The Hessian Cloth ‘Parajute’ of the Second World War

The Second World war in India and Burma was principally a ground campaign, prosecuted in large part with supply by air, both air landing and air dropping. Distance from the UK and other factors required GHQ India develop domestic capabilities to be partially self-sufficient. The war in India and Burma has received much less coverage than elsewhere and there are gaps in what has been published. Coverage of the supply parachute situation, critical to air dropping, is one of those gaps, with official and personal books and articles mostly focusing attention on a failed substitute, the hessian cloth parachute, at the expense of the locally produced and massively successful cotton cloth parachute

Nigeria: Fifty Years After the Civil War

The thrust of this article is Nigeria: 50 years after the civil war. The end of the war in January 1970 heralded an era of measures by successive governments at re-integrating the Igbo and forging national unity. As laudable as the measures are, there exist gaps in many of them between intent and practice. Many people continue to raise concern as to when the Igbo will be truly integrated into Nigeria and the centrifugal forces of ethnic and religious chauvinism tamed within Nigerian society. Using primary and secondary sources, this article concludes that true re-integration of the Igbo remains a mirage and to avert another civil war, successive leaders need to demonstrate genuine commitment to patriotism and national unity

‘Golden threads in the sober city woof’: London and the First Women Writers of The Yellow Book

Of the eighteen writers whose work appeared in the inaugural volume of The Yellow Book, only three were women: Ella D’Arcy (1857-1937), ‘George Egerton’ (Mary Chavelita Dunne, 1859-1945), and ‘John Oliver Hobbes’ (Pearl Richards Craigie, 1867-1906). This article considers the London publishing context within which D’Arcy, Egerton, and Hobbes wrote their pieces that were included in that first issue of the new magazine in April 1894. The women’s representations of London in each of their works are discussed in relation to their common portrayal of artistic characters who must make and potentially mistake their way in its contemporary metropolis

New Woman Poetics and Revisionist Mythmaking in Fin-de-Siècle Periodicals

This article considers how the female-authored poetry of The Yellow Book participates in a New Woman poetics that expands, reclaims, and celebrates women’s embodied experiences, both sexual and spiritual. Building on previous studies of this periodical’s gendered dynamics and aided by the research tools afforded by Digital Victorian Periodical Poetry  <https://dvpp.uvic.ca/>, this study situates poems by Rosamund Marriott Watson, Edith Nesbit, and Nora Hopper in relation to broader patterns of revising classical and biblical myth evident throughout fin-de-siècle poetry. Such an approach illuminates new constellations of meaning across periodical contexts and within The Yellow Book itself, inviting re-readings of lyric poems contributed by Olive Custance, Eva Gore-Booth, and others. As these examples underscore, revisionist mythmaking played a crucial role in the New Woman project of articulating more robust expressions of desire—as operative outside a patriarchal economy and as form of spiritual ecstasy that transgresses established categories of sacred/profane

Ella and Marion Hepworth Dixon: ‘What’s in a Name?’

‘The name, of course, [...] the name counts for something. Your late father’s name carries weight with a certain section of the public’, declares a fictional editor in Ella Hepworth Dixon’s seminal New Woman novel, The Story of a Modern Woman (1894).[i] One cannot help wondering if the name ‘Hepworth Dixon’ resonated in the same way for Henry Harland and John Lane, the editors of The Yellow Book, which began that same year. The name had definitely acquired a certain notoriety earlier in the century when William Hepworth Dixon (1821-1879) had been editor of The Athenæum from 1853 to 1869, but by 1894 two of his daughters, Marion (1856-1936) and her younger sister, Ella (1857-1932), had begun to make names for themselves in the literary world.   [i] Ella Hepworth Dixon, The Story of a Modern Woman (Broadview, 2004), p. 108. Italics in original. Initially serialised in twelve weekly instalments in the Lady’s Pictorial between January and March 1894, then published in book form later that year by Heinemann in London and Cassell in New York, the novel has since been republished several times, first in 1990 in the Merlin Radical Fiction series. All subsequent page references will refer to the Broadview edition

The Regio Esercito’s Fatalities, 1940-1943

The Italian Royal Army (Regio Esercito) fought no less than seven conventional campaigns against five opponents on two continents between 10 June 1940 and 8 September 1943, and in which around 133,667 servicemen died or went missing. Compared to the death toll of Italy’s First World War, from  May 1915 to November 1918, this is a surprisingly low figure. It is also a misleading and superficial figure as each campaign had its own lethal dynamic. Based on the few Italian sources available, this note compares the fatality rates for the campaigns and highlights downplayed facts and unknowns; and advocates for further and innovative research in the Albo d’Oro della Seconda Guerra Mondiale

Novel Arrangement: The Belgian National Branch of the Royal Navy 1940 – 1946

After Germany occupied Belgium in 1940, Belgian mariners interested in continuing the war at sea joined a specially formed Belgian national branch of the British navy, the Royal Navy (Section Belge) or RNSB. The article reviews Belgian naval forces before the Second World War, explains the reasons for the creation of this unusual force, details the ships and personnel involved, and argues that the British decision to incorporate Belgians into the Royal Navy benefitted both Britain and Belgium

Professionalism and Ethics in Military Leadership: Lessons from Pre-colonial Africa

This paper examines the role of professionalism and ethics in military leadership using examples from pre-colonial Africa. The Maasai warriors of East Africa provided professional military service to their society which rose to the position of hegemony in the region. Shaka developed a professional army which, through military might, placed the Zulu in a position of hegemony in Southern Africa. However, the undermining of military ethics resulted in the decline of professionalism and eventual failure in both the Maasai military and in Shaka’s military leadership. The paper concludes that military ethics must be consistently upheld to ensure professionalism and successful military leadership