Unknown Conflicts of the Second World War: Forgotten Fronts is a collection of chapters dealing with various overlooked aspects of the Second World War. The aim is to give greater depth and context to the war by introducing new stories about regions of the world and elements of the war rarely considered. These chapters represent new discussions on previously undeveloped narratives that help to expand our understanding of the interconnectedness of the war. It also provides an expanded view of the war as a mosaic of overlapping conflicts rather than a two-sided affair between massive alliance structures. The Second World War saw revolutions, civil wars, social upheaval, subversion, and major geopolitical policy shifts that do not fit neatly into the Allied vs. Axis 1939-1945 paradigm. This aim is to connect the unseen dots from around the globe that influenced the big turning points we think we know well but have really only a superficial understanding of and in so doing shed new light on the scope and influence of the war.

Providing diverse insights into Jewish-Gentile relations in East Central Europe from the outbreak of the Second World War until the reestablishment of civic societies after the fall of Communism in the late 1980s, this volume brings together scholars from various disciplines - including history, sociology, political science, cultural studies, film studies and anthropology - to investigate the complexity of these relations, and their transformation, from perspectives beyond the traditional approach that deals purely with politics. This collection thus looks for interactions between the public and private, and what is more, it does so from a still rather rare comparative perspective, both chronological and geographic. It is this interdisciplinary and comparative perspective that enables us to scrutinize the interaction between the individual majority societies and the Jewish minorities in a longer time frame, and hence we are able to revisit complex and manifold encounters between Jews and Gentiles, including but not limited to propaganda, robbery, violence but also help and rescue. In doing so, this collection challenges the representation of these encounters in post-war literature, films, and the historical consciousness. This book was originally published as a special issue of Holocaust Studies.

There have been many books on Adolf Hitler and specific military campaigns and battles during the time of the Third Reich. However, there has never been a comprehensive analysis of Hitler's role as the supreme military leader of the Third Reich across all the major campaigns. He combined every senior position in government and the armed forces until he was at the same time Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, Chancellor, Minister of War and Commander-in-Chief of the Army. He was involved in every aspect of the German war effort including new weapons development. How well did he perform these roles? He called himself a genius and was described as the greatest German military leader of all time by one of his most senior military leaders - was he? What does the evidence show? This book analyses each of the Third Reich's military campaigns paying special attention to Hitler's role in them. The book is based entirely on the evidence of the most senior military personnel who were there at the time, from their contemporaneous diaries and subsequent writings. The sources used include the diaries and recollections of three Chiefs of the Army General Staff, Field-Marshals Rommel, von Rundstedt, von Bock, von Kliest, von Manstein, numerous other senior generals, Hitler's military adjutants, ministers of his government and evidence from the Trial of the Major War Criminals at Nuremberg. Is there a consistent thread in this evidence? The first Volume is called Imperfect Victories and deals with the Polish, Scandinavian and French campaigns.

A new investigation into the twelfth-century accounts of the First Crusade, showing their complex relationship with the Bible. The Bible exerted an enormous influence on the crusading movement: it provided medieval Christians with language to describe holy war, spiritual models for crusaders, and justifications for conquests in the East. This book adds tothe growing body of scholarship on the biblical underpinnings of crusading, offering a reappraisal of the early twelfth-century narratives of the First Crusade as works of biblical exegesis rather than simply historical texts. Itrestores these works and their authors to the context of the monastic and cathedral schools where the curricula centred on biblical study, and demonstrates how the crusade's narrators applied familiar methods of scriptural commentary to the crusade, treating it as a text which could, like the Bible, be understood through historical, allegorical, and mystical lenses. These glosses of the First Crusade, which collectively constitute one of the greatintellectual achievements of their age, drew upon the Scriptures and earlier Christian theology, pilgrimage guides, and polemic to construct the crusade as a new chapter of sacred history. Within this story, the first crusaders played various biblically inspired roles: as new Israelites, they wrested the promised land from Muslims cast as new Canaanites and Babylonians; as new apostles, they reenacted some of the greatest miracles of the Gospels. By reconstructing the interpretive processes that made such readings possible, this study allows us to better appreciate the crusading movement's relationship to church reform, the apostolic revival, and the growth of anti-Jewish sentiment in twelfth-century Europe. KATHERINE ALLEN SMITH is professor of history at the University of Puget Sound.

Briggens House, near Harlow in Essex, was one of the most important of the establishments requisitioned by the Special Operations Executive (SOE) during the Second World War. Its mission was to accomplish Winston Churchill's directive to 'set Europe ablaze', and, initially, the house was used as a finishing school for the Cichociemni, elite Polish saboteurs, to prepare to parachute into Nazi-occupied Poland. In need of false identity documents to avoid the arrest, interrogation and execution of its agents, SOE gradually built up a printing department on site and Station 14 became the organisation's False Document Section. This is the true story of the house and its highly skilled wartime personnel, including British officers, Polish agents and the women of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry. For the resident staff it was a relatively safe posting, but tension built as the Poles, fighting their own battle for Polish independence, competed for scarce resources in wartime Britain. SOE historian Des Turner uses first-hand accounts, memoirs and official records to reveal long-forgotten stories of tragedy, humour and frustration, giving long-overdue credit to the men and women of Briggens House who were prevented by the Secrets Act from ever speaking about their wartime work.

This is the first major biography of Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay in fifty years. Ramsay masterminded the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk in 1940. Initially, it was thought that 40,000 troops at most could be rescued. But Ramsay's planning and determination led to some 338,000 being brought back to fight another day, although the Royal Navy and the Merchant Navy paid a high price in ships and men. Ramsay continued to play a crucial role in the conduct of the Second World War - the invasion of Sicily in 1943 was successful in large part due to his vision, and he had a key role in the planning and execution of the D-Day invasion - coordinating and commanding the 7,000 ships that delivered the invasion force onto the beaches of Normandy. After forty years in the Royal Navy he was forced to retire in 1938 after falling out with a future First Sea Lord but months later, with war looming, he was given a new post. However he was not reinstated on the Active List until April 1944, at which point he was promoted to Admiral and appointed Naval Commander-in-Chief for the D-Day naval expeditionary force. Dying in a mysterious air crash in 1945, Ramsay's legacy has been remembered by the Royal Navy but his key role in the Allied victory has been widely forgotten. After the war ended his achievements ranked alongside those of Sir Winston Churchill, Field Marshal Viscount Alanbrooke, Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery and General Dwight Eisenhower, yet he never received the public recognition he deserved. Brian Izzard's new biography of Ramsay puts him and his work back centre-stage, arguing that Ramsay was the mastermind without whom the outcome of both Dunkirk and D-Day - and perhaps the entire war - could have been very different.

This book investigates the origins of the North Korean garrison state by examining the development of the Korean People's Army and the legacies of the Korean War. Despite its significance, there are very few books on the Korean People's Army with North Korean primary sources being difficult to access. This book, however, draws on North Korean documents and North Korean veterans' testimonies, and demonstrates how the Korean People's Army and the Korean War shaped North Korea into a closed, militarized and xenophobic garrison state and made North Korea seek Juche (Self Reliance) ideology and weapons of mass destruction. This book maintains that the youth and lower classes in North Korea considered the Korean People's Army as a positive opportunity for upward social mobility. As a result, the North Korean regime secured its legitimacy by establishing a new class of social elites wherein they offered career advancements for persons who had little standing and few opportunities under the preceding Japanese dominated regime. These new elites from poor working and peasant families became the core supporters of the North Korean regime today. In addition, this book argues that, in the aftermath of the Korean War, a culture of victimization was established among North Koreans which allowed Kim Il Sung to use this culture of fear to build and maintain the garrison state. Thus, this work illustrates how the North Korean regime has garnered popular support for the continuation of a militarized state, despite the great hardships the people are suffering. This book will be of much interest to students of North Korea, the Korean War, Asian politics, Cold War Studies, military and strategic studies, and international history.

The Sunday Times bestselling account of Napoleon's invasion of Russia and eventual retreat from Moscow, events that had a profound effect on the subsequent course of Russian and European history. Moscow has both fascinated military historians and captured the imagination of millions on an emotional and human level. 1812 tells the story of how the most powerful man on earth met his doom, and how the greatest fighting force ever assembled was wiped out. Over 400,000 French and Allied troops died on the disastrous Russian campaign, with the vast majority of the casualties occuring during the frigid winter retreat. Adam Zamoyski tells their story with incredible detail and sympathy, drawing on a wealth of first-hand accounts of the tragedy to create a vivid portrait of an unimaginable catastrophe. power. His intention was to destroy Britain through a total blockade, the Continental System. But Tsar Alexander of Russia refused to apply the blockade, and Napoleon decided to bring him to heel. ramifications on Russian, French, German and, indeed, European history and culture cannot be understated. Adam Zamoyski's epic, enthralling narrative is the definitive account of the events of that dramatic year.

Originally published in 1920. The 231st Infantry Brigade, with which this diary is chiefly concerned, came into extence in January 1917, at a time when its compoent parts were engaged in the campaign against the Senussi, distributed in the Western Desert of Egypt and the Oases, from Sollum to Dakhala. The diary opens on October 1st 1917, when the preparations for the simultaneous attacks on Beersheba and Gaza were nearing completion.

This landmark publication commemorates the centenary of the Great War's Gallipoli campaign, 25 April 1915 to 9 January 1916. ANZAC Treasures approaches the subject of Gallipoli not only from a military perspective but also in terms of its social impact and its role in commemoration and nation building. It does so through the Memorial's immensely rich and varied National Collection, which provides a tangible link to ANZAC and gives an unparalleled insight into its many facets. The legend and reality of ANZAC are encapsulated within the relics, photographs, artworks, documentary records, personal diaries and letters that are displayed to dramatic and moving effect in a beautifully designed and produced commemorative volume.

The Great War and the Moving Image focuses upon the Allied war effort on the Western Front and in the Mediterranean. In doing so, the book addresses topics ranging from how carefully selected images projected a positive portrayal of ambulance trains, through film's instructional role promoting self-sufficiency on the home front, to the vital role of makeshift YMCA cinemas both sides of the Channel. With editors and contributors who are authorities on cinema in wartime Britain and on the British response to the challenge of 'total war', the volume highlights the power that the moving image had during the Great War. In the introduction, the editors consider why the First World War can be seen as the first uniquely cinematic conflict. Later, historians from Britain, Australia, and America go on to explore film's pioneering role as a powerful vehicle for propaganda at home and abroad, and its contribution to maintaining morale among soldiers on the front line as well as across civilian audiences back home. The book concludes by considering the representation of trench warfare in today's hi-tech computer games. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television.

A visit to the battlefield of Verdun is usually dominated by the forts of Douamont and Vaux, the museum at Fleury and the striking, huge Ossuary, Although this gives a flavour of the horrific fighting that took place in the area, particularly in 1916, the visitor will be hard pressed to get much more than an impression from such places.This book seeks to guide the battlefield pilgrim into parts of the battlefield that get rarely visited by means of a series of walks, a number of which include the major sites. The four tours have been carefully walked. All are practicable for a reasonably healthy adult; the tours vary in length, most taking a half day to complete and the longest (the last) a day. In a twist to the usual walks to be found in the Battleground series, Christina makes full use of the numerous field graves and isolated memorials that are to be found on the Verdun battlefield, a number of which will bring visitors to the most visited sites. In the course of these walks many physical remnants will be found, such as gun positions, bunkers and trench systems, the significance of which is fully explained. The walks have not been chosen at random: by following these the tourer will get a far greater understanding of why the fighting at Verdun developed as it did and why such places as Fort Vaux were so significant to both sides. The field graves and memorials to the combatants, very often of individuals, provide an opportunity to give their story and the unit action in which they were fighting when they were killed. Verdun is a battlefield where the story of units and individuals can easily become lost in the horror of the incessant fighting that raged over ten months; and over ground which is extremely difficult to read because of the post war forestation programme. Profusely illustrated and with excellent mapping, a hallmark of Christina Holstein's books, a visitor who follows the walks in this book will be left with a far clearer idea of the men who fought and died here and of the features of the battlefield and their significance in this battle that so challenged the endurance of the armies of two nations.

A fascinating exploration of how between February 1 and March 10, 1942, three small US task forces launched several unexpected raids across the Japanese defensive perimeter in the Central and South Pacific. After the devastating Japanese blows of December 1941, the Allies found themselves reeling with defeat everywhere in the Pacific. Although stripped of his battleships and outnumbered 10:3 in carriers, the US Navy commander-in-chief Admiral Ernest J. King decided to hit back at Japan's rapidly expanding Pacific empire immediately, in an effort to keep the Japanese off-balance. On February 1, 1942, Vice Admiral Bill Halsey led the US Pacific Fleet carriers on their first raid, using high-speed hit-and-run tactics to strike at the Japanese, at a time when most of the Japanese carrier fleet was in the Indian Ocean. Halsey's aggressive commitment inspired its American participants to invent the mythical "Haul Ass With Halsey" club. The last of the 1942 US carrier raids in March 1942 would form a defining moment in the Pacific War, prior to a new phase of high-seas battles between the opposing fleets. This superbly illustrated book documents for the first time in a single volume this little-known but important World War II naval campaign. The fabulous illustrations, including maps and colour artworks, bring to life the US air and naval raids on the Japanese bases in the Marshall and Gilbert Islands, Rabaul, Wake Island, Marcus Island, and Lae and Salamaua in northern New Guinea.

Historical events which are frequently mentioned in passing, but never explored in any depth or detail always arouse curiosity. One such event is the 'Little Blitz' on London in the early part of 1944. The 'Little Blitz' is the name applied to the air raids on Britain which were the manifestation of the Luftwaffe's Operation Steinbock, planned in the last few months of 1943 and put into effect from the middle of January 1944. The raids, planned as revenge for the destructive RAF raids on Berlin, mainly targeted London, and after nearly three years of respite from air raids, the 'Little Blitz' was an unwelcome surprise for Londoners. The offensive was largely ineffective, but some of the raids caused significant casualties and damage, and some alarm amongst the population and the authorities. This is the first account of the 'Little Blitz' to explore these raids in detail and assess their impact on London. The Little Blitz: The Luftwaffe's Last Attack on London describes the raids, making use of some vivid personal accounts.

"It is first and foremost an eyewitness account of an everyman and a true humanist. He was there during the Operation 'Cast Lead' and so his daily dispatches came directly from the killing fields of Gaza, and are therefore free of any media distortion or manipulation."--Ilan Pappe, professor of history, University of Exeter

An authoritative and deeply moving eyewitness account of the terrible twenty-two-day Israeli offensive against the Gaza Strip in December 2008 and January 2009. These daily dispatches were written in precarious conditions, between bombing raids and intermittent Internet access. Vittorio Arrigoni ends his dispatches with the plea "stay human," which became the motto of the peace protests in his native Italy. This English translation is updated with new entries reflecting on life in Gaza after the offensive and also features an introduction by famous Israeli historian Ilan Pappe.

Vittorio Arrigoni was an internationally renowned human rights activist who served as a volunteer with the pacifist International Solidarity Movement and worked closely with fishermen and farmers in Gaza. During the Israeli offensive against the Gaza Strip in 2008-9, Arrigoni acted as a human shield while working with the Palestinian Red Crescent ambulances. Working as a freelance journalist for the Italian daily "Il Manifesto," Arrigoni's daily dispatches, written between bombing raids and patchy internet access, ended with the plea, "stay human," which became the motto of the anti-Israeli peace protests in his native Italy. His authoritative and deeply moving eyewitness account was later published in 2010 in Italian, French, German, and English, which the historian Ilan Pappe described as the "account of an everyman and a true humanist." On April 14, 2011, Arrigoni was kidnapped and brutally murdered by militants in Gaza, which caused an international outcry and was unanimously condemned by Hamas and the Palestinian National Authority.

* Longlisted for the HWA Debut Crown Longlist 2022 * 'A stunning achievement' TLS 'Unforgettable' Nguyen Phan Que Mai, author of The Mountains Sing As the Korean independence movement gathers pace, two children meet on the streets of Seoul. Fate will bind them through decades of love and war. They just don't know it yet. It is 1917, and Korea is under Japanese occupation. With the threat of famine looming, ten-year-old Jade is sold by her desperate family to Miss Silver's courtesan school in the bustling city of Pyongyang. As the Japanese army tears through the country, she is forced to flee to the southern city of Seoul. Soon, her path crosses with that of an orphan named JungHo, a chance encounter that will lead to a life-changing friendship. But when JungHo is pulled into the revolutionary fight for independence, Jade must decide between following her own ambitions and risking everything for the one she loves. Sweeping through five decades of Korean history, Juhea Kim's sparkling debut is an intricately woven tale of love stretched to breaking point, and two people who refuse to let go.

** Winner of the RSL Christopher Bland Prize ** Uncovering the hidden love triangle between novelist Elizabeth Bowen and the author's grandparents - the critically acclaimed biography with never-before-seen letters detailing the affair. For readers who were swept up in Laura Cumming's On Chapel Sands, Daniel Mendelsohn's An Odyssey and Francesca Wade's Square Haunting. A death in the family delivers Julia Parry a box of letters. Dusty with age, they reveal a secret love affair between the celebrated novelist Elizabeth Bowen and the academic Humphry House - Julia's grandfather. So begins a life-changing quest to understand the affair, which had profound repercussions for Julia's family, not least her grandmother, Madeline. Julia traces these three very different characters through 1930s Oxford and Ireland, Texas, Calcutta in the last days of Empire, and on into World War II. With a supporting cast that includes Isaiah Berlin and Virginia Woolf, The Shadowy Third opens up a world with complex attitudes to love and sex, duty and ambition, and to writing itself.

This is a brutal story - but, from the safety of fifty years distance in time - it is an extremely compelling one. It is also an enduring lesson that a military unit, formed under an evil ideology, led by a social outcast and composed of vicious criminals, will sink to its lowest common denominator - hate. The Dirlewanger Battalion, also known as Sonderkommando (special commando) Dirlewanger was perhaps the least understood, but at the same time the most notorious German SS anti-partisan unit in World War II. German propaganda correspondents and wartime photographers did not follow them in action. And for good reason. Wherever the Dirlewanger unit - named for and led by Oskar Dirlewanger - operated, corruption and rape formed an every-day part of life and indiscriminate slaughter, beatings and looting were rife. Formed as a battalion of convicted poachers in 1940, the unit operated in Poland until 1942, guarding Jews in forced labor camps and making life miserable for Poles in Lublin and Cracow. From there Dirlewanger spent two years combating partisans in central Russia, giving no quarter and expecting none in return, during vicious fighting against an elusive foe in the midst of inhospitable swamps and dismal forests. In 1944 Dirlewanger savaged Warsaw during the Polish Uprising, before moving to Slovakia to crush another rebellion there. The end of the war saw the unit, which was now a division in size, fighting for its life south of Berlin against the Soviet Army. Medieval in their outlook on war and certainly not indicative of many German military formations, this unit none-the-less remains a reflection of a segment of mankind gone mad in the inferno of World War II on the eastern front. Size: 6" x 9" over 50 b/w photographs, maps, fully annotated

'Pulse-pounding' Sinclair McKay | 'Truly masterful' Damien Lewis | 'Who needs spy fiction, when fact can provide as thrilling a story as this?' Lindsey Hilsum The Spymaster of Baghdad is the gripping story of the top-secret Iraqi intelligence unit that infiltrated the Islamic State. More so than that of any foreign power, the information they gathered turned the tide against the insurgency, paving the way to the killing of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in 2019. Against the backdrop of the most brutal conflict of recent decades, we chart the spymaster's struggle to develop the unit from scratch in challenging circumstances after the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, we follow the fraught relationship of two of his agents, the al-Sudani brothers - one undercover in ISIS for sixteen long months, the other his handler - and we track a disillusioned scientist as she turns bomb-maker, threatening the lives of thousands. With unprecedented access to characters on all sides, Pulitzer Prize-finalist Margaret Coker challenges the conventional view that Western coalition forces defeated ISIS and reveals a page-turning story of unlikely heroes, unbelievable courage and good old-fashioned spycraft. 'Moving, visceral, utterly revelatory. A stunning tour de force by an author who has lived every word of it on the ground' Damien Lewis, author of Zero Six Bravo 'This compelling account of how Iraqi agents infiltrated ISIS takes us deep beneath the lurid headlines and into a sharply focused world of courage, ingenuity, terror and love' Sinclair McKay, author of Dresden 'In Margaret Coker's deeply reported, unputdownable account, the previously unknown Iraqi heros of the war against the Islamic State turn out to be braver than Bond and as subtle as Smiley' Lindsey Hilsum, author of In Extremis 'We all owe a debt of gratitude to the Falcons Unit for their important role in the fight against the most lethal terrorist group of our time' Anne Speckhard, Director of the International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism

This book offers a new insight into the political, social, and religious conduct of religious-Zionism, whose consequences are evident in Israeli society today. Before the Six-Day War, religious-Zionism had limited its concern to the protection of specific religious interests, with its representatives having little share in the determination of Israel's national agenda. Fifty years after it, religious-Zionism has turned into one of Israeli society's dominant elements. The presence of this group in all aspects of Israel's life and its members' determination to set Israel's social, cultural, and international agenda is indisputable. Delving into this dramatic transformation, the book depicts the Six-Day War as a constitutive event that indelibly changed the political and religious consciousness of religious-Zionists. The perception of real history that had guided this movement from its dawn was replaced by a "sacred history" approach that became an actual program of political activity. As part of a process that has unfolded over the last thirty years, the body and sexuality have also become a central concern in the movement's practice, reflection, and discourse. The how and why of this shift in religious-Zionism - from passivity and a consciousness of marginality to the front lines of public life - is this book's central concern. The book will be of interest to readers and scholars concerned with changing dynamic societies and with the study of religion and particularly with the relationship between religion and politics.

The two-volume Life of Gregory Zilboorg is a meticulously researched biography of the Russian-American psychoanalyst Gregory Zilboorg and chronicles the period from his birth as a Jew in Tsarist Russia to his prominence as a New York psychoanalyst on the eve of the Second World War. Drawing on previously unpublished sources, including family papers and archival material, this biography offers a dramatic narrative that will appeal to general readers as well as scholars interested in the First World War, the Russian revolution, the Jewish diaspora, and the history of psychoanalysis.

Women 'kept the home fires burning' while their men went off to war. This is the usual image of the part played by women in the First World War, reinforced through countless posters, government exhortations and even popular songs. It is very far from the truth. As this remarkable book shows, originally published in 1987, the truth was that women showed themselves capable of undertaking many roles hitherto the sole prerogative of men, a position accepted during the emergency of war but quickly 'righted' once peace was restored: the women who had helped to win the war were displaced by the returning heroes from the Front. Diana Condell and Jean Liddiard selected more than 150 superb contemporary photographs, and these unique pictures, with extended captions and accompanying text, illustrate the many and varied roles played by women in the First World War. Many of the photographs had never been published before and they reveal dramatically the extent to which women took over the day-to-day running of society during the war. Fulfilling these roles helped to change women's perceptions of themselves and their place in the social fabric: the photographs are arranged thematically to reveal this and how society's own view of women was altered as a result. The book also tells the story of the war from the female viewpoint, assessing its effect on the women involved. It focuses in a neglected but vital part of the history of the emancipation of women and also raises questions about what sort of victory they had worked for. In quality and range this was a pioneering study. More than that, through the haunting quality of its images it creates a pathway into the mind and world of the past.

A moving true story of love on the front lines. It was July 1944 when Madge stepped onto a troopship that was to carry her thousands of miles away from home. Only twenty years old and not long qualified as a nurse, she had signed up to serve in the Burma Campaign. She would be based on the Indian border, near the frontline where a fierce battle was raging between Allied forces and the Japanese. As Madge arrived in Chittagong, she wondered how she would adapt to the ever present danger of invasion and to life in a military hospital. She spent long, exhausting hours nursing the badly-injured young soldiers in her care, but found strength in her friendship with the other nurses. And then, one day, she met Captain Basil Lambert . . . Could their fragile, new found romance survive the terrifying final months of war? Heart-warming and poignant, Some Sunny Day by Madge Lambert is a story of courage, sacrifice and the power of true love.

Focusing on Chinese elite women as a special socio-political group, this book places the sophisticated networks they formed in the shifting geographical, social, cultural and political spaces of wartime China, where their political engagement, knowledge-making, and network-building in support of 'national resistance and reconstruction' (kangzhan jianguo) unfolded. By examining the emergence, development, integration, and transformation of these networks as an unsettled, fragmented process - a process that lasted through the extended wars and upheavals in China from the 1930s to the 1950s and that moves beyond party ideologies and geopolitical borders, the book seeks to explore the dynamics of war, politics, and gender in the broader context of the Second World War.