Steven Casey

Mental maps in the era of two world wars

Introduction S.Casey& J. Wright Raymond Poincare J.Keiger Lloyd George S.Marks The View from the Kremlin: Soviet Assumptions about the Capitalist World in the 1920s and 1930s C.Read One mind at Locarno? Gustav Stresemann and Aristide Briand J.Wright& J.Wright Atatuerk C.Foss Chiang Kaishek and Mao Zedong R.Mitter Hamaguchi Osachi E.Hotta Edvard Benes R.Crampton Mussolini, Il Duce A.Cassels Hitler N.Gregor The maps on Churchills mind G.Best Franklin D. Roosevelt S.Casey

Mental maps in the early Cold War era, 1945-1968

Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors Introduction S.Casey & J.Wright Joseph Stalin S.Radchenko Harry S. Truman S.Casey Ernest Bevin A.Deighton Charles De Gaulle S.Hazareesingh Konrad Adenauer J.Wright WLadysLaw Gomulka A.Prazmowska Josip Broz Tito J.Perovi? Mao Zedong Y.Xia Ho Chi Minh S.Quinn-Judge Jawaharlal Nehru J.Brown Gamal Abdel Nasser L.James Fidel Castro C.Foss John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson A.Preston Nikita Khrushchev M.Uhl Further Reading Index

Casualty Reporting and Domestic Support for War: The US Experience during the Korean War

Abstract The common argument that public support for war is casualty sensitive ignores the fact that casualty figures are not revealed automatically. While the military decides when, and to whom, to release such information, political elites can question, even condemn, how the government goes about this business. After briefly exploring how the US military operated during the two world wars, this article focuses on American casualty reporting during the Korean War, arguing that the way the figures were revealed often sparked enormous political controversy, which at two crucial moments helped to undermine domestic support for this distant war.

Ray Moseley, Reporting the War: How Foreign Correspondents Risked Capture, Torture and Death to Cover World War IIMoseleyRay, Reporting the War: How Foreign Correspondents Risked Capture, Torture and Death to Cover World War II, New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 2017; xiii + 422 pp.; £20.00 hbk; ISBN 9780300224665

not romanticize their ‘welfarism.’ This collection succeeds more in highlighting the comparative than transnational dimensions of wartime and postwar consumption. The transnational implications trumpeted in the introductory chapter are difficult to discern in several of its chapters, especially in the Soviet contributions. In part, this has to do with the specificities of the Soviet Union, whose food supply was more affected than the other countries discussed in the book, and who had already moved to a centralized distribution system well before the war but for different reasons. As Khlevniuk acknowledges, the Stalinist government simply re-imposed the rationing system that had functioned before 1935. It was the model of rationing necessitated by rapid industrialization and the fallout from collectivization that informed the Soviet approach, not the lessons of the First World War that countries like Japan took, and certainly not the lessons of capitalist market economies. Nevertheless, the book succeeds in showing how countries on either side of what would become the Iron Curtain deployed similar consumption-oriented strategies for maintaining home front morale, portraying the war as a temporary blip or as a decisive turning point, after which ‘normal’ life – whatever that meant specifically to them – would necessarily resume.

The war beat, Europe: The American media at war against Nazi Germany

From the North African desert to the bloody stalemate in Italy, from the London blitz to the D-Day beaches, a group of highly courageous and extremely talented American journalists reported the war against Nazi Germany for a grateful audience. Based on a wealth of previously untapped primary sources, War Beat, Europe provides the first comprehensive account of what these reporters witnessed, what they were allowed to publish, and how their reports shaped the home fronts perception of some of the most pivotal battles in American history. In a dramatic and fast-paced narrative, Steven Casey takes readers from the inner councils of government, where Franklin D. Roosevelt and George Marshall held clear views about how much blood and gore Americans could stomach, to the command centers in London, Algiers, Naples, and Paris, where many reporters were stuck with the dreary task of reporting the war by communique. At the heart of this book is the epic journey of reporters like Wes Gallagher and Don Whitehead of the Associated Press, Drew Middleton of the New York Times, Bill Stoneman of the Chicago Daily News, and John Thompson of the Chicago Tribune; of columnists like Ernie Pyle and Hal Boyle; and of photographers like Margaret Bourke-White and Robert Capa. These men and women risked their lives on countless occasions to get their dispatches and their images back home. In providing coverage of war in an open society, they also balanced the weighty responsibility of adhering to censorship regulations while working to sell newspapers and maintaining American support for the war. These reporters were driven by a combination of ambition, patriotism, and belief in the cause. War Beat, Europe shows how they earned their reputation as Americas golden generation of journalists and wrote the first draft of World War II history for posterity.

Zihua, S. (2012) (Trans. Silver, N.). Mao: Stalin and the Korean War: Trilateral Communist Relations in the 1950s.

This extremely useful book covers both more and less than what it states in the title. More, because Shen Zihua delves back into the 1940s to uncover what he views as the crucial origins of communist decision making in 1950. And less, since the book focuses on the bilateral Stalin-Mao relationship, culminating with their crucial Korean War decisions in the summer and autumn. Indeed, although Shen includes some useful insights into how the economic repercussion of the war shaped the Sino–Soviet alliance for the remainder of the 1950s, this book belongs firmly with the large literature on why Stalin decided to back North Korea’s invasion of the south in June 1950 and why Mao decided to intervene in the war in October. Alongside the existing body of work on these questions, Shen seeks to make a contribution on four levels. First and most specifically, he reassesses Stalin’s and Mao’s specific motivations. In both instances, he emphasises economic and national-security factors: Stalin’s keenness to acquire access to a warm water port in South Korea and Mao’s determination to keep the fighting away from Chinese territory. Second, he argues for the need to view these decisions in a longer time frame. In Stalin’s case, the replacement of the Yalta system with the new Sino–Soviet Treaty meant that in early 1950 the Soviet leader had effectively given up “most of the political and economic rights and interests that he had wrested from Chiang Kai-shek in 1945”; hence his sudden interest in letting Kim Il Sung invade South Korea, where the ports of “Inchon and Pusan would replace Lushun and Dalian, which he had pledged to return to China” (p. 118). For Mao, meanwhile, memories of the mid-1940s, when Soviet forces had first helped to defeat Japan and had then stayed in northeast China, convinced him of the dangers of letting another war come close to his borders; after all, if Soviet troops were now required against the Americans, they might this time stay for good. Third, Shen devotes considerable space to the one piece of concrete help Mao wanted from Stalin before intervening in the Korean War: air cover. He skilfully connects the tortuous negotiations between both sides on this question to their central policy priorities: for Stalin, avoiding direct involvement in the fighting; for

Harry S. Truman

The Truman presidency marked a major transformation in the United States’ relationship with the world. In June 1940, when Nazi Germany overturned the global balance of power by defeating France in just six weeks, the Roosevelt administration sat back and did very little. Exactly ten years later, however, when North Korea invaded South Korea — a country that the US military had listed as fifteenth in importance in 19471 — the Truman administration dispatched American ground troops within a week. It even brushed aside the nation’s traditional unilateralism, intervening under the auspices of the United Nations (UN), while also using the conflict to deepen the United States’ involvement in NATO — a long-term military commitment to Europe that even the most internationalist of presidents would hitherto have deemed impossible.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

‘Mr Roosevelt’, a friendly journalist observed in 1943, ‘reads maps with the skill of a professional’.1 Throughout his life Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) was certainly intrigued and fascinated by them. For relaxation he liked to peruse the routes his next cruise or trip would take and to collect historical and military maps to house in his library in Hyde Park. Before he entered the White House he was a councillor of the American Geographic Society, the country’s pre-eminent organization for the geographic profession.2 As president, he periodically consulted atlases, even ripping out pages so that he could crudely sketch in pencil where he thought new boundaries should be.3 And in 1942 he established the White House Map Room, a small, low-ceilinged room on the first floor, where large charts of the various battle zones adorned the walls and kept him up-to-date with the very latest developments in the war.4

Book Review: Dictators, Democracy, and American Public Culture: Envisioning the Totalitarian Enemy, 1920s-1950s

tant exception to the editors’ assessment (p. 19) that, in the 1930s, consensus ‘reigned in most quarters that the next war would require the wholesale mobilization of the home front’. There are too many interesting essays here to mention all. Dennis Showalter offers a masterly overview of the development of military thought, organization and planning in the 1920s and 1930s. Roger Chickering deals with Ludendorff’s descent into virtual lunacy in an effort to blame everyone but himself for Germany’s defeat in 1918 popularizing the term ‘Total War’ in the process. Thomas Rohkramer discusses Ernst Junger literary, cultured and (in his enthusiasm for plunging the world into a war still greater than the one he had survived) apparently psychopathic. Deborah Cohen’s essay on the treatment of the physically crippled and Simon Wessely’s and Edgar Jones’s of the psychologically crippled offer appropriate reminders of the real costs of violence. Altogether this is a disparate, disharmonious, but none the less interesting, collection of essays on twentieth-century warfare.

Franklin D. Roosevelt, Ernst ‘Putzi’ Hanfstaengl and the ‘S-Project’, June 1942–June 1944:

Between June 1942 and September 1944, Ernst ‘Putzi’ Hanfstaengl was employed by the Roosevelt administration as an intelligence analyst and psychological warfare adviser. This article not only explores the Presidents exact motivations for bringing a former confidant of Hitler to Washington in the midst of war, but also uses this curious episode to highlight some broader, and frequently neglected, themes of American wartime diplomacy, including: Roosevelts unconventional and idiosyncratic attitude towards intelligence material, the Presidents belief in the efficacy of psychological warfare, and the often strained relations between the administration and the British embassy in Washington on matters relating to the German problem.