Enemy Encounters in Modern Warfare

Holly Furneaux, Matilda Greig

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9783031567476
• eBook ISBN: 9783031567483
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

While the 1914 Christmas truces have a mythological status in British culture, intimate interactions with the enemy are, this interdisciplinary edited collection shows, a staple of modern warfare. Spanning multiple conflicts around the world, from the nineteenth century to the present Russia/Ukraine war, the chapters consider how fellow-feeling with the enemy during war has been both fueled and limited by constellations of class, gender, nationality, race, religion, sexuality, and shared experience. Scrutinizing asymmetries of power in enemy encounters, the instability of divisions between allies and enemies, and the heterogeneity of experiences within one army or side, contributors to this book confront a central question: how far is thinking of the enemy as an 'equal' in some way a precondition for non-violent interactions with them in war? In some cases, the ease of fraternization and reciprocity between the lines raises questions about the necessity of a clear feeling of enmity for fighting to continue, while in others, exclusionary attitudes based on racial or colonial hierarchies or the criminality of irregular warfare result in extreme violence and differential valuations of enemy lives.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Introduction: Fellow Feeling and Estrangement—Approaching Enemy Encounters in Modern Warfare
• Counterinsurgency for Readers at Home: Chilling Encounters with Guerrillas in Post-Napoleonic Novels
• ‘I was a stranger and ye took me in’: Adopting the Enemy
• ‘He said he was an Irishman also’: Irish-American Union and Confederate Encounter Stories in the American Civil War
• Racial Difference and the Limits of Fellow Feeling: British, German, and Dutch Soldiers Encounter the Enemy in Colonial Wars, c. 1900
• Global Sexual Encounters with Racialized ‘Others’ in War, Genocide, and Captivity, 1905–1945
• ‘Yoors truly German’: A Micro-History of Poetic Enemy Encounters of the 1917 Retreat
• Dying with the Enemy: Prisoners of War Deaths in First World War Britain
• Enemies, Subjects and Allies in Wartime Indian Northeast
• Enemy Encounters in the Imperial War Museum’s Second World War Galleries
• ‘Children Made to Carry Bombs’: Staging the Malayan ‘Emergency’ in Postwar Britain
• Trusting Your Enemy: American Encounters with the Kit Carson Scouts During the Vietnam War, 1966–1973
• ‘Islam is the religion of the sword not pacifism’: Strategic Nostalgia and Self-Othering in Islamic State Propaganda
• Memorializing the Enemy Three Ways: Australia, Japan, the USA
• USSR 2.0 vs. The Fourth Reich: Depicting the Enemy in the Official Occupation Media of Kherson Oblast
• Afterword: Coming Home—Finding Form for Veterans’ Life Stories of Enemy Encounter
• Back Matter