1937 and 1941, before the Western Allies—the United States, Canada, and Britain— recognized China as an ally, but these weapons were neither openly used nor part of a standard policy of deployment.7 The most well-known use of toxic gas during World War II was in the Holocaust, when the Nazis used Zyklon B in some of the concentration camps. Yet, as deplorable as this was, this use was not against international enemies on a battlefield (and even the enemy’s home front could be a battlefield); this was gas used on an imprisoned population. Neither scholars nor the public has chosen to classify that as chemical warfare as it is commonly understood. Thus, despite the common usage of poison gas on the Western Front in World War I, despite the common conviction by multiple nations that it would be used in World War II, it was not.

Why not? Even as chemical, military, and historical experts have raised doubts about the effectiveness of gas as a weapon in World War I, it is still widely known as one of the horrors of that conflict.8 The common perception of its inhumanity was reinforced by the living reminders of disabled veterans and exacerbated by the expectation that gas would be released from the air and on the home front in f uture wars. The result would affect numerous civilians as well as military victims. Whether or not gas was more, or even as, effective physically as artillery or guns in World War I is less relevant than the belief that it might cause more suffering and death in the next wars. So, the leaders and laymen of g reat powers prepared for it, offensively and defensively. They worried about it. They discussed it. For over twenty-five years, from the

end of World War I until the end of World War II, they spent enormous time and resources on a threat that never materialized physically.

Historians intrigued by this mystery have offered assorted explanations. During World War I, armies deployed gas from stationary weapons against entrenched or slowly moving targets. It is possible, but unlikely, that the fact that World War II was a war of movement, unlike the static Western Front of World War I, explains why gas was not used in the former. Perhaps the personal and publicly proclaimed abhorrence of gas by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Führer Adolf Hitler made a difference.9 Or, some suggest, deterrence, unpreparedness, or a combination of factors inhibited gas use in World War II.10 Limited inventory meant there were periods when responses would have been slow, localized, and short rather than the preferred strategy of rapid and sustainable attacks; although bomb and plane shortages existed, especially early in the war, they did not prevent retaliation everywhere.11 While these and other reasons have merit, a wider and deeper examination of World War II reveals that the issue is more complicated.

The first step is to realize that the most useful question is not “Why didn’t the Allies use gas?” This suggests that it was a one-time decision and that all the Western Allies used the same rationale. In fact, the Allies repeatedly made the decision to refrain from gas, sometimes from different motivations. So, “Why did the Allies, despite temptation and crises, refrain repeatedly from deploying gas?” is more accurate.

Even that is not the right question. Gas did not have to be deployed physically to be a weapon. Yes, gas was not released on the battlefield or on the enemy’s home front via a deliberate policy, but in some ways, it was used. If one looks back at World War I, armies released gas on the battlefield, but the weapon’s nature made it valuable not only because of the casualties it caused but also because of the fear it engendered in soldiers who dreaded it. It was a weapon of terror simply because it existed, and it forced militaries and others to change their behavior in anticipation of its use. Soldiers participated in anti-gas drills and learned how to put on respirators in seconds. Men carried gas masks, burdening themselves and bearing a constant reminder of the gas threat. Physicians strug gled to determine how to treat gas cases, sometimes uselessly.12 It did not have to be used physically to cause damage. It did not have to cause bodily harm to soldiers or civilians to influence the belligerents’ wartime policies and actions, or even to cause anxiety.

Gas generated physical and intangible threats in World War II as well. The energy put toward preparing for a gas war—offensively and defensively on the home front (more of a fear for the British Empire than for Canada and the United States) and the battlefront—was inspired by both logic and fear. As a

psychological and physical weapon, gas certainly shaped the war effort of the major belligerents. Gas, or at least the anticipation of it, consumed limited material, strained available human resources, and influenced nations’ plans.

Thus, while one goal of this book is to comprehend why the Western Allies made the decision, repeatedly and despite g reat temptation, not to deploy gas on the battlefields, another purpose is to answer the question, “How did the existence of CW influence the course of their war?” Gas was an active weapon, even if not deployed in the traditional sense. Both the presence of a gas threat and weapons, and perceptions about it, affected British, US, and Canadian actions at home, with each other, and toward the enemy These attitudes changed over time, impacting behaviors and policies regarding gas, including limits on restraints against using gas.

As the war continued, events illuminated boundaries that, if crossed, meant that the Western Allies almost certainly would decide to deploy gas. Those in power during World War II never considered absolute the taboo or norm against gas use that we speak of today. If national survival or national identity was at stake, for instance, Britain would have chosen to become a global pariah if that meant that it had to use gas to survive a German invasion. Canada possessed less motivation to start an offensive gas war deliberately, but not only was it allied with both Britain and the United States, who might, but also it engaged in offensive and defensive actions that had the potential to trigger Germany to start a gas war. For example, in the morass of calculations and bluffs in World War II, Canada’s desire to inoculate its soldiers against botulism—considered a chemical weapon then—generated resistance from its Allies who thought that Germany might see a vaccination program as a hint that Canada was about to use botulism itself or as a justification for a Nazi preemptive chemical strike.

However, the boundaries shifted. One of the key factors that eroded gas restraints was the growing brutality of the war—and the concomitant desensitization of leaders and the public. Demonstrated by actions by both sides, from Germany’s vengeance rockets (more frequently known as the V-1 and V-2 rockets) lobbed at Britain to the UK and US carpet bombing of Germany and the US firebombing of Tokyo, this escalation combined with the conflict’s length lessened the Western Allies’ restraint. By the end of the war, it was not desperation but exhaustion and animosity that nearly provided the critical push for the Allies, particularly the United States, to start a gas war. As threats to national survival itself decreased after Victory in Europe (V-E) Day because belligerents were less likely to face enemy retaliation in kind, the Allies had the luxury of viewing what were less urgent challenges as their current greatest ones. They did not cross the chemical warfare line, likely because the war ended abruptly with the atomic bomb and the Russian declaration of war on Japan. These obviated US

plans that probably would have led to an Allied gas attack on Japanese forces. By mid-1945, in other words, for at least some influential figures in the United States and Britain who had the power to propose or formulate chemical warfare policy, concerns about national survival had given way to surviving the war with energy to finish the job and without sacrificing more Allied lives than need be, however that had to be done. There was nothing inevitable about their decisions not to use gas in World War II.

This book focuses on Britain, Canada, and the United States—the Western Allies. Unlike the other two major Allies, the Soviet Union and China, these three were the nations who had the ability to produce and use gas, and who also possessed democr atic systems in which governmental policies responded to public opinion and actions as well as military judgments and political assessments; there were many opportunities to make choices about gas or for policies to be influenced by a range of individuals. These nations cooperated, piecemeal, by sharing gas research, equipment, and scientific experts. More impor tant, they were distinct from the USSR and China because they created a joint chemical warfare policy. In contrast, as f uture chapters will show, Britain and the United States distrusted the Soviet Union and China to tell the truth about Axis gas use against their populations. Britain, the United States, and Canada form a cohort in the gas story of World War II.

For myriad reasons, each Western Ally’s leadership (re)considered gas at different times and in different ways. More specifically, Britain was one of the first nations involved in World War II that potentially faced an immediate threat by a chemical attack. It continued to be active in the war, and its former colony, Canada, was the most involved of the Commonwealth countries in cooperating not only with Britain but also with its neighbor, the United States. It was the only dominion who negotiated ably, and whose perspectives were considered seriously by Britain and the United States, during the establishment of the joint chemical warfare policy. Canada’s role differed substantially from that of other members of the Commonwealth and Empire, although it did remain a junior par tner of Britain and the United States.

The latter soon became the most powerf ul member of this coalition. After Pearl Harbor, understanding gas policy for all three also meant comprehending both the US position and that the other two nations had a wary eye on the United States. The fact that the United States—unlike the other two—was not bound by the Geneva Gas Protocol, the dominant prewar treaty banning gas, made the alliance relationship rocky at times.13 This means that an analysis of chemical warfare restraint regarding the Western Allies is as much a story of alliance politics, international law, and diplomacy as it is an account of military machinations. The three nations strug g led to balance the threats to their

Three QuesTions wiTh SEIJI SHIRANE author of Imperial Gateway

1. What is your favorite anecdote from your research for this book?

Xu Zhiting illustrates the in-between status many Taiwanese subjects had in Japan’s wartime empire. At the start of the Sino-Japanese War (1937-45), Xu was detained in South China by Chinese authorities until Japan’s naval occupation of 1938. Upon his release, Xu was hired by the Japanese as a navy interpreter to help administer the region. Over the next few years, he made his way up the imperial ranks in South China’s police and education bureaus. Although Xu and other overseas Taiwanese were still relegated to second-class status below the Japanese, they took advantage of their linguistic skills and colonial subject-

How do you wish you could change your field?

Much of the important scholarship on Japan’s empire has focused on northern expansion in colonial Korea and Manchuria. I want to draw greater attention to colonial Taiwan and its pivotal role in Japan’s southern advance from 1895 to 1945. My book shows how Japanese expansionism in South China and Southeast Asia was shaped not only by Japanese imperialists but also by overseas Taiwanese subjects with their own visions and ambitions. Rather than viewing Japanese empire-building as something exported from the home islands, we need to re-examine colonies as originating sites for imperial policies and practices.

hood to find opportunities that placed them in supervisory positions above local Chinese populations.

2. What do you wish you had known when you started writing your book that you know now?

I wish I had located Taiwanese oral histories earlier in my book project. Though some Taiwanese subjects—educated elites and anti-colonial activists—left written records about Japan’s southern expansion, most overseas Taiwanese in South China and Southeast Asia left few contemporary records. Fortunately, in revising my book, I was able to incorporate Taiwanese oral testimonies transcribed by historians of the Institute for Taiwan History (Taipei) in the 1990s. Such sources allowed me to include firsthand experiences of Han and indigenous Taiwanese subjects missing in Japanese official archives.

Fortunately, in revising my book, I was able to incorporate Taiwanese oral testimonies transcribed by historians of the Institute for Taiwan History in the 1990s.

THE EXCERPT

Introduction

Königsberg/Kaliningrad is the only city to have been ruled by both Hitler and Stalin as their own domain—not only in wartime occupation, but also as an integral part of their empires. As a borderland of both the Third Reich and the Soviet Union, the city became a battleground of revolutionary politics, radical upheaval, and extended encounters between the two regimes and their more or less willing representatives. This book is about how Königsberg became Kaliningrad—how modern Europe’s two most violent revolutionary regimes battled over one city and the people who lived there. It offers a microcosm of the Nazi-Soviet conflict in the decade surrounding the Second World War. It explores how two states sought to refashion the same city and reveals how local inhabitants became proponents of radical transformation, perpetrators of exclusionary violence, beneficiaries of social advancement, and victims of oppression. The book focuses especially on the period from 1944 to 1948, when Germans and Soviets lived and died together, first under Nazi and then under Soviet rule, as they tried to make sense of the war that had drawn them together.

Königsberg, a port city on the Baltic Sea, was founded in the thirteenth century by the Teutonic Knights and grew to be the easternmost major city in the German lands, a vibrant trading port and cultural

capital of the German Enlightenment. After the First World War, the city and the surrounding territory of East Prussia became “orphans of Versailles,” cut off from the mainland of the Reich by the Polish Corridor, a twenty-to-seventy-mile strip of land designed to grant the new Polish state access to the Baltic Sea.1 East Prussia became an exclave: a symbol of the “severed body” of the Reich. Trapped behind the Corridor, with its inhabitants fearing invasion by hostile neighbors or the infiltration of Bolshevik communism, Königsberg became a breeding ground for radical German nationalism. By 1933, East Prussia became the territory with the highest Nazi vote and a stage for local National Socialist leaders to carry out their plans for German national renewal.2

During the Second World War, East Prussia became an epicenter for the apocalyptic encounter between two opposing ideologies, states, armies, and peoples. The region played an outsized role in the war as a launching point for Germany’s genocidal campaigns in the East, and Königsberg’s Nazi leaders enriched themselves by incorporating large swaths of neighboring Polish territory into East Prussia and dominating the Nazi civilian administration of German-occupied Soviet Ukraine.3 East Prussia was also the place where the war first returned to German soil. The Soviet invasion of East Prussia in the spring of 1945 began one of the largest offensives of the Second World War, triggered one of the greatest civilian exoduses in human history, and produced the most violent encounter between the Soviet army and a civilian population, as invading soldiers looted and pillaged the towns, raped tens of thousands of German women, and executed German men in bloody revenge for the years of Nazi occupation.4

At the end of the war, East Prussia was divided into three parts, as the Allies resolved to strip the far-flung province from the postwar German state. Königsberg and the surrounding countryside of northern East Prussia were granted to the Soviet Union as part of the agreement between Stalin and the Western Allies over postwar borders in Eastern Europe, and the remainder of the province was divided between Poland and Lithuania.5 The territory and its capital were renamed Kaliningrad in 1946 and were eventually incorporated as the westernmost oblast (district) of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. Kaliningrad was among the most devastated territories in Eastern Europe, nearly razed by British bombing raids in August 1944, a scorched-earth Wehrmacht retreat and months-long futile defense, and the exceptionally violent and prolonged Red Army occupation in the spring of 1945.6 The remaining population, between 150,000 and 200,000 German

civilians in the spring of 1945, were primarily women, children, and the elderly, as most able-bodied German men had been killed, interned, or deported as forced laborers.7 They were joined by Red Army soldiers and officers who served in the initial military administration and over 10,000 former Soviet forced laborers.8 Over the course of 1945–46, Soviet citizens, primarily from Russia, Belorussia, and Ukraine, arrived to rebuild the region’s decimated industry and agriculture.9 For over three years, German and Soviet civilians, sworn wartime enemies and chosen peoples of mutually antagonistic regimes, lived together in the ruins of Kaliningrad.10 Soviet officials, unsure of what to do with the fascist population they had inherited, planned alternately for the Sovietization of their German neighbors (with antifascist clubs, collective work brigades, and the promise of full citizenship) and their eradication (through starvation wages, imprisonment, execution, and increasing marginalization). By the time the Soviets expelled the remaining Germans in late 1948, nearly half of the original population had died.11

The impulse to compare the Third Reich and Stalin’s Soviet Union is almost as old as the regimes themselves. Hannah Arendt, who had grown up in Königsberg and had first witnessed there the rise of radical revolutionary movements in the wake of the First World War, argued that the two states constituted novel forms of government—not just authoritarian dictatorships, but totalitarian regimes that systematically terrorized their populations to subject them to complete domination.12 During the Cold War, Western politicians used the specter of totalitarianism to cast Soviet communism as fundamentally opposed to the moral values of the liberal-democratic “free world.” A subsequent generation of historians rejected the totalitarianism model as grossly oversimplified and sought to analyze the Third Reich and the Soviet Union through more historically informed structural comparisons.13 Such works compared various claims, practices, and institutions of the two societies and revealed that there were indeed striking similarities: both were authoritarian dictatorships built around the cult of the leader; both used an ideological party apparatus to dominate the activities of the state; both fabricated emergencies to break down the rule of law and resorted to terror in the name of security against perceived enemies, internal and external; both relied on imprisonment and encampment to eliminate political, social, and racial or ethnic enemies.14

But along with similarities, these comparative histories revealed some fundamental differences. Hitler, the undisciplined firebrand artist, left much of the implementation of his vision to his loyal

henchmen, whereas Stalin, the didactic bureaucrat, spent long hours at his desk micromanaging fine points of policy.15 There were crucial differences in all spheres, including government structures, approaches to the economy, attitudes toward culture and religious expression, and conceptions of the place of women and the family in revolutionary society.16 In both cases, “totalitarian control” over society was a mirage—the two regimes suffered from widespread bureaucratic inefficiency, and it was often this political disorder, rather than the leader’s total grip on power, that escalated violence over time.17 But for all the nuance and insight of these comparative histories, such rule and system comparisons often replicated the top-down, theory-driven framework of the old totalitarian paradigm. They also tended to present the two regimes in an analytical bubble, presenting the two as deviations from normal European democratic development.18

The Third Reich and the Soviet Union were radically transformative and violent revolutionary regimes. The idea of revolution conjures up images of the masses rising up to overthrow tyrannical rule, but revolutions are also about long-term transformative projects carried out by the state. Both the Third Reich and the Soviet Union aimed to solve the seemingly intractable problems of their age—the tensions of urbanization, industrialization, widening economic inequality, nationalism, and the inefficiencies of parliamentary democracy—by envisioning the total refashioning of politics, the economy, society, culture, and geopolitical space. Both aspired to transcend the ills of modernity and bring about the end of history; both aimed to end pettiness and competition by eliminating the middleman between the individual and the state. Both rejected free-market capitalism and turned from bourgeois individualism and the divisiveness of parliamentary politics toward dictatorships that promised to carry out the will of the people, foster collective unity, and heal the wounds of war losses and social divisions.

The Soviet Union has long been considered a revolutionary state. Lenin and the Bolsheviks, proclaiming themselves to be a revolutionary vanguard, fused Karl Marx’s critique of capitalism with the nineteenthcentury Russian intelligentsia’s fervent mission to liberate the empire’s peasants and workers from oppression. Even as the shape of the revolution changed once the Bolsheviks assumed power, the transformative urge remained—the drive to civilize and uplift the former victims of oppression from backwardness and to reshape the natural and built environments in service of the future communist society.19

Nazi Germany, by contrast, has been more often presented as an authoritarian conservative regime. Yet the Nazis also had radically transformative revolutionary visions for the state, politics, economy, and society.20 Although they rejected Marx’s logic of class struggle, they were decidedly anticapitalist and sought to break the German economy free from international finance capital. Although they embraced ethnic nationalism and biological racism to maintain the presumed German racial purity, Nazi eugenic programs attempted to improve the German race through euthanasia and scientific breeding, and social programs sought to reshape German people into conscious National Socialists who would build a new collective culture around the values of the state. Their most ambitious transformative project was the genocidal impulse to reconfigure the multiethnic “land and peoples” of Eastern Europe into “spaces and races” under German control.21 When it came to the eastern territories of Prussia, the Nazi movement had an especially strong focus on revolution. East Prussia’s Nazis, in particular, as self-proclaimed “conservative revolutionaries” and “Prussian socialists,” shared with the Bolsheviks a strong emphasis on overcoming economic backwardness without succumbing to the social ills and economic inequality of capitalism.22

Both states were revolutionary responses to the tensions of the “age of the masses”; however, the representatives of these two revolutions felt that what fundamentally divided them were their radically different terms for inclusion into the new societies they were forging. The Nazis sought to unify the German people through blood, excluding all those they deemed to be racial outsiders. The Soviets, rejecting such biological racism on principle, sought to unify the entire world around the value of labor, excluding all those they considered actual or potential exploiters. The two regimes ultimately emphasized these distinctions, and by the mid-1930s, they became so preoccupied with the danger presented by the other that each increasingly defined its revolutions in opposition to its nemesis. Nazism pitted itself against Bolshevism, and Soviet communism defined itself against European fascism, in general, and the Third Reich, in particular.23

At early points in their revolutionary trajectories, the two regimes saw themselves as a rejection of the legacies of European civilization. During the war, however, both changed their tune, each side claiming to be defending European civilization against the other. The Nazis, downplaying attacks against Western capitalism, emphasized Germany’s

mission to defend all of Western Europe against Bolshevism. By 1944, when the Soviet invasion seemed inevitable, the Nazis in Königsberg attempted to rally the population for defense by casting Königsberg—the city of Kant’s enlightenment—as Europe’s greatest hope and most willing martyr against the Red Slavic tide about to wash over the continent. The Soviet Union also claimed that the war was about the defense of Western civilization, in this case against German racism and imperialism. Wartime journalists propagated a form of “socialist humanism,” tied to the old internationalist mission of global communism—the idea that workers of the world could unite in a society open to all peoples of the world, including, in theory, the Germans. Yet tied together with socialist humanism was the idea that this was a “Great Patriotic War,” a triumph of the Russian people over the Germans. Building on Stalin’s official reintroduction of Russian nationalism in the 1930s (including patriotic history textbooks, celebration of prerevolutionary Russian military heroes, and a cult of Russia’s national poet, Alexander Pushkin), the idea of a sacred war had a profound influence on Russian mass culture. The war was cast as the battle of the Russian Ivan, who was good, strong, and pure, against the technologically capable but depraved German Fritz. Both of these ideas—the defense of European civilization and the triumph of the Russian people—were central to Soviet citizens’ understanding of their mission. Both the Nazis and the Soviets claimed to be defending the Europe of Shakespeare and Goethe, but only the Soviets raised their guns to defend Heinrich Heine, a German Jew.

This book moves away from structural comparisons by presenting Königsberg and Kaliningrad as an entangled history of these two regimes, showing how they not only grew out of a common historical context, but also competed for the same geographical space and understood each other to be mortal enemies and competitors for the future of humanity.24 Whereas structural comparisons tend to treat the two regimes as separate entities, this book shows how the two were in constant dialogue, reacting and responding to each other over time. They did so not only in the world of ideas—imagining the fascist or Judeo-Bolshevik enemy—but also in the world of real-life encounters. Königsberg and Kaliningrad show how the ideologies of Nazism and Stalinism responded and adapted to local context, and what happened to these ideologies as their torchbearers and victims encountered each other on dramatically shifting terms. While each side claimed to be defending the values of European civilization against the barbarians,

Three QuesTions wiTh SARAH E. PARKINSON author of Beyond the Lines

1. What’s your favorite anecdote from your research for this book?

The research that I did for this book involved conversations with some of the most fascinating people I’ve ever met. People often shared stories that involved the most absurd, romantic, terrifying, joyous, and devastating moments in their lives. I value those moments of confidence and reflection for what they allowed me to share with and learn from people. The interlude that opens the book, with Munadileh the battlefield nurse, is a good example; the vignette in Chapter 3 where Abu Wissam and his family fled the 1982 invasion in his

the course of time. There are memoirs by some of the foreign providers who worked in the camps, and I’d love to see a more complete representation of local providers’ experiences as well.

cousin’s wedding car and wound up facing an Israeli tank in an orchard is another. It’s hard to say that there are “favorites” among them.

2. What do you wish you had known when you started writing your book, that you know now?

Since I’ve written the book, I’ve completed the training to be an emergency medical technician. People I interviewed for this project were part of the inspiration for this decision, as were experiences connected to the Syrian refugee crisis in Lebanon. I would love to go back and speak more deliberately to the care providers who worked in the various medical establishments to ask more about how they changed their practices and techniques over

3. How do you wish you could change your field of study?

People are complicated. They act against their interests. They believe seemingly ridiculous things. They take incomprehensible risks. Political science has frankly struggled as a field to capture that complexity while articulating clear, comprehensible, persuasive arguments.

“There is, quite simply, no armed conflict in the world that does not have a gender component.”

Over the course of the next twelve months we will publish approximately ten new books in the field of Military studies. You can find these, as well as all International studies books previously published by Cornell University Press and its imprints on our website. Either use your smartphone camera to scan the QR code below or visit cornellpress.cornell.edu/subjects/military-history to see our extensive list.

If you are a Cornell University Press author and would like to have your work featured in the next issue of Military Studies: A Cornell University Press Magazine please contact the marketing department.