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Author: Ron Theodore Robin
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 1995
Total Pages: 217
ISBN-13: 9780691037004
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This is the extraordinary story of the 380,000 German prisoners who filled camps throughout the USA during World War II. Using personal narratives, camp newspapers, and military records, the author re-creates in detail the attempts of prison officials to mould the daily lives and minds of their prisoners.
Author: Dave Hannigan
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Published: 2021-10-15
Total Pages: 233
ISBN-13: 1493063529
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Barbed Wire University tells the extraordinary tale of Winston Churchill’s internment of some of the most gifted Jewish refugee writers, professors, artists, and painters of their generation in a camp on the Isle of Man in the Irish Sea. These were men who had fled Hitler’s Germany, found refuge in Britain, and then, in the hysteria of 1940, were held in captivity as a perceived security threat. They turned the camp—Hutchinson Camp—into a school, concert hall, and artistic community. Using memoirs and diaries, some of which have only recently become available in archives, Dave Hannigan pieces together a richly detailed account of what these remarkable men did during their time in captivity. This is a forgotten corner of World War II, and the way these men constructed a Bohemian idyll in the middle of the Irish Sea, their freedom taken from them, is an extraordinary tale of grit and creativity.
Author: Ron Theodore Robin
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 1995-04-03
Total Pages: 224
ISBN-13: 1400821622
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →From Stalag 17 to The Manchurian Candidate, the American media have long been fascinated with stories of American prisoners of war. But few Americans are aware that enemy prisoners of war were incarcerated on our own soil during World War II. In The Barbed-Wire College Ron Robin tells the extraordinary story of the 380,000 German prisoners who filled camps from Rhode Island to Wisconsin, Missouri to New Jersey. Using personal narratives, camp newspapers, and military records, Robin re-creates in arresting detail the attempts of prison officials to mold the daily lives and minds of their prisoners. From 1943 onward, and in spite of the Geneva Convention, prisoners were subjected to an ambitious reeducation program designed to turn them into American-style democrats. Under the direction of the Pentagon, liberal arts professors entered over 500 camps nationwide. Deaf to the advice of their professional rivals, the behavioral scientists, these instructors pushed through a program of arts and humanities that stressed only the positive aspects of American society. Aided by German POW collaborators, American educators censored popular books and films in order to promote democratic humanism and downplay class and race issues, materialism, and wartime heroics. Red-baiting Pentagon officials added their contribution to the program, as well; by the war's end, the curriculum was more concerned with combating the appeals of communism than with eradicating the evils of National Socialism. The reeducation officials neglected to account for one factor: an entrenched German military subculture in the camps, complete with a rigid chain of command and a propensity for murdering "traitors." The result of their neglect was utter failure for the reeducation program. By telling the story of the program's rocky existence, however, Ron Robin shows how this intriguing chapter of military history was tied to two crucial episodes of twentieth- century American history: the battle over the future of American education and the McCarthy-era hysterics that awaited postwar America.
Author: Lyn Ellen Bennett
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
Published: 2017-11-15
Total Pages: 298
ISBN-13: 1623495822
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Barbed wire is made of two strands of galvanized steel wire twisted together for strength and to hold sharp barbs in place. As creative advertisers sought ways to make an inherently dangerous product attractive to customers concerned about the welfare of their livestock, and as barbed wire became commonplace on battlefields and in concentration camps, the fence accrued a fascinating and troubling range of meanings beyond the material facts of its construction. In The Perfect Fence, Lyn Ellen Bennett and Scott Abbott explore the multiple uses and meanings of barbed wire, a technological innovation that contributes to America’s shift from a pastoral ideal to an industrial one. They survey the vigorous public debate over the benign or “infernal” fence, investigate legislative attempts to ban or regulate wire fences as a result of public outcry, and demonstrate how the industry responded to ameliorate the image of its barbed product. Because of the rich metaphorical possibilities suggested by a fence that controls through pain, barbed wire developed into an important motif in works of literature from the late nineteenth century to the present day. Early advertisements proclaimed that barbed wire was “the perfect fence,” keeping “the ins from being outs, and the outs from being ins.” Bennett and Abbott conclude that while barbed wire is not the perfect fence touted by manufacturers, it is indeed a meaningful thing that continues to influence American identities.
Author: Midge Gillies
Publisher: Quarto Publishing Group USA
Published: 2011-05-25
Total Pages: 586
ISBN-13: 1845137272
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →“A moving and eye-opening account of the lives of second world war PoWs by the daughter of a man who was captured . . . a riveting collection of stories.” —The Guardian Feature films like The Bridge on the River Kwai and The Great Escape have created the stereotype of the Second World War prisoner of war. But, as Midge Gillies shows in this groundbreaking work of social history, the true experiences of nearly half a million Allied servicemen held captive during the Second World War were nothing like the Hollywood myth—and infinitely more extraordinary. The real lives of POWs saw them respond to the tedium of a German stalag or the brutality of a Japanese camp with the most amazing ingenuity and creativity. They staged glittering shows, concerts and elaborate sporting fixtures, made exquisite ornaments—even, amid the terrible privations of the Thailand-Burma railway, improvised daring surgical techniques to save their fellow men’s lives. Whatever skills or hobbies they took with them to captivity they managed to continue and adapt—to the extent of laying out a 9-hole golf course between the huts of one German camp. They took up crafts and pastimes using materials they found around them: even the string from a Red Cross food parcel was used to make cricket balls, football nets and wigs for theatrical performances. Men studied, attended lectures, learned languages, sat for qualifications and exams, on such a scale that one camp was nicknamed “The Barbed-Wire University.” Drawing on letters home, diaries and interviews with redoubtable survivors now into their nineties, Midge Gillies recreates the daily lives of a truly remarkable group of men. “Astonishing tales of improvisation, ingenuity and courage.” —The Spectator
Author: Joanne S. Liu
Publisher:
Published: 2009
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9780878425570
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →How could an ordinary fence shape a nation's history? Before the 1870s, much of the American West was an uninterrupted expanse of plains, where native tribes followed buffalo herds for hundreds of miles and cowboys ran cattle wherever water and grass led them. After the Homestead Act of 1862, settlers pouring into the West to stake their claims found that farming was not easy in cattle country, where the Law of the Open Range dictated that the needs of the herds-and their owners-came first. Then, seemingly overnight, everything changed. The invention and mass production of barbed wire made it possible for homesteaders to fence off millions of acres, creating a violent clash of cultures. In this engaging history, the struggles of cattlemen, farmers, Indians, inventors, and outlaws are brought to life for history buffs and curious readers alike. Enhanced by historic photos, maps, and a handy chronology, Barbed Wire: The Fence That Changed the West reveals the fascinating account of how a simple twist of wire transformed a country's landscape and ushered in a new way of life.
Author: Chester M. Biggs, Jr.
Publisher: McFarland
Published: 2011-07-28
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9780786467228
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →On December 8, 1941, Japanese troops methodically took over the U.S. Marine guard posts at Peiping and Tientsin, causing both to surrender. Imprisoned first at Woosung and then at Kiangwan in China, the men were forced to laboriously construct a replica of Mount Fujiyama. It soon became apparent that their mountain was to be used as a rifle range. In 1945 the author was among those transferred to the coal mining camp at Uteshinai in Japan. Recounted here are descriptions of the living and working conditions at the prison camps in China, the treatment of American prisoners by their Japanese captors, and how the POWs were able to hold themselves together.
Author: Arnold Krammer
Publisher: Lyons Press
Published: 2020-10
Total Pages: 352
ISBN-13: 9781493049523
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This is the only book available that tells the full story of how the U.S. government, between 1942 and 1945, detained nearly half a million Nazi prisoners of war in 511 camps across the country. With a new introduction and illustrated with more than 70 rare photos, Krammer describes how, with no precedents upon which to form policy, America's handling of these foreign prisoners led to the hasty conversation of CCC camps, high school gyms, local fairgrounds, and race tracks to serve as holding areas. The Seattle Times calls Nazi Prisoners of War in America "the definitive history of one of the least known segments of America's involvement in World War II. Fascinating. A notable addition to the history of that war."
Author: Gilly Carr
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2012-04-27
Total Pages: 330
ISBN-13: 1136322361
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This book focuses on the numerous examples of creativity produced by POWs and civilian internees during their captivity, including: paintings, cartoons, craftwork, needlework, acting, musical compositions, magazine and newspaper articles, wood carving, and recycled Red Cross tins turned into plates, mugs and makeshift stoves, all which have previously received little attention. The authors of this volume show the wide potential of such items to inform us about the daily life and struggle for survival behind barbed wire. Previously dismissed as items which could only serve to illustrate POW memoirs and diaries, this book argues for a central role of all items of creativity in helping us to understand the true experience of life in captivity. The international authors draw upon a rich seam of material from their own case studies of POW and civilian internment camps across the world, to offer a range of interpretations of this diverse and extraordinary material.
