Search Results

By the beginning of 1863, the army of Tennessee was rapidly losing men. Few were respectful of the mandatory conscription act, and the men that did report for duty were often of poor quality. Officers took a number of actions to increase the army’s ranks and to improve the behavior and discipline of soldiers. Desertions and disobedience were increasingly met with harsh punishments and executions. Bragg created a provost to crack down on anything that jeopardized the army’s functionality. The provost arrested deserters, guarded prisoners of war, closed down brothels, and generally policed the army. Realizing the Confederate Conscript Bureaux was ineffective, Bragg placed Gideon Pillow in charge of conscription, bypassing the Richmond bureaux. Pillow rounded up thousands of new conscripts, but many of them were unwilling. Many men continued to desert the army to return home or turned themselves into the enemy. Other additions to the army were returning absentees and exchanged prisoners; however, reenlistment and conscription campaigns ultimately did not make up the substantial losses caused by desertions.

The defence budget-cut in 1925 had reduced military strength which the 1936 re-armament decision tried to reverse. By 1939, the Swedish navy was rather obsolete. Sweden had only 150 aircraft that were elderly and slow. There was almost no development of either tanks or anti-tank weaponry before 1941. The defence planners had developed defensive war-scenarios based on Russian aggression. Their plans were rooted in a fear of Soviet Russia while the likelihood of trouble with Germany was dismissed. After April 1940,the Government was resolved to resist any Norwegian-style invasion by Germany. The emphasis in the armed forces was on strengthening their equipment and training. By 1941, Swedish defence thinking had altered substantially due to experience and observation of successful German military operations. The strategy remained defensive: to resist any invasion of Sweden from any quarter. The Swedish military caste changed fundamentally in both leadership and attitude. The strength of Swedish defence increased substantially as resources poured into the three services after 1940 and the formation of a Home Guard (Hemvärn) force. The politicians were firmly in charge of the country’s defences. The will to resist was apparent from spending, conscription, mass-mobilisations and the creation of irregular forces.

This chapter examines the other nerve centres of discontent that were forming beyond the west of Scotland in such places as Aberdeen, Dundee, Edinburgh, and the mining districts of Fife. It notes that the example of Scottish war resisters clearly demonstrated that they were politically active across much of Scotland, and that the impact of the Russian Revolution only added an impetus and further momentum to the development of the radical left throughout the country. It reports that Dundee was to become the main centre of the anti-war activities of the No-Conscription Fellowship and the ILP during the war, and a stronghold of communism in the 1920s. It further reports that there was a pacifist majority on the Aberdeen Trades Council's executive committee by 1918, and in relation to its size and population Aberdeen was considered ‘more red than Glasgow’ by the early 1920s.

This chapter presents the letters written by Thomas Henry Carter to his wife Susan between January 8 and May 1, 1862. In these letters, Carter talks about how and his men of the King William Artillery were encamped in winter quarters at Davis's Ford in Prince William County, Virginia; Union army victories in Tennessee and on the coast of North Carolina; and the Conscription Act. He also reflects on his effort to obtain a furlough to visit his family; his battery's march southwest alongside the tracks of the Orange and Alexandria Railroad; the Confederate army; Joe Johnston's army; and the King William Artillery's reorganization under the provisions of the Conscription Act, with Carter reelected as its captain.

In the early decades of the twentieth century, Jews and Muslims in Algeria’s south assumed ever more strident, and, increasingly, divergent public postures in the face of French military rule. For Mzabi Ibadites, the inter-war period was marked by staunch opposition to French conscription efforts, and by intense debates between conservatives and reformists (that is, proponents of the Islahi movement), especially over the question of how, and by whom, Ibadi youth should be educated. In the absence of an Islah-like movement, southern Algerian Jews of the inter-war period sought to patronize colonial institutions amidst a climate of tremendous constraint. This quotidian, social action took three highly visible forms. In numbers disproportionate to the size of their community, Mzabi Jewish children attended public school, while Mzabi Jewish women, men, and children exploited public health offerings. At the same time, ever-growing numbers of men sought to conscript themselves into the French army. In all of these regards, southern Algerian Jews were manoeuvring strategically in an extremely regulated environment and signalling that they were both eager to reap the benefits of French citizenship and prepared to assume the responsibilities that attended naturalization.

Insistently analogizing crime-fighting to war-fighting, Gerald Ford advanced the political case for rebuilding the American war state as a crime-fighting state, though his weak presidency accomplished little in practice. With the end of conscription of 1973, the fate of millions of men of a crime-prone age also roiled crime politics. Jimmy Carter was the post-1963 president most resistant to the punitive turn, and media treatment of crime often resisted as well. But a late-decade explosion of political and religious language about criminal evil and sexual danger set the stage for the next phase of the punitive turn.

During the Civil War, the US Army ran short on manpower. Conscription helped, but so did keeping some less-able men, those weakened by wounds or sickness, in the Invalid Corps (later Veteran Reserve Corps). These saw a wide range of rear-area duties, including working in hospitals and guarding Washington DC, but also were involved in chasing draft-dodgers and a battle. Initially the VRC was volunteers, but later physically-limited men were not discharged but involuntarily transferred to the VRC. Many officers with the VRC were ideologically committed to abolition, and stayed involved with the Freedman's Bureau.

Like American society, around World War I the US Army saw African-Americans as second-rate. There were Black units, but they were assigned to remote areas. When the Army was expanded to fight WWI, political pressures forced the Army to form new and larger Black units. Black college graduates were also recruited as officers. However, the African American units were not given particularly good training nor high-profile missions. Some units performed down to the level of training and expectations, and the Army blamed race for the poor performance rather than itself for setting the units up for failure.

During World War I, the US had to quickly mobilize an army. Rather than demanding full physical fitness, it started accepting men with job skills, and tacitly accepted that the army was an industrial organization. WWI ended too quickly for the full implications to be felt, and the system was kept ‘on the shelf’ between the world wars. During WWII the system failed. It had only two categories (General Service and Limited Service) that did not reflect all the gradations of jobs. The US Army replaced Limited Service with a graded system based on physical ability.

In the United States, there was substantial opposition to entering World War I, and yet conscription was introduced more quickly than in any other English-speaking country. In Australia, opposition to entry was minimal, but opposition to conscription was so great that its introduction was blocked. The period before US entry into the war also saw an unusual surge of American interest in Australian social experiments—including experiments with Compulsory Industrial Arbitration and Compulsory Military Training—which reached a peak in the wake of a unique Australian referendum on conscription. This essay examines the extent of this surge of transnational interest, the reason for it, and its possible effects, before considering why the outcome of the conflict over conscription was so different in these two similar historically liberal New World societies.

Working-class antimilitarism before and during World War I was an internationalist and international movement that transcended national boundaries. In the USA and Australia, this movement argued that war disproportionately wasted working-class lives and caused particular hardship for workers and their dependents at home, while employers profited and even profiteered; workers should therefore be loyal to their class rather than their nation and refuse to fight workers of other nations. Yet American and Australian working-class antimilitarists were very much products of their respective countries. National circumstances, which varied, shaped the campaigns they conducted. Entry to the war occurred at very different moments. Conscription was imposed in the USA shortly thereafter; in Australia conscription never passed two deeply polarizing referenda on the issue, which split the governing Labor Party. The labor movement in Australia had far greater political and industrial power than in the USA, where a formidable military-industrial complex had loosened the country’s isolationist moorings. This essay compares and contrasts American and Australian labor antimilitarism with particular focus on the varying roles played by the Industrial Workers of the World, the Socialist Party of America, the Socialist Labor Party of Australia, the Australian Socialist Party, and the Australian Labor Party. On both sides of the Pacific Ocean, working-class antimilitarists suffered for their internationalist principles, but the manner of their suppression was also conducted differently.

Municipal politics offers an opportunity to assess the impact of the Great War on the lives of workers in Australia and the United States and the fortunes of labor and socialist parties. Although both countries lay on the periphery of the European conflict, each contributed significant manpower and economic resources to the war effort. Each also faced the disruptive impact of the war on their economies. Locally soaring prices, spot unemployment, housing shortages, and the loss of breadwinners’ income put great stress on working-class families that labor and socialist parties sought to address. In the pre-war period, these parties in both countries contested for power in cities but more successfully in the United States, despite limits on municipal home rule. A pre-war surge in strike activity was also more intense in the United States. These circumstances shaped the local politics of the war years in which locally mobilized anticonscription and antiwar activity in Australia surged at the local level. In the United States, urban elites successfully used socialist opposition to the war to severely repress and ultimately disable socialists’ capacity to maintain their pre-war strength in cities. As a consequence, while US socialists’ gains eroded during and after the war, in Australia successful local mobilization against conscription enabled the Labor Party to make gains in municipal as well as state and national politics. The war dramatically changed the political landscape for labor and socialists in both countries—for the worse in the United States and for the better in Australia.

Chapter 2 considers London’s mobilization and descent into war with special attention to financial expedients, soldier recruitment, and the first experiences of war. Prior to this, however, it considers political developments surrounding the rise of Isaac Pennington, London’s zealous Lord Mayor who replaced the loyalist Richard Gurney, and came to champion parliament’s cause in the City. Pennington and likeminded activists and agitators engaged in concerted schemes to silence parochial opposition and promote parliament’s efforts. Their engagement is crucial to understanding the early war period and the narrative of metropolitan mobilization that henceforth unfolds. Following this important introduction, which sets the tone for the remainder of the book, is a systematic consideration of early wartime finance, including explorations of dynamics of livery company lending, parochial lending, ward assessments, and collections (especially in terms of the establishment of parliament’s Committee for the Advance of Money and the Weavers’ Hall subcommittee), and other important financial expedients. Next is a consideration of the ways in which early financial and military mobilizations shifted popular opinions about war, from breeding notions of urgency to competing ideas about how to best end the conflict. Ultimately, these early efforts laid fractured foundations that would give rise to party divisions and “peace” and “war” movements. Chapter 2 reveals London’s part in making parliament’s nascent war effort possible, but it also exposes conflicting sentiments that would in time shake parliament’s wartime coalition to its core.

Maintaining adequate staffing levels was a major concern for many cinema managers especially after many young men were called up into the services. Exhibitors repeatedly attempted to get certain members of staff “reserved” – that is, exempted from conscription – and repeatedly found itself on the losing side in its skirmishes with the Ministry of Labour. This chapter looks at the ways in which British cinemas reacted to the loss of employees, and the ways in which changing employment demographics – most noticeably the increased proportion of female staff and the greater number of women projectionists (a.k.a “projectionettes”) – effected patron experience. The chapter also investigates the challenges facing managers as they sought to obtain and maintain uniforms for their employees. Clothes rationing brought about significant changes to the appearance of people employed in the cinema as clothes coupons, utility overalls and second-hand costumes became the order of the day. In a period before shabby was chic, poorly maintained clothing threatened to undermine pre-war ideas of the cinema as dream palace.

Chapter 4 further explores the theme of metropolitan demands on the colony by examining the difficult position of both Catholic missionaries and colonial administrators during the wide-reaching metropolitan effort to recruit African soldiers to fight for France in the First World War. Administrators resented the disorder provoked by recruitment and conscription, especially as time went on. Catholic missionaries harbored

This chapter examines how citizenship and selfhood were subtly recalibrated through conscription in Cold War Britain and uncovers details of the lives of young national servicemen in Korea. It begins with a discussion of military citizenship in the era of the Korean War, before turning to specific moments in national service life. Starting with recruitment (a recurring feature in most memoirs of national service), it explores the significance of masculinity, age, class and humour for the young men who were sent to Korea during their two years’ service. Together with the previous chapter, it sets out again the importance of experience to the social history of the Korean War in Britain. It considers how opinions on national service further informed the British views of the Korean War and how, like Korea, national service fitted uneasily within the narratives of post-war British society and culture. Like Korea, was national service obligatory, unglamorous and potentially of limited overall purpose?

This chapter seeks to answer the question of how the decision about labour conscription of the native Muslim population was made. By examining the debates within the imperial government on the possibility of military conscription of the native men, this chapter argues that the decision in 1916 to conscript Turkestan’s native population for labour brigades did not arise out of the previously discussed scenarios for the performance by this population of one of the basic state duties. Instead, the decision was made in response to the pressing economic needs of the empire, without considering expert opinion and the possible consequences.