Military welfare history: what is it and why should it be considered?

Abstract

Military welfare is a major yet abstract sub-field of warfare studies and warfare history, which interrogates the multitude of welfare, care, medical provisions and social policies that have existed at different times and within different social and political spaces relative to and for the benefit of armed forces personnel and their families or dependents. As a scholarly project military welfare history is both well developed and still evolving. It comprises a substantive community of scholars who have produced a robust body of literature. Yet, despite all of the scholarship that has existed since the 1960s, and more especially since the 1990s, military welfare history remains estranged from mainstream warfare history. Thus, it is the purpose of this special edition to encourage transformation in three ways: firstly, by highlighting or reacquainting a cross-section of scholars with the existence of this diverse but exclusive sub-field of warfare and welfare history that has existed as long as warfare itself; secondly, by highlighting the diversity of recent and current scholarship in this sub-field, and thirdly, by highlighting the existence of an academic network that has the explicit purpose of bringing together scholars in this diverse sub-field.

Keywords:

• Military
• welfare
• care
• pedagogy
• veterans
• empire

Introduction

The history of warfare is, by and large, divided into two scholastic fields. The first – military history – is concerned ‘primarily with the histories of armed forces, not only in war but also in peace.’ It has therefore been ‘more comfortable with wars fought by armies and navies than with wars fought between warrior societies, or before soldiering became a distinct profession’.¹ The second is the more diverse – history of war (what many scholars previously called ‘new’ military history),² which engages with the ways that governments and militaries prepared for, organised, and conducted war. This field assesses the ‘place of war in society’, specifically its influences on cultures and individuals, and ‘how it has been perceived, experienced, and legitimated’.³ The role of war in generating social, political, economic, and military change is also a significant element of histories of war. Yet, there is a third field of scholarship that straddles and complements both of these scholastic fields: military welfare history.

Military welfare history can be summarised in a simple phrase: the impact of service. That impact is studied through a multitude of disciplinary and scholastic prisms, and across multiple chronological periods, societies, nationalities, cultures, and geographical regions. The scope of military welfare history is broad because while military welfare clearly begins with soldiers and veterans, it by no means ends with them. This field also interrogates how their service affects their families, dependents, and communities. In addition, military welfare history incorporates all the changes to a society due to this service, including but not limited to policies, perceptions, ideologies, provisions, and infrastructures. This vast range of categories necessitates examining the decisions of governments and militaries as well as charitable, philanthropic, and religious organisations. It likewise requires gauging how creating and modifying various forms of assistance (such as government allowances and pensions, regimental provisions, charitable funds, philanthropic education, employment, housing, and medical care) seeks to meet the evolving needs of soldiers, veterans, and their families.

As a scholarly project, military welfare history is both well-developed and still evolving. Social scientists and humanists have been writing about military welfare for several decades, although their scholarship has not always been tagged historiographically as military welfare history, per se. There now exists a substantive community of scholars who have produced a robust body of literature. Military welfare scholars ask ‘war and’ questions, finding common cause and productive overlap with scholars who investigate the environment, labour, sexuality, popular culture, disability, state policy, law, race, ethnicity, and gender. Military welfare scholars do not disguise but rather dissect the horror of war, scrutinising its immediate, persistent, and recurring impacts upon military communities, home fronts, and societies. They even question when and for whom a war actually ends and evaluate the aftermath and legacies of a conflict.

As we are almost a quarter into the twenty-first century, now is the time to reflect on what military welfare means in this era and why. Such reflection and reappraisal have been made all the more necessary, perhaps, by the Russo-Ukrainian war (still ongoing at the time of publication). It is time to identify the diverse aspects of military welfare as they pertain to military personnel, veterans, and their families and dependents better. It is also time for military history and history of war scholars and scholarship to give greater recognition to, and develop a greater awareness of, what is termed here as the third, overarching scholastic field within the history of warfare.

Despite various academic writings since the 1960s,⁴ and more especially since the 1990s, military welfare history remains unrecognised as a distinct field by many military historians and historians of war.⁵ It is also estranged from mainstream welfare history. This needs to change. No longer can it be acceptable for social work and social policy textbooks and histories of modern welfare,⁶ and scholarship on the advent and advancement of the welfare state,⁷ to look merely at the impact of warfare on welfare. There is also a need to show how welfare impacted warfare, and more importantly how some welfare provisions began and evolved within military spheres, often in ways that contrasted heavily with civilian spheres.⁸

Likewise, historians of military medicine and scholars who focus on the welfare provisions for soldiers on the battle front or their families on the home front can no longer simply study and contextualise their subject matter solely within a military context or only within the home front context of a given war. Pre-war, post-war, and peacetime military medical and welfare developments must be taken into account, and there is also a need to integrate, as well as to compare and contrast, military policies and processes with similar measures in civilian spheres. This needs to be done in a manner evocative of the doctoral research of Mike Hally at the University of Edinburgh. Despite seventy years of scholarship around the topic of the Royal British Legion veterans’ organisation, his research is the first to delve beyond the now accepted fact that the Legion was formed in 1921 through the amalgamation of three independent veterans’ organisations. He is the first historian to delve deeper and not only provide a necessary organisational study of those three predecessor bodies, but also analyse their social, communal, and political origins and contexts.⁹

There exists a clear need for the application of a similar degree of deep interrogation by military historians and historians of war to the multitude of military welfare topics. There furthermore is a clear need for the stimulation and facilitation of dialogues and collaboration between the fields of warfare history and (civilian) welfare history (and the history of medicine and nursing) and their cohorts of scholars. This special edition of War & Society seeks to contribute to this process in three ways. Firstly, it seeks to highlight or reacquaint military historians and historians of war with the existence of military welfare. This third field of study not only straddles both military history and the history of war but is also a diverse sub-field of welfare history (albeit one exclusive to the military community). Secondly, this special edition highlights the diversity of scholarship in this field, and thirdly, it highlights the existence of an academic network that has the explicit purpose of connecting scholars, sharing knowledge, and encouraging collaboration to develop military welfare history further.

This special edition brings together a small sampling of the immensely diverse and global body of scholars and scholarship relating to military welfare history. This collection of essays comprises several researchers with expertise in the areas of conflicted societies, post-conflict societies, veterans’ affairs, popular charity, (post-)imperialism, and disability. These scholars engage with these topics through the prisms of the First World War, the inter-war period, post-revolutionary Ireland, and the Second World War/Cold War eras. Contributions come from Eleanor O’Keeffe, an early career historian with interests in military power and identity, rituals of commemoration, and post-war memorialisation cultures, who is employed at the Historic Royal Palaces in the UK; Brian Hughes, lecturer in the Department of History at Mary Immaculate College, Limerick in Ireland; Sílvia Correia, professor at the Federal University of Porto, Portugal; Colin Moore, associate professor and Director of the Public Policy Centre at the University of Hawaii, USA; and Laura McEnaney, a professor of history and the Vice-President for Research and Academic Programs at the Newberry Library in Chicago, USA.

The questions

Reflecting on the subject of military welfare raises many questions. Not all of these questions have been thoroughly explored, and for those which have been the subject of past scholarship, they have and will continue to raise new questions. For instance, how does a state and its military prepare to care for its servicemen before a war? How does that care shift during wartime? What about the post-war? How does a state or society meet the needs of its veterans? And exactly how long is a post-war period? Until all the veterans die? Until the next major conflict starts? And whether reflecting on before, during, or after a war, does military welfare primarily mean financial benefits and medical care?¹⁰ Additionally, what about servicemen’s dependents? How is the well-being of their wives and children the concern of the military and the state, or even the public? And how long does that obligation to dependents last? With a soldier’s children, does legitimacy matter? And what about the parents of a serviceman? How do they figure into any welfare considerations? Many of these aspects have been addressed in the British and Irish cases by Jennine Hurl-Eamon, Lynn McKay, Eliza Reidi, and Paul Huddie, for example, and in the German case by Amy Carney.¹¹

Parallel to these queries is the question of the role of non-state actors, including private individuals, charities, and philanthropic organisations. Periods of conflict are synonymous with waves of popular public charity and philanthropy. Fundraising efforts, collections after religious services, creating ‘soldiers’ comforts’ or clothing banks for servicemen’s wives and children, and families offering to house women and children affected by a conflict are but a few examples of this civic engagement. Such work frequently involved the foundation or expansion of organisations to manage and co-ordinate such endeavours.

In this special edition, Eleanor O’Keeffe discusses the charities set up by military units for the benefit of both their veterans and the families of their serving personnel, principally wives and children, and especially orphans. Using the case study of the King’s Own Scottish Borders Association (KOSBA), she highlights the contribution of military charities to veteran welfare in the United Kingdom after the First World War and the importance of local ecosystems of governance and philanthropy to post-war social cohesion and society’s relationship with veterans. Comparing the purposes, organisation, and operations of the KOSBA to those of other Regimental Associations and the more well-known British Legion, O’Keeffe’s case study shows that British veteran charity after the Great War could be holistic, existing in local ecosystems of the ‘mixed economy of welfare’ and intimately connected with issues of governance. O’Keeffe situates this analysis within the broader question of British veterans’ overall quiescence after the First World War, especially in the tumultuous immediate post-war years.

Many military welfare questions are based on the premise that the state which goes into the war comes out of the war more or less intact, but that is not always the case. Take the first world war and the experiences of Germany and Austria as examples. The German Empire that went into the war in 1914 was replaced by a republic declared in 1918, established in 1919, and replaced in 1933 with a dictatorship. The multi-ethnic Austro-Hungarian empire broke apart, and each new state viewed its responsibilities to imperial veterans differently. Not that all of those new states lasted the entirety of the interwar period; German expansion pre-second world war saw the annexation of Austria and the dissolution of Czechoslovakia.

The impact of a changing state is discussed in this special edition relative to British ex-servicemen in the newly independent Irish Free State in the 1920s and 1930s. Brian Hughes analyses a unique and specifically ‘loyalist’ charitable organisation: the Southern Irish Loyalists Relief Association. Building upon the range of studies about welfare services and charity available to Irish ex-servicemen, including the mentally or physically disabled, Hughes offers insight into revolutionary and post-partition Ireland; the experiences of imperial veterans of the first world war within the society of the new Irish Free State; and interwar British Conservative politics.

Changing national borders and political systems are often the result of loss, leading to additional questions about the ramifications for servicemen (and their families) from defeated states, especially those of subordinate nations, like the Austrians who served in the German military during the Second World War. Consideration might also be given to the ethnic Germans who lived in pre-war Czechoslovakia and were expelled from the post-war Czechoslovak state.¹² And then there was Russia – a world war followed by two revolutions, a civil war, the rise of a dictatorship, and interwar purges all before the start of another world war followed by the decades-long cold war. The definition of whom the Soviet state deemed worthy of support surely changed multiple times, as seen in the respective work of Robert Dale, Alexandre Sumpf, and Natalia Danilova.¹³

Even without a military defeat, a nation can still experience political turmoil that impacts the place of soldiers, veterans, and their families in a society. This includes the case of Portugal, as seen in the article by Sílvia Correra. Using the experiences of Portuguese soldiers after the first world war, she explores the ways in which war disability was perceived and represented within the context of changing political regimes (republic, dictatorship, and ‘corporatist state’). She evaluates the influences of hegemonic discourses of masculinity on pre-war Portuguese society and on the mobilisation of military manpower during the war years as well as the invocation of this discourse by disabled Portuguese veterans in their public demands for recognition in the decades after the peace.

Disabled veterans represent one group of wartime casualties, but belligerents also suffer loss of life in war: losses that impact soldiers and civilians alike as well as bring destruction to home fronts. How do such losses affect post-war welfare? Germany lost both world wars but suffered in the second war far greater damage and a higher loss of life in addition to its post-war dismemberment, occupation, and division into two nations. The Soviet Union faced a devastating invasion in 1941, and the loss of life was catastrophic by 1945, with a combined soldier and civilian death toll of at least 27 million. How were the Soviet government’s actions and decisions vis-à-vis its soldiers and their families shaped by this dual victory and loss? In contrast, the continental United States escaped the ravages of invasions, bombings, and so forth. Its loss of life and property was minimal compared to many other Allied, Axis, and occupied nations. Flush with victory and emerging on to the post-war stage as a cold war superpower – how did these factors shape the perceptions of what the American government and military believed it owed its soldiers, veterans, and their families?¹⁴

Race is another key factor, leading some military welfare scholars, like Dónal Hassett and Holly Pinheiro, to ask questions like: how did racist policies elevate some veterans as worthy of support while others received less, if any, assistance?¹⁵ For imperial powers, such as Britain and France for example, how did the establishment, maintenance, and demise of their respective African and Asian empires shape their perspective of what they owed imperial troops for their service in both world wars? Such questions are also applicable to the United States, as seen in Colin Moore’s article. Moore provides a detailed investigation of the contested politics that surrounded the US Federal Government’s denial of equal benefits to veterans of the Philippine Commonwealth Army after their service during the Second World War under United States Army command. He critically evaluates the post-war welfare provisions that were offered to Filipino ex-servicemen in contrast to those afforded to veterans of all ethnicities in the mainland United States under the provisions of the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944 – better known as the ‘GI Bill’. Spanning a period of sixty years, he discusses how the US government’s efforts to suppress its imperial past shaped military welfare policy in the post-war era.

Another major issue is that of sex and gender. Women’s and gender studies have expanded the field of inquiry as the number of women and LGBTQ + people who serve in the armed forces in combat roles has grown over the past one hundred years. This scholarship has generated questions like, do militaries perceive supporting the husband and children of a female soldier through the same lens as a male soldier and his family? How are young female soldiers of childbearing age accommodated compared to soon-to-be soldier-fathers? Also, in more recent decades, what impact does the sexual orientation of a soldier and his (or her) partner have on the allocation of benefits?¹⁶

Within military welfare histories, as in histories of war, military hardware has not been replaced, but rather repositioned. This topic can be explored through the lens of gender history: what was a man’s relationship to his gun? How did ammunition rip into and reshape men’s bodies and psyches in the long aftermath of war? Did bombs falling from aeroplanes rearrange gender roles on the home front temporarily or long term?¹⁷ Drawing upon these questions and building upon the ‘new’ scholarship that has been developed since the 1960s, the last article in this special edition, by Laura McEnaney, considers the place of military welfare history within the sphere of teaching, specifically, the teaching of military history. Using the United States’ higher education sector as a case study and the Military Welfare History Network and the outputs of its large, diverse, and global membership as an influential example, she presents readers with an interrogative article. She posits several questions for them to consider and perhaps answer through their own teaching practices within and beyond the academy.

The network

At this stage, something should be said about the academic network and the conference from whence this special edition originated. The emergence of the Military Welfare History Network (MWHN) in February 2019 reinvigorated the war and society approach to military history while also refining the queries that are inherent to the field.¹⁸ Military welfare concentrates on welfare, care, and medical provisions not only for those in uniform, but for their family members too in and across all geographical and cultural spaces, chronologies, and thematic areas. It provides a lens through which the ‘impact of service’ can be viewed and assessed. The network sees warfare as a vast system of relationships and interactions that can be untangled and scrutinised by scholars from diverse disciplines and perceptions.

Although history is at the heart of the network and membership largely consists of researchers in history departments, the MWHN is not just a venture for historians. Indeed, the network has connected scholars studying military welfare across the humanities and social sciences, across different institutions, and across international borders. The network draws these scholars together to promote their research, to expand their professional networks, and to develop new and exciting collaborations. At the time of publication, the MWHN comprises over 150 researchers who are affiliated with around 100 higher education institutions and a dozen other organisations in twenty different countries across the globe. To these are added nearly two dozen affiliated journals, museums, projects and research centres, as well as independent scholars. Together they are sharing their immense expertise to develop research consortia, publications, and projects, and they are endeavouring to advance this immensely diverse and important interdisciplinary field of research, education, and public policy development.

The scope of the MWHN is broad, engaging with its two constituent terms of ‘military’ and ‘welfare’ in the widest possible senses. With regards to the former, its members and their research engage with all manner of armed forces, both regular and irregular, including armies, navies, air forces, militias, intelligence services, and paramilitary formations. With regards to ‘welfare’, it covers all manner of welfare (personal, physical, and spiritual), care, and medical provisions afforded to service personnel, their families, and other dependents. This includes all relevant policies, perceptions, ideologies, provisions, organisations, and infrastructures coming from a government, a military, a charity, philanthropy, and chaplaincies/clergy. It also includes government allowances and pensions, regimental provisions, charitable funds, philanthropic education, employment opportunities, housing schemes, and both convalescing and medical provisions.

The research interests of the network’s membership cover a variety of topics and areas, and over the past two decades, its members have produced or contributed to some of the most important publications in the field. To name but a few, these include One Hundred Years of Wartime Nursing Practices, 1854–1953 by Christine Hallett; The Men with Broken Faces: Gueules Cassées of the First World War by Marjorie Gehrhardt; and Battle-Scarred: Mortality, Medical Care and Military Welfare in the British Civil War by David Appleby and Andrew Hopper.¹⁹ Jennifer Mittelstadt’s book, The Rise of the Military Welfare State, stands out in particular as a leading example of how diverse and multifaceted the study of military welfare history can be through a single national case study.²⁰

The conference

Originally intended to be hosted in person at the Humanities Institute at University College Dublin in 2020, the Military Welfare History Network conference was postponed until 2021 (due to Covid-19) and then held as an online conference. Running from 24–25 June, the event schedule comprised fifteen scholars whose paper topics, disciplinary approaches, geographical locations, and career stages perfectly represent the diversity and breadth of the network. Speakers joined the conference from both coasts of the United States as well as Hawaii, from several parts of the United Kingdom, including Scotland, and from Brazil, Ireland, Poland, Portugal, and Romania. Attendees also joined from those countries, plus several more. The speakers’ papers were divided into two keynotes and four panels (‘Dependents, Charity and Third-Party Actors’; ‘Veterans’ Care and Empire’; ‘Charity, Politics and Veterans Welfare’; and ‘The Military, Medicine & Care’). This special edition is fortunate enough to include an article from one of the conference’s esteemed keynotes (Laura McEnaney), plus representative papers from two of the four panels. It has been co-edited by both the network’s founder and coordinator (Paul Huddie) and a presenter from the fourth conference panel (Amy Carney).

The objectives of the inaugural conference were three-fold: networking, communication, and dissemination. Firstly, the conference brought together established academics and early career researchers from around the world who are actively engaging with the historical developments in the areas of welfare, care, and medical provisions afforded to service personnel, their families, and other dependants. The conference demonstrated that valuable research had been and was being undertaken by a burgeoning cohort within the academy and beyond, who focus on various regions, conflicts, and periods. This research provides a crucial historical underpinning to contemporary welfare systems and provisions. Secondly, the conference provided a forum where these scholars could come together to present, discuss, and debate their research findings relative to this understudied yet hugely important aspect of the global and transnational history of the military. Lastly, the conference brought together a sampling of researchers who were already connected to one another through the network, with a view to stimulating greater interest and encouraging further research in the field. It sought to and has developed a tangible output from these interactions through this special edition of War & Society.

Conclusion

To best understand where contemporary military welfare systems are working, failing, and going in the future, we must first understand where they came from and how they got to where they are today. This can be done through a chronologically and geographically diverse analysis of various historical state-directed, voluntary, and charitable processes. Such a comparative undertaking serves to develop our knowledge and understanding of the intersectional, multifaceted, and long-term evolution of such specific military welfare provisions.

It is the purpose of this special edition of War & Society to facilitate this process. The articles in this volume seek to encourage a transformation within our understanding of warfare and welfare in five ways. Firstly, they highlight or reacquaint welfare historians with the existence of a diverse, but exclusive sub-field of welfare history (military communities only) that has existed as long as welfare itself. For as long as there have been soldiers and sailors, there have been spouses and children and widows and orphans, and there have been veterans. All of these people have been impacted by military service, and all of them have had welfare needs before, during, and after military service and periods of conflict. Secondly, they (re)introduce military welfare history to military history and history of war scholars as a third and related field of study. Thirdly, they highlight the diversity of recent and current scholarship in this tertiary field of warfare history/studies, not just relative to the two world wars and the victorious powers, but relative to service personnel, veterans, and their families generally. Fourthly, they highlight the existence of an academic network that has the explicit purpose of bringing together scholars in this diverse field of research and scholarship. Finally, this special edition serves as a springboard for further military welfare research. Answers to many of the questions seeking to discern the significance of the impact of service remain incomplete. New questions remain to be discovered, especially but not solely because of current global events. Working in tandem with welfare scholars, military historians, and historians of war, the humanists and social scientists who study military welfare history demonstrate the benefits of exploring the complexity of warfare and the resulting human struggles that shaped later decades as fatefully as the conflict.

Acknowledgments

This article was only made possible thanks to the assiduous effort of Amy Carney from the outset. Together both editors of this special edition also thank, firstly, each of the contributors for giving their time and effort to producing the final articles found in this issue, and secondly, all of the peer reviewers who gave their time and constructive criticism to help bring this special edition to fruition. Lastly, we thank the editor and team of War & Society for their support from the outset.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Paul Huddie

Paul Huddie is an historical researcher interested in war and society, principally within the British Empire in the long nineteenth century. He has particular specialisms around the history of the British Army wife and the evolution of the triangular relationship between her, Victorian and Edwardian British military charities, and the British State. He is a graduate of University College Dublin and Queen’s University Belfast and the author of The Crimean War and Irish Society (2015). He has been an Executive Committee member of the Irish Association of Professional Historians since 2015 and is the founder and coordinator of the Military Welfare History Network (est. 2019).

Amy Carney

Amy Carney is an Associate Professor of History at Pennsylvania State University, the Behrend College. She teaches courses in modern European history, including classes on both world wars, fascism and National Socialism, and the Holocaust. Her research, including her book Marriage and Fatherhood in the Nazi SS, (University of Toronto Press, 2018) focuses on family history in the Third Reich.

Notes

1 Hew F. A. Strachan, ‘Military History,’ in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edn (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2015), 506. Examples of ‘military history’ scholarship includes but is not limited to, David M. Glantz, Colossus Reborn: The Red Army at War; 1941–1943 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2005); Williamson Murray and Allan R. Millett, A War to Be Won: Fighting the Second World War (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2000); Hew Strachan, The First World War: A New History (London: Simon & Schuster, 2014).

2 For discussion of this term: Joanna Bourke, ‘New Military History,’ in Palgrave Advances in Modern Military History, ed. by Matthew Hughes and William J. Philpott (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006), 258.

3 Society for the History of War website: <https://www.show.org.uk/about> [accessed 15 May 2023]. Examples of ‘history of war’ scholarship include but are not limited to: Edward M. Spiers, The Army and Society, 1815–1914 (London, 1980); Desmond Morton, Fight or Pay: Soldiers’ Families in the Great War (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2004); Kara Dixon Vuic, The Girls Next Door: Bringing the Home Front to the Front Lines (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019).

4 John Southard, ‘Beyond “A Company, B Company” History: A Military History State of the Field,’ American Historian (August 2014), 20–3.

5 Davis R. B. Ross, Preparing for Ulysses: Politics and Veterans During World War II (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969); Bourke, 258–80.

6 Examples include Pat Thane, The Origin of British Social Policy (London: Croom Helm, 1978), 17–8; Nicholas Timmins, The Five Giants: A Biography of the Welfare State (London: Fontana Press, 1996), 31–43; Daniel Béland, What Is Social Policy? Understanding the Welfare State (Cambridge: Polity, 2014), 7, 41, 70–1.

7 A prime historical instance of this is Herbert Obinger, Klaus Petersen, and Peter Starke, eds, Warfare and Welfare: Military Conflict and Welfare State Development in Western Countries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).

8 Some clear examples of this can be found in the British First World War historiography, relative to state allowances for families and widows’ pensions: Susan Pedersen, Family, Dependence, and the Origins of the Welfare State: Britain and France, 1914–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Janis Lomas, ‘“Delicate Duties”: Issues of Class and Respectability in Government Policy Towards the Wives and Widows of British Soldiers in the Era of the Great War,’ Women's History Review 9, no. 1 (2000), 123–47; Eliza Riedi, ‘British Widows of the South African War and the Origins of War Widows’ Pensions,’ Twentieth Century British History 29, no. 2 (2018), 169–98.

9 Mike Hally, ‘Rights Not Charity: The Radical Roots of the British Legion’ (PhD diss., University of Edinburgh, 2022); Mike Hally, ‘The Deep Roots of The British Legion: The Emergence of First World War British Veterans’ Organisations,’ in Veterans of the First World War: Ex-Servicemen and Ex-Servicewomen in Post-War Britain and Ireland, ed. by David Swift and Oliver Wilkinson (London: Routledge, 2019), 17–33.

10 These questions have been addressed in various ways by Julie M. Powell, ‘About‐Face: Gender, Disfigurement and the Politics of French Reconstruction, 1918–24,’ Gender & History 28, no. 3, (2016), 604–22; Eri Nakamura, ‘Psychiatrists as Gatekeepers of War Expenditure: Diagnosis and Distribution of Military Pensions in Japan during the Asia-Pacific War,’ East Asian Science, Technology and Society 13, no. 1 (2019), 57–75; Stephanie Wright, ‘Of Maiming and Privilege: Rethinking War Disability Through the Case of Francoist Spain, 1936–1989,’ Past & Present 255, no. 1 (May 2022), 317–50.

11 Jennine Hurl-Eamon and Lynn McKay, eds, Women, Families, and the British Army, 1700–1880, six volumes (London: Routledge, 2020); Eliza Riedi, ‘Assisting Mrs Tommy Atkins: Gender, Class, Philanthropy, and the Domestic Impact of the South African War, 1899–1902,’ Historical Journal 60, no. 3 (2017), 745–69; Paul Huddie, ‘SSFA, Ex-Servicemen and Their Families 1919–21,’ in Veterans of the First World War, 34–47; Amy Carney, Marriage and Fatherhood in the Nazi SS (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018).

12 Adam Luptak and John Paul Newman, ‘Victory, Defeat, Gender, and Disability: Blind War Veterans in Interwar Czechoslovakia,’ Journal of Social History 53, no. 3 (Spring 2020), 604–19.

13 Robert Dale, Demobilized Veterans in Late Stalinist Leningrad (London: Bloomsbury, 2017); Alexandre Sumpf, The Broken Years: Russia’s Disabled War Veterans, 1904–1921 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022); Natalia Danilova, ‘The Development of an Exclusive Veterans’ Policy: The Case of Russia,’ Armed Forces and Society 36, no. 5 (October 2010), 890–916.

14 For example, on the issues of war brides of American soldiers as well as the legitimate and illegitimate children of US soldiers: Philip E. Wolgin and Irene Bloemraad, ‘“Our Gratitude to Our Soldiers”: Military Spouses, Family Re-Unification, and Postwar Immigration Reform,’ Journal of Interdisciplinary History 41, no. 1 (Summer 2010), 27–60; Angela Wanhalla and Erica Buxton, ‘Pacific Brides: US Forces and Interracial Marriage During the Pacific War,’ Journal of New Zealand Studies, 14 (January 2013), 138–51; Kelly Condit-Shrestha, ‘American Fathers, German Mothers, and “Brown Babies”: The Intersection of Race, Empire, and Kinship in U.S. Transnational Adoption,’ Zeitgeschichte 48, no. 1 (2021), 12–33; William Skiles, ‘Gisela Kriebel: A History of a German War Bride,’ Journal of Genealogy and Family History 5, no. 1 (2021), 29–40.

15 Dónal Hassett, The Great War and the Language of Politics in Colonial Algeria, 1918–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019); Holly A. Pinheiro Jr., The Families’ Civil War: Black Soldiers and the Fight for Racial Justice (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2022).

16 Jennifer Mittelstadt, The Rise of the Military Welfare State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 278–79, n. 2.

17 Jessica Meyer, Men of War: Masculinity and the First World War in Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008); A. Ruthenberg, ‘The Mark of a Man: Changing Perceptions of Masculinity and Military Service, 1945–1973,’ Maryland Historian 30–31 (Summer 2008), 12–26; Effie Karageorgos, ‘The Bushman at War: Gendered Medical Responses to Combat Breakdown in South Africa, 1899–1902,’ Journal of Australian Studies 44, no. 1 (January 2020), 1–15.

18 All details about the Military Welfare History Network can be found on its website: <https://militarywelfarehistory.wordpress.com/> [accessed 15 May 2023].

19 Jane Brooks and Christine E Hallett, eds, One Hundred Years of Wartime Nursing Practices, 1854–1953 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015); Marjorie Gehrhardt, The Men with Broken Faces: Gueules Cassées of the First World War (Bristol: Peter Lang, 2015); David Appleby and Andrew Hopper (eds), Battle-Scarred: Mortality, Medical Care and Military Welfare in the British Civil War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018). See also Michael. Robinson, Shell-Shocked British Army Veterans in Ireland, 1918–39 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020) and David Edgerton, ‘War and the Development of the British Welfare State,’ in Battle-Scarred, 200–29.

20 See footnote 16.