Beyond Glory: Civilians, Combatants, and Society During the Battle of Shanghai
Abstract The 1932 Sino-Japanese conflict in Shanghai was the first example of a modern war waged in a large city between two heavily equipped armies. It was also the first urban conflict during which massive destruction, especially aerial bombing, ensued with utmost disregard for the consequences to civilians. This paper looks at the damage and losses the two contending armies suffered. The group of Chinese armies involved in the conflict was not prepared either to handle the consequences of using highly lethal weapons or to provide the appropriate level of medical assistance to their soldiers involved. The result was a catastrophic level of casualties. The battle for Shanghai announced the frightening massive waves of destruction that World War II would unleash on European and Japanese cities.
Landscapes of Fear: Wartime London, 1939–1945
As cartoonist Osbert Lancaster recalled in his autobiography, fear was central to the civilian experience of London during the Second World War. As the term "The People's War" suggested, the British war effort depended not only on conscripted and directed labor and the rationing of con sumer goods but also on the fortitude of civilians, particularly those in urban areas, who were constant potential targets for German bombing raids. This article ex amines three narratives of civilian experience in wartime London?private diaries, psychologists' notes, and fiction?to reveal the hidden landscapes of fear in a city at war. During the Second World War, London was the primary and most dramatic stage where both personal and communal fears were played out. Londoners feared death, loss of property, injury, bereavement, and, on a broader scale, the loss of the war and the end of Britain. The 1940s thus saw the elaboration of older Victorian fears of London as a potential canker in the heart of Imperial Britain. British civilization was once again vulnerable to being weakened by the "enemy within," and symptoms of the dreaded degeneracy were sought in expressions of
Urban Identities and Catastrophe: Izmir and Salonica at the End of the Ottoman Empire*
Two huge fires dramatically influenced the urban development of Salonica and Izmir, in 1917 and in 1922, respectively. These catastrophes occurred after the Ottoman Empire fell, and Salonica and Izmir had shifted into new national contexts. The fires mainly destroyed the districts that were transformed during the late‐Ottoman period. These districts became the cosmopolitan façades of modern Izmir and Salonica. The post‐fires' tabula rasa provided an opportunity for Greek and Turkish politicians and European planners to change the urban identity of both cities. Moreover, the Lausanne Treaty of 1923 transformed their multicultural societies also. Reconstruction plans had been thought to de‐Ottomanize and remove the previous idea of the towns and their multiplicity, interpreting new cultural and nationalist feeling. Here, I emphasize how modernity was interpreted before and after the fires, and point out contradictions between ideological aspects of planning and how the first urban districts were built during the 1920s.