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This chapter describes how the Senior NCOs and their children in Hong Kong's pre-war garrison had been great friends. It notes that during the evacuation from Hong Kong on the Awatea, and in Australia itself, the Barmans teamed up with the Gollege family — Greta Gollege, daughter Pat, and son Gerry. It describes how the family lived in the same suburb in Sydney and later in Moree in the north of New South Wales. It further explains that Charles Barman's wife and family had spent the war years — like most service families from Hong Kong — in Australia.

This introductory chapter begins with a discussion of the similarities and differences between the English civil war and other European wars during the first half of the 17th century. It then explains the objective of the book, which is to examine what kind of war the English civil war was. An overview of the topics covered by the book is presented.

This chapter argues that even during its pre-war days, England was far better prepared to embark on a war than either contemporary studies have suggested. This pre-war preparation was of two kinds: the first was literary and intellectual, the second practical and professional. The literature of war and pre-war military education and training for Englishmen in the early 17th century are discussed.

This chapter examines the Buffs' experiences in 1914. The battalion spent much time in desperate defences which appeared to both prove and disprove tenets of pre-war practice. German assaults had been covered by artillery and machine gun fire, but were executed with little guile or field craft. Dense packs of attacking troops had fallen easy victim to the collective firepower of the battalion. It could easily be concluded that German assaults failed due to a combination of poor fire and movement and a lack of desire to close fully and effectively with the enemy. Weight of defensive fire had certainly hampered the Buffs, as had a lack of sufficiently heavy supporting artillery fire. Historians have spent much time debating whether the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) should have swapped paradigms at this point from the human-centred to the technological-centred. However, analysis of the Buffs' 1914 experiences implies that the BEF actually required a combination of these paradigms. Infantrymen needed to be highly trained, motivated, and led by men with an eye for ground and opportunity, but these elements then had to be slid into a wider framework of technological and logistical excellence and flexibility. Over the next three years, battalions of the Buffs played a part in every uphill exhausting slog and every exhilarating downhill sprint experienced by the BEF as it created this war-winning blend.

On June 15, 1912, King George V and Queen Mary attended Speech Day at Harrow School, receiving a loyal address from the boys, hearing songs, and taking tea with the Head Master and a fair proportion of the British Establishment. This was pre-war England at its palmiest, most confident, most powerful with Harrow at its centre, ‘a national possession’. Beneath the bunting, all was rather less secure. Numbers had been declining for a decade and were about to slip below 500 for the first time in over a generation. For forty years, the governors had been waging an unsuccessful campaign to balance the books. Like many other public schools, Harrow had been in the forefront of shaping and sustaining the ideology and practice of imperialism. The surrender of the ideal of service to the City of God to service to the City of Man was just one more symptom of how the anxieties of economic and social change had replaced theological religion with political religion. James Welldon personified this transition.

This chapter examines the pre-war army and the British Expeditionary Force's (BEF) military campaign in France and Flanders against the Germans in 1940. This campaign showed that the British were unable to mount successfully either a static defence or a mobile counter-offensive. The British defeat in this campaign was attributed to the BEF's policy and to the major weaknesses in the army's own preparations for war. In addition, the British also failed to foresee how German doctrine and organization would interact with their own on the battlefield.

This chapter looks at the second volume of The History of Polish Film, written by Barbara and Leszek Amatys, together with Wiesław Stradomski. Stradomski compiled the first part, about the legal, economic, and cultural conditions surrounding the development of Polish cinematography, and wrote a short chapter, ‘Jewish Film’, as well as the conclusion. In the chapter on the final four years of sound film in Yiddish, Stradomski used all the items he had managed to gather from the press in Polish, and related these press cuttings to films such as The Dybbuk and Idl mitn fidl. Unfortunately, this short chapter, which treats about seven sound films, was weakened when a discussion of two important films was moved to the chapters compiled by Leszek and Barbara Amatys. The volume also contains minor errors. The chapter then argues that the second volume could be more comprehensive. It suggests that, to serve as a contribution to the memory of perished Polish Jewry, it would be worth writing an essay about the participation of Jews in the development of Polish pre-war film, in its production, direction, photography, acting, and distribution.

This chapter examines the war preparation and pre-war festivities in Belgium on the eve of the Battle of Waterloo. The Duke of Wellington, despite his busy schedule preparing for war against Napoleon Bonaparte, was able to attend these events. As early as May 1815, the Allied Powers had already devised a strategy against Napoleon under the leadership of Wellington and Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher. They understood that Napoleon's strategy involved speed and efficiency of attack and tactical surprise.

This chapter examines how BBC radio and its practices created possibilities for the recognition of African-Caribbean voices, as they discussed life in England years before the arrival of Windrush, and just before television re-emerged as a cultural force. It also examines how programmes created for West Indian audiences changed foci, and began to offer varied, personal perspectives on life for African-Caribbean immigrants. It outlines the influence of radio upon the BBC Television Service, management directives and pre-war programming. Beginning in 1939, the programme Calling the West Indies featured West Indians troops on active service reading letters on air to their families back home in the Islands. The programme later became Caribbean Voices (1943–58) and highlighted West Indian writers who read and discussed literary works on the World Service. These programmes offered rare opportunities for West Indians to discuss their perspectives on life among white Britons and subsequent social issues.

This chapter covers a set of concerns surrounding the emergence of a modern Jewish literature in the French language. It explains what the novelty of a few maverick intellectuals in the pre-war years that became a recognized genre of writing in the 1920s. It identifies Jewish writers who began to publish novels, plays, poems, collections of folklore, and short stories about different aspects of Jewish life and the issues of assimilation and acculturation in modern society. The chapter discusses Jewish literature in translation that comprised important components of literary renaissance. It also details how French readers were introduced to the world of east European and North African Jewry through novels and short stories written in French by writers who had migrated to France.

This chapter analyzes the ways in which youth movements functioned in the lives of their adherents, suggesting that these organizations came to fill the same roles as religion had for previous generations. It highlights regional differences in the practices of the youth movements. It also reviews how the interwar period treated Poland as a unified state and had been recently cobbled together from the ruins of the pre-war empires. The chapter proposes a new understanding of the mental characteristics of Jewish children and adolescents in Poland between the two world wars. It looks at the youth's feelings regarding the future of the traditional Jewish world and their solidarity and identification with their ethnic community.

This chapter explores the tension between universalism and particularism as expressed in the pre-war poetry, novels, and essays of André Spire, Edmond Fleg, Henri Franck, and Jean-Richard Bloch. It examines the question of Jewish identity in the modern world through writers that paved the way for the much more widespread phenomenon of Jewish self-questioning in the post-war years. It also looks at André Spire's ground-breaking Poèmes juifs and Quelques Juifs that offered a scathing critique of both Jewish assimilation and French antisemitism. It discusses Henri Franck's prose poem La Danse devant l'arche, which describes a young man's quest for the meaning of life and reveals a similar tension between affirming the specificity of Jewish roots and embracing a larger French cultural heritage.

This chapter concerns Jedwabne. It first attempts to ‘reconstruct’ the Jedwabne of pre-war times, with its Jewish, Polish, and German inhabitants, and their houses, shops, crafts, markets, and everyday life. The chapter then investigates the memories of the oldest living generation of Polish Catholics. It also takes a look at how their individual memory been shaped by collective memory, including stereotypes and prejudices. The ‘world before the war’ here is explored whether as an arena of conflict or of coexistence. Next, the chapter deals with the tragedy of July 1941. It considers the effects of the tragedy upon the sociocultural memory of the three generations of Polish Catholics living in Jedwabne and how it is expressed in myths, superstitions, omissions, and fables. From there, the chapter considers why and how witnesses choose between testimony and silence. Finally, the chapter examines how the publicity on the matter influenced people’s memory.

This chapter argues that the merit and importance of Tadeusz Piotrowski’s Poland’s Holocaust lie in the fact that all of the principal actors in the tragedy are gathered together in one book. The book reminds us that what happened between 1939 and 1945 on the territory of pre-war Poland involved the actions of seven parties (rather than two or three, as indicated in most historical monographs on the subject): Germany, the Soviet Union, the Poles, the Jews, the Lithuanians, the Belarusians, and the Ukrainians. The book’s fundamental flaw is that it fails to draw a balanced picture of their interrelations; rather it defends the cause of one of them, and this results in one-sidedness. The book offers little new material, relying mainly on secondary sources. One of the book’s main defensive weapons is deflection.

The chapter opens with a reminder that mapmen still saw cartography as a way to unify the world through the efforts of hard-working explorers. It relates the illusory rise to power of Bowman to the reader, whose pride in his guile as a geographic peacemaker could not contain the hurt egos of the besieged European nations left disgraced by earlier peace accords. It follows Penck’s fall into obscurity and move to Leipzig, where his positivist appeals to maintaining the power of the victor would go on to fuel fascist ideologies but were rooted in geographical studies. The chapter depicts Teleki as continuing to argue on behalf of Hungary and against the league of nations. It ends with an anecdote of the Franc affair, an attempt to smuggle money from France to Hungary orchestrated by several of Hungary’s highest powers. The chapter argues that such desperate transnational manoeuvring reflects the attitudes of the mapmen who continued to use their science as a way to find identity and security for themselves and their people in a changing globalized world.

This chapter describes the post-partition Polish lands, in which several prayer houses and synagogues strove for the modernization of religious life and introduced some innovations and moderate liturgical reforms. It talks about different innovations that changed over time and ranged from simply putting more emphasis on aesthetics, order, and decorum to more radical yet still limited changes, such as the introduction of a regular modern sermon delivered in German or Polish by an academically educated preacher. It also cites Majer Balaban’s book on the progressive synagogue in Lwów, which became an object of academic investigation by Jewish Polish historians. The chapter examines the characteristics of the pre-war research that focused on the histories of particular progressive circles and the activities of progressive leaders. It discusses the two dominant narratives that include the biographies of religious leaders and the histories of particular synagogues.

Cinemas were, for tens of millions of Britons each week, an element of everyday life, and cinemagoing was a cultural and experiential activity that was at once exciting and mundane. Changes to pre-established ideals of cinemagoing were, therefore, significant; popular reactions to such changes, which were used by bodies such as the Metropolitan Police to gauge morale, no less so. Establishing the parameters of the study, the introduction also, explains the varying meanings of the word ‘utility’, from which the book takes its title’ and provides an overview of the British exhibition industry in 1939 in order that the changes that occurred during the war can be understood in their proper context.