Third-year UoP history student Rebekah Money describes the research she carried out for her dissertation on the allied bombing campaign against German cities during World War II. Rebekah’s supervisor was Dr Rob James. Most people learn in school about the blitzkrieg tactics and the fear that the Nazis brought to the countries of Europe at the start of the Second World War. However, outside of a specialist focus we, as a country, rarely take the time to consider how damaging our own bombing campaign was. This was one of my thoughts when I was considering my dissertation topic in February 2024. I wanted to focus on a part and side […]
Tag Archives | Second World War
Wartime representations of the Royal Navy submarine service in the British press
Dr Rob James, Senior Lecturer and Course Lead for the MA Naval, Maritime and Coastal History, has recently published an article, co-written with one of the MA’s alumni students, Martin Backhouse, in the journal War in History. The article, ‘Un-silencing “The Most Silent Section of ‘The Silent Service’’’: The Portrayal of Royal Navy Submarines and Submariners in the Illustrated London News, 1939-1945’, examines the portrayal of Royal Navy submarines and their crews in the world’s first weekly illustrated newspaper, the Illustrated London News, during the Second World War. It argues that the newspaper depicted Britain as having a technologically advanced and potent submarine service, whose personnel were part of an […]
Researching the role of the Western powers in concealing Japanese War Crimes
Recent UoP history graduate Benjamin Taylor wrote his third-year dissertation on Japanese war crimes, discovering that the US and other Western states played a far larger role in the cover-up than has been previously acknowledged. Below he writes about the trial and error process of writing his dissertation, and how the guidance of his supervisor, Dr Rudolph Ng, has been vital. My chosen topic for my dissertation was an investigation of the cover-up that has surrounded Japanese war crimes. Specifically, my dissertation sought to answer two questions: has there been a cover-up surrounding Japanese war crimes? And two, if so, which country was most instrumental in creating and perpetuating this […]
The long-term impact of Japanese Imperialism in China, 1931-1945
Third-year UoP student Brandon Lawson used his dissertation study to discover more about Asian history in the twentieth century, a topic he felt deserved more attention in historical studies. His dissertation was entitled Shadows of war: “Justice” and geopolitical tension caused by Japanese Imperialism on China, 1931-1945. Brandon’s supervisor was Dr Rudolph Ng. The conquest of Chinese territory by the Imperial Japanese Army in the 1930s led to a horrific and deadly campaign across the land, decimating the lives of their victims and cities in their path across vast swathes of Asia. However the impact that the territorial expansion had on China society spanned many decades up to the modern […]
Tin Cans and Relics: The Royal Navy’s over-age destroyers in the Second World War
Although Winston Churchill argued for the importance of building new destroyers, at the outset of the Second World War in 1939, many destroyers in the fleet were aged, and of limited practical value. In a paper given on Wednesday 8 May, Dr Jayne Friend examined the careers of these destroyers in the context of propaganda, culture and imagination to suggest how these very different classes of vessel had wide-ranging but parallel importance and purpose. Dr Jayne Friend is a naval historian specialising in the relationship between the Royal Navy, culture and identity within Britain. She gained her PhD, titled “‘The Sentinels of Britain’: Royal Navy Destroyers, British Identity, Culture and […]
Debates about the Jews’ place in a decolonised world
On Wednesday 8 November Dr Laura Almagor (University of Utrecht) presented a paper in our History Research seminar series entitled Reinvention at Bandung: Jewish Displaced Persons and the new global order, 1943-1962. During the summer and autumn of 1945 millions of uprooted persons made their way back to homes across Europe. The remaining refugees crowded together in displaced persons camps in Germany, Austria and Italy. Six years later, 175,000 individuals, mostly Jews, still languished in the camps. In 1955, the Bandung conference convened to discuss the lingering problem of these displaced persons. Laura’s research looks at what the conference debates reveal about how displaced persons and Jewish leaders understood the […]