Children and War
James, Marten (ed.) (2002).
New York: New York University Press; 313 pages. $22. ISBN 0814756662.
Children and War is an admirable collection of scholarly essays edited by James Marten, Professor of History at Marquette University. Robert Coles, in his forward to the collection, pays tribute to Anna Freud’s observations of British children during the London blitz and to her deep respect for their agility and resourcefulness in times of terrible danger. In many respects, this book serves as an extended commentary on Freud’s profound understanding of the capabilities of children.
The book consists of 21 essays that address children’s engagement with war as soldiers, victims, observers, supporters, spies, and as symbols of national angst, identity and valor in a wide variety of conflicts. About a quarter of the essays address World War II and its aftermath, while others concern the American Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, the Civil War, World War I, colonial wars against the Maori, the Australian Aborigines, Native Americans, the Sandino and Mexican Revolutions, the Civil War in Liberia, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and other conflicts.
The portraits that emerge are complex, inspiring, and troubling. These essays show how the historical and cross-cultural diversity of children and varied understandings of childhood challenge current international efforts to create a universal definition of “the child” through the Convention on the Rights of the Child.
In these essays, it is striking how engaged and animated children are by war, both in the imagination and in reality. In addition, the book shows the ways children are subjected to relentless attempts by society to control and mediate their responses to war, even to the extent, as James Martin puts it, of trying to shape their memories of war.
I will not catalogue all the essays in the book, but reviewing a few of them will give a sense of the range of issues the book addresses. Marten’s introduction sets the tone of the book. He discusses the narrative of Iron Hawk, a Sioux warrior who at age 14 fought at the Little Big Horn River in 1876 and participated in wiping out General Custer and his troops. Iron Hawk recounts shooting an arrow into a soldier, knocking him off his horse, and beating him to death with his bow. Told when he was an old man living on a bleak reservation of the defeated Sioux, Iron Hawk’s narrative makes clear that at age 14 he thought of himself as a man, and that even many years later his victory at war continued to give meaning to his life. Elizabeth William’s essay, “Childhood, Memory and the American Revolution,” continues this line of analysis with her reviews of men’s and women’s accounts of their childhoods during the American Revolution. Many boys, some as young as age 12, joined the revolutionary army, often enlisting with their fathers and uncles. Williams tells us of women’s accounts of the moral threats that accompanied wartime violence. Both men and women wrote proudly of how, as children, they bore their share of the burden during the Revolution. In “Rescue and Trauma,” Eric Sterling explores a darker side of children’s resilience as he introduces us to a hidden tragedy of war. He writes of Helga, a Jewish woman desperate to save her daughter Eva’s life in Nazi Germany. She sent her to England in the famous Kinder transports, which saved some 10,000 children from the fate that befell 1.5 million other Jewish children who were murdered during the Holocaust. Miraculously, Helga survived Auschwitz, only to find at the war’s end that Eva had transformed herself into an English child, changed her name to Evelyn, and wanted nothing to do with her mother ever again.
At the same time, war has inspired adults to mediate and shape children’s behavior and values. In “Flower of Evil,” Aaron Cohen describes the alarm bells raised among Russian pedagogues and teachers as they fearfully observed children’s growing fascination with war at the onset of World War I. Many of these teachers came to see war as a moral catastrophe requiring intervention, even for children who never actually went to war. In “Imagining Anzac,” Bruce Scates shows how the duties of remembrance of Australia’s war dead were imposed upon generations of Australia’s children, even as the meaning of remembrance changed over time. Steven Heathhorn, in “Representation of War,” shows how in the generations before World War I, the school experiences of British working-class children were infused with a military ethos. Heroic stories of figures such as Lord Nelson, who was killed at the battle of Trafalgar in 1805, and of General Gordon, killed at Khartoum some 80 years later, were used to inculcate identification with Britain’s nationalist and imperialist ambitions. In “Japanese Children and the Culture of Death, January –August 1945,” Owen Griffiths reviews what he calls the Japanese “culture of death” as it played itself out in Japanese children’s magazines in the last year of the Second World War. At that point, the Japanese government was exhorting the nation to die in a form of collective suicide. The articles, letters, pictures in these children’s publications pressed young boys to die for the Emperor and called upon young girls to commit suicide to preserve the ideals of Japanese purity and modesty.
In “Stolen Generations and Vanishing Indians,” Victoria Haskins and Margaret Jacobs compare the removal of children from Native American and Australian Aboriginal society. Removal was couched in the language of child protection, but the authors cogently argue that it was actually an extension of wartime subjugation and aggression in which children became virtual hostages for the good behavior of tribal peoples. Finally, in “Baptized in Blood,” Michael Schroeder introduces us to Santos Lopez, who in 1926 at age 12 joined the liberal forces of the Sandino rebellion in Nicaragua and became a general at age 15, a fact which reminds us that children have been part of virtually every war of national liberation, rebellion, guerilla war and insurgency in the last two centuries.
These essays, as well as the others in the volume, invite us to take a very serious cross-cultural and historical view of children’s involvement in war. Each of the essays is individually compelling, and collectively, they serve as a cautionary tale against simplistic evaluations of children’s participation in war.
Reviewer Information
David Rosen received his Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Illinois and his law degree from Pace University School of Law. He is currently at Fairleigh Dickinson University in Madison, New Jersey. His is the author of Armies of the Young: Child Soldiers in War and Terrorism (Rutgers University Press, 2005).