Goldsmiths, University of London: Journals Online
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Learning to Fail? Wartime Adaptation and Special Force in Burma, 1942–1944
Get PDFThis article considers wartime tactical adaptation and its relationship with operational performance and outcomes during the Second World War. Specifically, it examines Long Range Penetration Groups (LRPG) facing the Imperial Japanese Army in Burma during two major operations to reveal how adaptation may decrease combat effectiveness and contribute to operational failure. This conclusion challenges contemporary assumptions about adaptation during conflict and suggests some of the costs when adaptation fails. It raises new questions about what circumstances and in what ways tactical adaptation may contribute to operational success or failure during mid-to-high intensity combat, relevant for contemporary theorists and practitioners
Lieutenant-Colonel James Leslie Kincaid and the Emergency Response to the 1944 Eruption of Mount Vesuvius, Southern Italy
Get PDFThe 1944 eruption of Vesuvius occurred at the height of the Second World War. A successful emergency relief operation was launched by the Allied Control Commission and was led by an American officer, Lt. Col. (James) Leslie Kincaid. In this paper we both describe the operation and evaluate its effectiveness pointing out, inter alia: the importance of well-trained and experienced personnel; the need for expertise across a wide range of specialisms; the ability to both empathise with victims, but at the same time lead and strongly direct a successful military operation and work harmoniously and effectively with allies. 
War, Technology and Narrative Hierarchies
Get PDFThis article considers some of the ways communications technologies have shaped narratives of war. It touches on different military cultures and how they contend with imposed and implicit hierarchies. It then goes on to briefly discuss the ways these hierarchies are expressed in various analogue and online media, both as a reflection and a potential subverter of cultural expectations about who participates in conflicts, and how
The Royal Fleet Auxiliary and Post-War Change
Get PDFIn 1945 the Admiralty owned a large number of Royal Fleet Auxiliaries, most of which were oil tankers with the larger freighting tankers transporting oil to naval bases, and the smaller attendant tankers issuing it to the Royal Navy in harbour or at sheltered anchorages. During the war a new requirement had emerged for replenishment at sea, and in the post-war period this became the main activity for the Royal Fleet Auxiliary (RFA). This article describes how the post-war RFA met that demand by changing its ships and organisation away from its mainstream British Merchant Navy roots towards the Royal Navy it supports
Anchored Together in the Storm
Get PDFDuring the pandemic (since March 2020 and ongoing) I have attended weekly online large groups. Large groups give us the opportunity to explore cultural, political and social matters
What Baudelaire Means to Me
Get PDFI first encountered Baudelaire as an A-level student. Sadly, the teaching of French at my school focussed more on language than literature. Compounded with the strangely affectless quality about the texts my teachers chose for us to read in class, it is a wonder I have much interest in French literature at all. At school, we drudged stolidly through passages of L’Étranger and Thérèse Desqueroux with little sense of excitement. That only came later at university, when a supplementary class on Flaubert’s ‘Un Coeur Simple’ opened doors for me
A Prose Reverie for Charles Baudelaire
Get PDFAs a child of popular culture, it seems fitting that my long-delayed appreciation of Charles Baudelaire began in front of a television screen. Every Halloween since childhood, I ritualistically set myself before the TV to re-watch the first ‘Treehouse of Horror’ episode of The Simpsons, which offers an affectionate parody of Edgar Allan Poe’s sombre poem ‘The Raven’ (1845). Electronic images of the cartoon raven, relentlessly repeating the eerie word ‘Nevermore’, ingrained themselves on my young mind, which was completely oblivious to the show’s overt satire. Astride the bust of Pallas, the raven’s cartoon utterances seemed both strange and beguiling, containing an unsettling symbolism I couldn’t understand. After continual nagging, my parents finally relented and bought me a collection of Poe’s works containing this mysterious narrative. That small, mass-produced edition of Poe’s stories and poems, bound in cheap red cloth, its pages tipped with artificial gold, still sits on my shelf, gathering dust until the darker months, when I routinely re-read my favourites: ‘Ligeia’ (1838), ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ (1839), ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ (1842), ‘The Oval Portrait’ (1842), and, of course, ‘The Raven’