The aim of this chapter is to discuss some of the assumptions made when selecting Norway as a case study to understand the modern history of anti-Zionism and antisemitism after 1967 and developments after 7 October. The argument is made that a small country can provide a good site for research about large questions. The chapter looks at the history of antisemitism in Norway in an attempt to explain the strong reluctance against identifying antisemitism in the political mainstream. The original constitution of Norway contained a paragraph banning Jews from entering the country. The background to this is presented. In the discourse that emerged after World War II, antisemitism was naturally seen to be a defining feature of Nazism. The broad reckoning that took place in Norway meant that antisemitism after 1945 came to be seen as something foreign, a dark force that was brought to Norway by external agents. In this way, Norwegians, like many Europeans, found an easy way to compartmentalize antisemitism as something alien.

Chapter 1 briefly covers the Militia during the interwar period before charting the first two years of the war. While the Militia did not conduct any fighting during this time, it was an important time in shaping (and perhaps even defining) perceptions of this organisation. Over this period, the Australian government and Army, to a lesser extent, applied a First World War attitude towards maintaining two distinct fighting organisations.

Chapter 3 is the first to look at Militia units in battle and covers those on the Kokoda Trail and Milne Bay from July to November 1942. As well as representing their initial combat experience, these battles highlighted how the prejudices of senior officers resulted in spiteful judgements on the capability of Militia units and sweeping generalisations that would never occur with the AIF. Although some senior officers such as Blamey were less critical, the self-serving nature of his views and others who praised the Militia, along with the deprecations, would recur. Among various misleading beliefs associated with the Kokoda campaign, it has come to symbolise a moment when the ‘two armies’ bonded and AIF–Militia relations improved. As will be seen, this is a specious interpretation that has been bolstered by a myth that Militia units were filled with ‘boys’.

Chapter 7 concludes with an analysis of the controversy over granting militiamen membership to the RSL, which was finally resolved in early 1945. This protracted process was a microcosm of perceptions of the Militia and the experience of militiamen throughout the war and, therefore, makes for a fitting ending. This book is not a ‘complete’ history of the Militia. Instead, it mostly uses battalions, battles and campaigns to highlight themes that allow for an integrated understanding of a collection of men and an organisation that played a vital role in the nation’s conduct of the war and rightly contributed to its ‘cherished military tradition’.

In his wartime account of the Australian Army’s operations in New Guinea, the journalist Alan Dawes insisted that the ‘volunteer fighting services … in a conscript world are Australia’s proudest boast’.Written in 1943, his account typified the importance that Australian society placed on volunteers at the time.This, and an attachment to ‘citizen’ soldiering, were the two defining attitudes towards military service before and during the Second World War. While the Australian Militia exemplified the latter trait, it was not the nation’s ‘boast’ because it partly comprised conscripted men. Among its various features, the presence of conscripts and an association with the more general notion of conscription influenced perceptions of the Militia more than anything else.

The brief conclusion summarises some of the findings from the book and places the Militia’s experience into a broader historical context.

Chapters 6 and 7 examine the Militia’s operations on the Huon Peninsula (October 1943 to September 1944) and during the final campaigns (October 1944 to August 1945). More than any other aspect of its service, the Militia’s contribution to the Huon Peninsula campaign and the extent of its garrison duties have been ignored. Chapter 6 seeks to fill this gap in light of broader perceptions within the Army and public of ‘unequal sacrifice’ between the AIF and the Militia. It revisits the issue of AIF transfers and the gazetting of Militia battalions as ‘AIF’, expanding the focus to cover the entire war before briefly examining residual political interest in the reinforcement of units.

In 1949 Isaiah Berlin published a notice in the Atlantic Monthly of Their Finest Hour. Berlin’s essay was subsequently reissued as a standalone publication, entitled ‘Mr Churchill in 1940’, in 1964 It is Berlin’s paean of praise to Churchill as ‘the saviour of his country’. The seventy-fifth anniversary of the publication of Berlin’s original text is an opportune time to take another look at it. With the longer perspective of hindsight, it has become clear how uncritically Berlin accepted Churchill’s version of events in Their Finest Hour and of the part he had played in them. Throughout 1940, Churchill was less ‘sure he would not fail’ than he retrospectively alleged. Nor were his relations with Roosevelt as close as he suggested. And notwithstanding his claims to the contrary, Churchill did discuss the possibility of reaching a peace deal with Hitler in the summer of 1940. There is a further point. For despite the boundless admiration that Berlin lavished on Churchill, he did not ‘really like the company of great men’, Churchill included. Yet he also admitted that ‘if there is to be public life, it cannot be conducted by such as us’.

This introduction reflects on the conceptual benefits, challenges, and limits of putting into conversation military history and global history. It regards the two world wars as times of both disruption and heightened connectedness. Severed trade, breaches in diplomatic relations, enforced immobility, and economic sanctions were paired with new connections, contacts, networks, emulations, and reroutings. Four key perspectives define the volume’s approach. First, decentering the study of the world wars widens the geographic, chronological, and social scope of historians’ outlook, introducing a more diverse historical narrative. Second, focusing on the mobility of people, ideas, and goods, which the world wars both engendered and deepened, raises important questions about what was absorbed, adapted, and rejected as part of these circulations. Third, emphasizing encounters helps to show the impact of global warfare at the local level, highlights the transformation of individual and collective identities, and forces a reflection on the lives of those who remained untouched, at least apparently, by faraway events. Finally, this volume explores global languages: the shared systems of conceptualization and communication – including commemorative practices and international and humanitarian law – which developed on account of the world wars’ extreme violence.

This conclusion reflects on the importance of studying the two world wars as moments of interconnectedness, when societies, economies, and cultures interacted with one another across national boundaries. It insists on the importance of moving beyond solely diplomatic, military, and political histories to instead prioritize transnational and transimperial perspectives, acknowledging groups and individuals above and below the level of states. Several categories are particularly useful in this endeavor: home fronts, colonial mobilization, captivity, occupations, and neutrality. Taking stock of these helps to highlight new frameworks of experience spread across the world. Finally, there is the important question of the relationship between the world wars and globalization. By their nature and by the reactions they prompted, these two global conflicts were ultimately the agents as much as the opponents of that process.

The servants in Elizabeth Bowen’s fiction, increasingly complex, allow her to represent, variously, Irishness (Donovan and his daughters in The Heat of the Day), the paid companion’s difficulties in living intimately with an employer (in several short stories), a housekeeper who maintains family memories with its furniture (Matchett in The Death of the Heart), and even a murderer who resents his position as a flunkey (Prothero in ‘The Disinherited’). These portrayals allow explorations of class loyalties, predicaments, and resentments, as well as subtleties of Irishness and Irish neutrality during the Second World War. This chapter examines paid companions, Irish help and their informal relationships with their employers, and morally forceful servants who contribute to the advancement of plot. Bowen’s servants often prompt their employers’ confrontation with the reality of their moral, social, or historical circumstances; by doing so, they can expose or puncture their employers’ illusions about their respective worlds.

Beginning in the 1930s, Elizabeth Bowen wrote literary criticism, book reviews, essays, and other non-fiction works for various media at a remarkably steady pace. Much of this writing centered on the novel – whether on contemporary novels that she reviewed, on classic works of English fiction for which she wrote introductions, or on the novel as a genre with an important history and an uncertain, yet vital, future. This essay traces the development of Bowen’s thinking about the novel and her gradual honing of an idiosyncratic descriptive vocabulary for the genre. It concentrates on a key set of writings that Bowen produced towards the end of, and just after, the Second World War, when she was at the height of her own fame as a novelist and when the history of what she regarded as the ‘free form’ of the novel, especially the recent history of the modernist novel, was a matter of urgent cultural discussion.