 Thank you everyone who has joined us this evening for the launch of Professor Susan Carruthers' new book, Dear John, Love and Loyalty in wartime America. My name is Dr. Mark Pondos, I'm the co-director of the Sir Michael Howard Center for History of War here at King's, and so I'm just going to introduce the speakers we have for this evening, and we're going to hear some comments from them about this wonderful book that Professor Carruthers has written, and then we will also, after there's been some discussion between the panelists, open it up for questions from the audience, whether in person or online. So first off, it's my pleasure to introduce Professor Susan Carruthers, whose book we're here to celebrate this evening. Professor Carruthers specializes in U.S. and international history with particular expertise on the role of media in war, cold war culture, and colonial counterinsurgency across the 20th and 21st centuries. Her work has examined how individuals and societies have made sense of conflict and is aftermath, and she's, aside from the book we're celebrating this evening, she's author of numerous other books, including Winning Hearts and Minds, the Media of War, Cold War Pactives, and The Good Occupation. So that's Professor Susan Carruthers. Following that, we have Professor Joanna Burke, who's a Professor of History at Birkbeck University. Professor Burke is kindly joining us from Greece this evening online. Professor Burke's wide-ranging work has examined topics including women's history, gender, masculinity, working class culture, the history of emotions, psychiatry and medicine, sexual violence, and histories of war. She's the author of 13 books. Pardon me, Joanna, if it's more than that. When I was looking at your copious bibliography, I found 13, but 13 possibly more books, which include Husbandry and House Boy 3, Women, Economic Change, and Housework in Ireland, 1890 to 1914, Dismembering the Male, Men's Bodies, Britain, and the Great War, an intimate history of killing, face-to-face killing in 20th century warfare, fear, cultural history, rape, a history from 1860 to present, and loving animals on B.C.A.L.L.D., Zephilia, and post-human love. Professor Burke is also the editor of War and Art. Following Professor Burke, we're going to hear some comments from Professor Burke Datis, who's also joining us here online. Professor Datis is the USS Midway Chair in Modern U.S. Military History and is Director of the Center for War and Society at San Diego University. Professor Datis specializes in Cold War history with a focus on the American War in Vietnam. He's the author of five books, including Fighting in the Great Crusade and Eighth Infantry Artillery Officer in World War II, No Sure Victory, Measuring U.S. Army Effectiveness and Progress in the Vietnam War, Westmoreland's War, Reassessing American Strategy in Vietnam, and Withdrawal, Reassessing America's Final Years in Vietnam. His most recent book, which you guys can see next to him there in the video capture, is Pulp Vietnam War and Gender in Cold War Men's Adventure Magazine, which examines how men's adventure magazines helped shape the attitudes and masculine identities of American soldiers during the Vietnam War. And I think, as we'll see, there are a lot of interesting synergies and overlaps between Professor Datis's work and Professor Brother's work that we're going to be talking about this evening. We were meant to be joined this evening by Professor Kara Vuok, who's the last purple Benjamin W. Schmidt Professor of War, Concert and Society in 20th Century America at Texting Christus University, but unfortunately, due to personal reasons, Professor Vuok is no longer able to join us for this evening. But I'm told Professor Vuok has sent along some questions and some comments to Professor Datis, so he will be relaying those after his comments and questions to Professor Brothers. And finally, last but not least, we have Dr. Aaron Hiltner. Sorry, Hiltner. Dr. Hiltner is a lecturer in the United States history here at UCL. Dr. Hiltner specializes in the history of the United States, and his work focuses on empire, ecology, the military, foreign relations, and masculinity. His first book, Taking Leave, Taking Libertaries, American troops on the World War II home front, was published with Chicago University Press in 2020, and it examines civil military conflict in the US mainland during the Second War. So that's enough for me, introducing our very distinguished, bright panel. So what I'm going to do now is I'm going to turn it over to Professor Burke, who's going to begin with some comments and some questions on Professor's brother's work. So Professor Burke, please do take it away. Hi, look, I'm really thrilled to be here. Let me just share my screen with you. Just bear with me for one minute. Great. Look, I'm so thrilled to be here. I mean, this is an incredible, incredible book, and I'm going to tell you why I think this, that's the case. But I want to start my talk today by giving you a little bit of nostalgia from my childhood in New Zealand in the 1980s. And what I want to show you is just a one minute and less than a minute advert that was on New Zealand television in the 1980s. And I think it, the reason I want to show this to you is because I think it genuflects towards some of the themes that come up in Susan's really extraordinary book. So let's just listen to this now. For my girl, Shirley, we're going to be married. So there we have it. I mean, I think this advert, which I remember from my childhood, is relevant to this launch for so many, many reasons. Only five years before this ad was broadcast, New Zealand soldiers had returned from Vietnam. Wounds were still raw. And here I'm talking about emotional wounds as well as physical ones. But the ASF, the world's largest manufacturer of cassette tapes. In fact, some people in this audience may not even know what cassette tapes used to be, what they were, but they were confident enough about their audience to know that there was also humor in dear John Letters. Note the gruff, world weary Sergeant with his cigar. Crucially, I think the ad actually starts with him, not the dear John, because letters are important. Letters, cassettes, communication between the home front and the war front are important. And the Sergeant acts as this kind of master of ceremonies, handing out the letters and the cassettes from back home, or what, you know, Susan calls male with magical properties, letters as sacralized objects. Only then in this ad does the does the camera turn to the naive young man, I mean, practically a boy, not really up to the task of being a warrior, perhaps trying to prove his manly vigor to his lover by enlisting. But of course, being exumped by all people, his own brother, who of course was not doing his bit for the nation. Then there is that deceptively upbeat song of the female lover confessing to infidelity. The soldiers, you'll notice fellow comrades in arms alternate between these rather knowing smiles and sympathy for their dumped comrade. As they listen to the tape knowing what must be coming, they reveal, I think, this kind of war vulnerability and dependency on women, some of them including the gruff Sergeant almost tear up, thinking that it could have been a dear John letter to them. In Susan's words, the only bonds that men in uniform can truly trust are those between male comrades in arms. So in other words, we've got here this theme, which is really big one in Susan's book of brotherly bonds. Dear John, and here I'm talking about the book, is I think a really masterful history of a concept that was only coined during the during the Second World War, due to some which quite unique features of that war, including the global mobilization of young men, a significant proportion of whom were married. But you know, of course, the theme of women deserting their men in times of war goes back to ancient times. But as Susan really lovelily unpicks that it's the meaning that has changed. Susan points to the vast number of reasons for these shifts in meaning, including things like ambivalence about whether married men should be in the military in the first place, anxieties about prostitutes, not prostitutes, about petro-tutes, and so called allotment Anne's miscegenation and marriage to foreigners, not to mention what she doesn't mention in the book is the kind of scandal here in Britain at least, that the discovery that French women didn't wear knickers to bed. Technology is a really big theme here, as we saw in the clip of the ad, cassette tapes, as well as the more traditional pen on paper letters were really, really important. So these technological shifts are something that Susan really has a really fantastic large section about. In fact, it's one of the parts of the book that I found most fascinating because Susan tells us that by, I think it's 1971, something like 90% of service personnel relied on cassette tapes to communicate with our people back home. And of course, the other important theme of the book in terms of understanding changing meanings is the rise of military psychiatry, which led to the medicalization of broken-heartedness. Now, Susan, I think what's really, one of the things really incredible is that she's done this amazing job in digging out a wide range of actually really very, very elusive sources, including letters, official documents, chaplaincy records, psychiatry reports, films, novels, oral histories, women's magazines, and so on and so on. So she builds up this multi-layered story here. And of course, these sources are finding dear John letters, and these sources are very difficult. After all, lovers tore up dear John letters into small pieces and scattered them around. They ceremoniously burned them or used them. And this is the term that I discovered through Susan, thank you, as bummer. I'm not sure if that's how you pronounce it. Anyway, bum fodder basically. Post-war commemorations also prepared to ignore the fact that women folk maybe weren't as behind their men folk as they had kind of hoped. And of course, none of us like to dwell on the fact that love doesn't conquer all. The rather sweet story of Anne Goddus, her correspondence with Corporal Samuel Cramer, including her notorious one liner, go to hell, which kind of forms a backbone to Susan's book. I mean, that story actually did have a happy ending, but that was probably rare. To be dear John was not pleasant. This is why the military was very concerned about dear John letters. Blue moods were contagious. Jilted men might be forgetful or reckless in battle. They might go AWOL. They might drink to excess. They might commit suicide. They were not in fighting shape. They might lash out, committing atrocities against the enemy, or even their own officers. Fragging is one theme that Susan really looks at well. They, as General George Patton famously quipped, this was why women who began letters, dear John, should be shot as traitors. Of course, it was this whole story that Susan tells and the way she tells it shows that this was a very one-sided kind of narrative, if you like. The double standard, our reigned supreme male infidelity in comparison was treated with greater leniency being seen as necessary to let off steam. In other words, infidelity, she shows, was highly situational. Girlfriends were taught that it was their duty to be faithful. Wives were expected to wait often years for their POW husbands to come home. If they strayed, I think the word is very interesting in itself, they were vilified. Female emotional labor required really very, very heavy lifting. Now, we were asked at the end of our reflections on the book to, I think, questions we wanted to ask Susan. And there's so many things, in fact, that I wanted to ask her after I read this book, not because I hasten to say, not because she's omitted important topics or has not been clear. In fact, I think this book is a excellent example of clarity combined with depth, but precisely because her arguments are so rich. In other words, the book throws up all these really big questions about love, about marriage, about war more broadly. So some of the things that I would be really curious about is, I think I wanted to know more about the women involved, the women themselves. I mean, one thing Susan shows very, very clearly is that the blame was placed on the jilters. But I'd be really interested, kind of, to know whether they actually felt guilty or ashamed and how they coped with this. I also thought sections on the section on psychiatry conflated a lot of different professional groups. So in other words, we've got civilian psychiatrists versus militarily socialized ones. We've got psychoanalysts versus social workers. We've got chaplains and so on and so on. And I'd really would like to hear more from her about the differences between these groups. And finally, I think more could have been said about the relationship between breaking up in civilian contexts and a comparison being made to those war contexts. I mean, I'm sure we all here know people today who have all the last few years who have been dumped by SMM and are all by changing status on Facebook pages. Susan really does a wonderful job in speculating about how these changes again in technology might have had an impact. But I think this is where oral history with serving military personnel might have been really particularly insightful. But these are quibbles. These are to ask for just her to write four or five books on this wonderful, wonderful topic. I mean, her concluding words, I think, were really, really powerful. I mean, just how she concludes this book. And she says very simply, she writes, the dear John Letter has helped make women not wore the culprit for love's breakdown under pressure. It's time for other stories and other voices to be heard. And I think that's a really powerful way to really conclude what is an extraordinarily historical, literary and exciting book. Thank you. Thanks, Susan. Thank you so much for that, Johanna. So we'll hear from Professor Davis now with his thoughts and reflections. Great. Thank you, Mark. Thank you so much for the invitation. And Susan, congratulations on just a fabulous book. I'm so excited to be talking about this, especially with both you and and Johanna, whose work I admire greatly. I want to apologize to everybody. First up, the the San Diego Gas and Electric Company is doing their best to recreate a World War One trench battlefield in the street just below me next to our house. So if there's a little bit of background noise, I apologize. So Johanna hit on so many important points. And not surprisingly, I'll probably be repeating some of them. But I think it's best for me to start with an admission that I read this book is as one of multiple stories that were unfolding simultaneously. And each one is the book was going on was building on each other in a really smart and nuanced way. And what I found wonderful, Susan, is that you always kept putting the human story at front and center of your historical analysis. And I think that was so important to watch all this, these multiple stories unfold in a way that that always kept the human voice front and center. So I thought I would kind of share a little bit about the stories that I found that were doing just that unfolding here. And the first is as a historian, I saw this work really as a story about sources and how source sources in many instances can be manipulated, both at the time they're being created. And years later by historians who may not be critically evaluating how the sources were initially interpreted, whether it's by the the letter receivers themselves or by popular culture or, as Joanna mentioned, by military command and military leadership at the time. And I think when you have this story in which Susan says there's so many contemporary actors that are wanting to preach a particular sermon, I really like that term, whether it's war correspondents or magazine writers or even military leaders. Again, as a historian, this to me is very much a story about how popular narratives are constructed and maintained. And so to me it's a wonderful book to use in a graduate seminar to talk to students about how we as historians find sources and then interpret those sources in a way that's something responsible and in a way that perhaps tells a different story that we might be comfortable with. Second and not surprisingly, I think this is very much a story about militarized masculinity and what we mean by that very, in a sense, paradoxical term, in part because despite these popular depictions we have and assumptions that go with our understanding of military masculine, I believe, it's that fragility is really what is undermining or is underscoring so much of our understanding of masculinity. It seems a bit paradoxical but I think Susan does a wonderful job of laying out why these paradoxes might exist. We assume in the popular narrative that the crucible of military service and especially the crucible of serving in combat is going to turn boys into men. And I think what these letters show is there are some problems with those assumptions and yet I wonder here if this myth in and of itself is even convoluted because as Susan suggests the male bonds grew stronger from broken vows and so one of the questions I had was how are these servicemen who are receiving these letters at once feeling vulnerable and fragile but at the same time benefiting supposedly from these male bonds that are growing stronger because they are in receipt of these dear John letters. Next is as Joanna mentioned and I think not surprisingly this is a story about double standards for wartime romance. Again, I think linking to this theme of male fragility that the power of supposed power of female infidelity that it can threaten to undermine entire armies is pretty fascinating and I think says something to male anxieties even for those who are in uniform. And here I think the double standard is what I saw in my exploration of pop culture in the Cold War era as well where male infidelity is expected and even seen as a reward for heroic service especially in wartime and yet we might ask them why is it that unfaithfulness is deemed treacherous and even treasonous if you're a woman. If you're a woman and yet at the same time it's a masculinity affirming bonus if you are a man and I'm reminded as I was reading this book I showed some clips in my warren gender course of the I believe it's 52 or 53 the film Gregory Peck filmed the man in a gray flannel suit which is again once a story of male anxieties about living in the immediate post-war era as an organization man in U.S. suburbia and these fears that this feminizing suburban living is going to emasculate men but at the same time this is also a story of the lead character Gregory Peck of all people a story of wartime infidelity and so you know to me it's these paradoxes that come out of the letters I think that are really important for us to think about as we're studying topics related to warren gender and when you go back to I think both the movie the man in the gray flannel suit in these letters it's always incumbent on the woman in the case of the film it's incumbent on the wife to grant forgiveness and then ultimately to sustain this Cold War nuclear family with traditional traditional gender norms set in place so the man is not emasculated by the experience and can continue to serve in proper ways during the Cold War era. On another level this is also a story about heterosexual coupledom and how that has been co-opted by the military for for the purposes of military commands and leaders and in that way I think it reinforces the notion of sex in the military and what I found fascinating here is that that story is not static that we see these tensions between heterosexual coupledom and the development of male homosexual bonds evolve over time and there are certain themes that I think are present throughout the story here but you can also get a sense of some of these changing norms over time and yet in both cases it seems that women are deemed both a threat and an outlet and so either way the relationship to misogyny and and as Susan I think points out the potential for collective punishment is pretty clear and so I think it's really fascinating what Susan does here with these letters of showcasing how women might make soldiers as she says inefficient because then they're worrying about the possibility of a broken relationship and the impact that we'll have on military efficiency and as she notes senior leaders like Patton and so many others and I've seen this in my own research believe that fighting and effing went hand in hand and and again the paradox to me is interesting here because the onus almost always and in so many ways is placed on the woman to operate in a space that is acceptable and it's the onus is to to operate in that space that is acceptable not just a society but as I think the letter showcasing Susan's analysis that it's also acceptable for the military and so when you have opinion leaders and military leaders who are blaming both men and women for sex delinquency it seems that the women are clearly bearing the brunt of the blame here. In another vein as as Joanna mentioned I think this is a story about the racial components of wartime romance and I think we see these highlighted in these tensions particularly when we do get to the Korean war and the American war in Vietnam that Asian women in particular might be scheming predators as Susan notes but they're also in the popular narrative seen as inherently sexual and and what do we how do we think about that with our contemporary understandings of the Oriental woman as it's related to male service here I'm reminded of Hannah Gatsby's the comedian Hannah Gatsby's definition of misogyny in her standup which really is a social commentary in a net which she argues that misogyny is something that you at once detest and desire and I think you see that played out in the racial components of these letters that these women are scheming predators but also something to be absolutely desired and I think not surprisingly neither the Asian women nor the dear dear John letter writers seem to have much opportunities to speak for themselves here so again this gets back to who is responsible for creating popular narratives and even I would argue collective memories and then a few other stories I think are important here I think this is also a story of the state inducing obligations what does that mean for women who are writing these letters not for the sake of seduction but for the sake of patriotism I do wonder and this is a question I do have of how much of this notion of fighting for the girl back home really matters to soldiers on the front line does it truly sustain them in combat or the immediate aftermath do letters truly have that much power Susan speaks of this expanding trellis of invented and exaggerated material so I wonder how we can accurately evaluate the power of these dear John letters as historians and then as a Vietnam historian I you know I really think what Susan does with the American War Vietnam is fascinating here because the all of these narratives that I just laid out are further complicated when they're tied into stories about a lost war like the one in Vietnam when we're treacherous women who stabbed American soldiers in the back are partly to blame for Vietnam and you know we can think obviously of the most popular femme fatale Jane Fonda who equally turns on men when she turns against the war and I think all this suggests this the challenge of evaluating the source base on that's tied so inherently to collective memory on the relationships between war and society back home and then the last thing I think as I mentioned earlier these relationships are not static with the coming of the all volunteer force the Susan notes by 1978 nearly 60 percent of soldiers were married and my own experience in the U.S. Army suggests some of the issues with that that I had officer evaluation reports were married officers who were in charge of units were evaluated as part of the command team with their wives and these wives were now co-opted into the military in an unofficial way to manage family support groups with little to no training and there's been some wonderful work done by historians like Dave Kieran who have argued that this became really problematic during the global war on terror with these high rates of PTSD and units not just among soldiers but also family and then these women who are family support group leaders serving as substitute psychiatrists and emotional support leaders without fully understanding I think the larger context of the relationships between military mental health and what's going on back home so to me I think the the biggest question is how do we evaluate the totality of a source base like this when it's it's likely that many if perhaps not most soldiers didn't keep dear John layers and here I wonder if we can compare these letters to the band of brother thesis that became so popular with Steven Ambrose's book in 1992 in short who would have written about their experiences of the military if they did not feel they were part of the band of brothers for those who weren't accepted into the group what were their thoughts on camaraderie and wartime unit cohesion and so you know are the sources source bases skewed in a sense because um those who don't want to tell a positive story or left out of that overall story um so again I think this is just a wonderful book Susan again congratulations I found it so incredibly fascinating because all these stories are piling up each on top of each other as you move through the book in such a wonderfully crafted way um as Joanne said I think there's just so much to unpack here for students and for folks that are for looking at the relationships between between war and society so thanks for for writing just a wonderful book thanks for those comments Greg um did you want to also share um professor Buick's questions as well just now again you're on mute Greg yes I can I actually send her a text and said I'm going to she she sent me a letter to read and I told her I was going to start the letter with a with a slight revision that said I remember finally the first time I wrote my first Dear John letter um but she said I should probably uh stay away from that so I here is the letter that Carol wrote um Dear Susan this is not a Dear John letter but I thought that since I'm not actually present at your book launch celebration to talk with you and the other commentators and guests directly that I would write you a letter it seems only fitting I sincerely apologize for not being able to be present in person I was very much looking forward to what I am sure will be a wonderful conversational scholars who I greatly respect I'll start by noting that Dear John is one of the very best books I've read in years I remember the first time that you told me about this project right after the good occupation had been published every time we spoke of it I thought that you really tapped into something that you'd found that wonderful project that everyone else wished they had thought of themselves I also wondered how you would manage to tackle such an ambitious and elusive topic in less capable hands this would have been a book simply about the letters or even a book about wartime relationships that failed and while that would have been an important study Dear John tells a much more expansive revelatory and important history of gender and war from World War two through the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan Dear John very simply isn't about the Dear John letter it's about the ways that wartime state mobilized love it's a history of how the American military deemed stable heterosexual relationships essential for the war effort for the morale of fighting men for their post war adjustment and for victory love and marriage were not merely personal private matters during wartime but relationships that bore both immediate consequences for soldiers at the front and for the nation at large yet the marital and the marshal had to perfectly align and that balance was never easy military officials both desired and distrusted stable relationships even as many military commanders wanted their men to have the steady influence of good women they also fear the power that women could wield women they knew could break men with only a few words at its heart then Dear John is about the power of women in wartime for both good and ill though it is also about the enormous pressures placed on them everyone from Dear Abby to Eleanor Roosevelt and General George Patton insisted that girlfriends and wives had a civic duty to boost the morale of soldiers at the front they were what the men were fighting for after all and they better be worth it the consequences were simply too great jilted men drank to excess they went AWOL they committed atrocities and they attempted suicide or so the story went despite the advances of military psychiatry and military efforts to shore up family support women continued to bear responsibility for men's wartime mental health even men halfway around the world even men held for years in prisoner of war camps even men who are not faithful themselves we are fortunate to be participants in a continually growing community of scholars whose work examines the relationship among war gender and sex Dear John makes important interventions into this field even as it further complicates our understanding of how wars both affirm and disrupt conventional gender and sexual relations I'm struck by the many contradictions that this study raises on one hand military officials prepared men to distrust women and to expect their unfaithfulness on the other national discourses rationalized war as a fight for home unfaithful women strengthened the homosocial bonds of war even as a dear John letter could demasculinize and victimize the band of brothers and despite the ever expanding presence of women in the U.S. military the dear Jane letter has not become the equivalent of the dear John military culture still expects women to keep keep the home from fires going for fires going even if the women are no longer waiting at home home itself plays a nuanced and complicated role in this history although wartime separations challenge the stability and sanctity of the home proximity also proved problematic technologies brought home closer to the front with real the real tapes in the Vietnam War emails in the Persian Gulf and video calls in Afghanistan but not all the news was good news and the daily stresses of life at home proved distracting and worrisome at the front it's a tenuous balance too much or not enough and it's one that military couples and families continue to manage today like all good books dear John points to new questions and possibilities I'd love to know more for example about how evolving manpower policies and needs might have shaped americans understandings of the dear John letter and of wartime marriages more broadly americans vociferously insisted on marriage deferments during world war two as a way to maintain the traditional family structure as wartime demands necessitated that exemptions change allowing for the stripped conscription of some husbands did public understandings of the function of the wartime family changes well what might changing draft exemptions for married men tell us about wartime challenged americans experiences within marriage and understanding of its wartime functions did the ending of conscription in 1973 and the return to an all volunteer force alter the cultural functions of wartime marriage and its demise and I'd love to know more about how military couples in today's force understand and experience these issues with one half of 1% of the american population serving in the military does the dear John letter or military marriage in general serve as an indication of a fractured relationship between military and civilian society as it did in previous areas and what if peacetime military marriages or the company towards in which spouses and children go with a service member to his or her duty station do wartime and separation hold particular relevance and potential danger or does a military marriage force face challenges that span wartime and peacetime I would of course also love to know more about the women who wrote dear John letters we get a good glimpse of these women in the book of the pressures they felt to write well and often to put on a happy face for the duration but I love to know more about their internal struggles to deal with wartime stresses with the anxieties and opportunities brought on by wartime relocations and separations and as you know in the very last line of the book it's time to hear more voices I would love to hear the voices of women who balance love for marriage with their own wartime and military work service women could marry during world war two for example the military officials separated the couple so that they could prioritize work over marriage by the vietnam war many married nurses or army nurses lived with their spouses and hastily arranged billets to the chagrin of some commanding officials how did these military marriages function as ideals for problems and what are the gay couples who struggled with wartime separation on top of the pressures of having to remain closeted war and love remain as entangled as ever and perhaps there's something eternal in that relationship odysseist and panellope appear throughout the pages and I suspect that if you were writing the conclusion today you might have ended with stories of family separated by war in Ukraine we see the power and the challenge of wartime love and the heartbreaking photographs of husbands and wives clinging to each other for as long as they possibly can of fathers waving goodbye to children they may never see again battlefield nuptials offer a more hopeful image but one that is nonetheless laden with uncertainty we know the stresses and challenges that they will face in the days to come perhaps now though we better we were better equipped to understand these relationships in the very least we can see that war not women is to blame for the destruction of wartime love I'll keep this missive brief and hope for more conversations in the future congratulations on a wonderful book sincerely Karen all right thank you great for sharing professor who looks letter with us and then para if you're watching this recording right now thank you as well so we'll move down to our final discuss it Dr. Aaron just take a look yeah thanks very much and thanks to you Susan for producing such an amazing book I when I was reading through this I thought back to a quote from Mary Lou Roberts's book what soldiers do which is her look at U.S. soldiers invading France particularly Normandy and the chaos that took place through that invasion and one of the quotes that she has here is about how researchers dismiss at their own risk sexual relations as an a historical sideshow of combat and I think the really exciting thing for this book and for the people on this panel and people in this room I'm sure is that I think we actually have done a pretty good job since that point of trying to avoid this pitfall and really thinking about how sexual relations but also broader gender politics and how we can put that at the center of military experience wartime I think there's been a real flourishing in the field so it's such an exciting time to read this book Susan's book is a new and vital entry into this field with so many invaluable insights for understanding some of the most intimate the most painful and meaningful experiences that troops and civilians lived through next to dying and birth marriage and romance are some of the most important things in our lives and I think those are all the more heightened by wartime the book takes readers through what I can say is really exciting for a history book is for real emotional experience like reading this book you really get involved into these people's stories in their lives and it was great that I think you embrace that emotional journey going through it the dear John and dear Jane I think make for fascinating insights into how inexplicably romance sex family and love were to to central I think to military concerns as well so not just the military experiences of soldiers but the day-to-day concerns of the most important decision makers within the military when they're thinking about morale when they're thinking about fighting strength logistics communication the loyalty of people in society they were thinking about sex and romance in part through this intermediary of the dear John letters and they were also considering how state power could be used to compel service among not just people in uniform but people in society as I think the panel is pointed to I think there's a lot more to say but I just want to thank at the start Susan Beth Bailey Andrew Preston Cambridge for putting together such an interesting book and a compelling study of gender and sexual relations in military history and while the focus today is obviously on celebrating Susan's book here I also want to briefly remind everybody in the room and watching this later that there's a new edit volume coming out managing sex in U.S. military from the University of Nebraska press Kara who couldn't be here as one of the co-editors and I believe you're contributing a chapter as well so look out for that next month one of the major points that I think Greg touched on a bit so I'll try to keep this a little briefer is the the role of the state in mobilizing regulating and supporting male heterosexuality I think that's some of the most important things that we can take across here across all these different wars the branches and continents that Susan gets into we can see how supporting male heterosexuality was essential to different military policies technology and understanding of morale and health of soldiers dear John Paul powerfully centers this across so many different conflicts from the sociologists and psychologists that are seeking to understand suicide to the very designers of all the communication systems mail systems right the telephone systems internet and how they're actually going to regulate that these concerns about sex and romance are important to that I think the book also shows how heterosexual men demanded the validation companionship and emotional outlet they found women be supported by the policies and infrastructure of both the military and the state many uniform men through believe that the coercive power of the institutions ought to be used to induce women to be endlessly loyal prove their fidelity to both man and country as a kind of a simultaneous commitment and to countenance whatever slight or humiliation or coercion that the military and state might put upon them I think dear John also examines how the military and broader society enforce the vision of male heterosexuality or women were expected if not be standard issue as you delineate but figures that must remain faithful and chased even when men were not expected to I think what you capture so well here about women is how they were subtly and very often not so subtly told that loyalty to their man would be essentially standard operating procedure in wartime this goes back to a fundamental point that I think Chris Capizola made in Uncle Sam wants you right namely that total war brings the state into the most intimate parts of the lives of civilians right and that's going to be a key part in which the state mediates its relationship to civilians dear John also describes how much of men's attention military resources and social morality was used to police the behavior of women and to ensure that quote unquote loyal woman would be if not a right of service something that could be coercively volunteered in the same way that chris talks about in his book I think it also reveals that women did not passively accept these demands either and I think something I'd like to hear more about I wonder to what degree some of these dear johns can actually be read not just as a breakup of a relationship but a protest against the societal demands the state was putting upon them maybe there aren't enough for us to actually know that but I think it's worth exploring a bit more dear John also likely succeeds in capturing how women often became the scapegoat for military officials as Kara's letter just made I think really clear the revisions of war and the all too common cruelty that is baked into military service across several wars can be elided by the supposedly faithless woman who has sent her missing explain that it's all over and that there's somebody else now right we can put the blame on them so I think it's a real credit that you can bring out that strand of history but it's also a real credit that while doing that and noting the many failures of heterosexual men in this time I still think you're quite empathetic to the heartbreak and real emotional strife they must have experienced when feeling like their their lives were falling apart upon receiving a letter like this so it's an amazing balancing act that you do there dear John delves tuned to how the romantic familial mental welfare of female troops was all too often discounted and views viewed as something of an acceptable loss as part of the service it's one of the most revealing discoveries of the book for me that the dear Jane letter has arguably been a more common experience for troops and a more harrowing experience for women and uniform it's one of those things that of course we should have seen before but Susan I think does such a great job of bringing that out here the US military as you pointed out has continued in search to spend more resources on thinking about the relationships for service men but it seems by comparison that relatively little has been done for women who are in uniform and what their relationships and families are like so it's something that I think of an enduring legacy of a continuing to focus on heterosexual men that we need to be aware of as we continue to study this topic I want to turn to something else too and I think it's one of the most interesting elements is you tapping into this mythology of the dear John letter and dear John does a good job of interpreting the stories and mythologies have thrown out the letters themselves and here I think we can see how there's a really unique element of US military experience popping up in the form of characters characters that populate the imaginations of service men and service women they pop up as recurring modes of understanding what could be an overwhelming and bewildering experience of mobilization and war within the barracks of world war two for example we probably know some classic characters like the gold brick the sad sack the flat Peter things that Paul fuzzle talks about in in his books and these are all archetypical characters that groups of soldiers applied to others in their unit as a way of categorizing and ranking different members in an outfit and as Susan also points out here male civilian characters about him too we have the four effort Jody standing in for the forms of resentment fear and hatred that troops often placed into men out of uniform these characters in the minds of service men certainly the civilian curves that I just talked about I mean in the minds of the service men were doubtlessly you know shirking duty they're striking at their cushy job they're slinking around to pick up the love Lauren girlfriends right so we can see how much mental power these characters have even if they're not necessarily based in real fact these characters are real I think so much about the culture of the barracks but they also help reveal a lot about these interior fears and desires of troops and one of the great things about the book I think is how it captures how they're also crucial female characters populating the imaginations of troops we have the treacherous wife anti-war girlfriend the stole the girl who's stolen away once the man is selflessly sacrificing himself for his country right so I think figuring out exactly how female characters play a large role in the creation of different cultures within the barracks is going to be something that's really valuable to take from this book okay I want to turn now to be talking about how the dear John the analysis the dear John letter that you do here treats it as the genre and this I think dovetails a bit with what Greg said so I'll try to be brief for here but I really love how much you just don't take it as a face value document or rather a genre created by the troops themselves and I think this point is a crucial one not for just understanding the source but also understand the cultures within the male dominated military many actions that men took when they were involving women were not for their just their experience with that woman they were performed for other men in the unit I think it's really telling that when Sam gets mad at Anne for showing him up not showing up at the right place even though it's really Sam's fault that it's not just that he's mad at not seeing Anne he's mad that he's that she's shown him up in front of other men in this unit right masculinity is for other men to a large degree often in the military I think as we discover throughout the book some dear Johns are you know genuine ruptures and conclusions to relationships and marriages some letters to exchanges are maybe more rare in this case but amicable or expected it's not necessarily surprised others ambiguous but many more of course are quite wrenching for the person receiving it but others particularly those where the man man likely explains that the partner just suddenly left right capture mostly how men have thought about the specific demise of relationship but not what precipitate and a good deal of these dear John messages though were also fabricated by servicemen and I think it's one of the most exciting points of what the book is doing is showing that servicemen are fabricating some of these dear Johns for their comrades amusement but also to engage in the kind of vicarious misogyny a shared experience of hating women within the group especially I think during World War II and I think this is a really critical point because these rituals the way that Joanna talked about them right at the beginning reinforce the kind of belonging with the barracks and I kind of want to pick up where what some of what she said more and more members of these jilted GI clubs in World War II for example or the Marines and Jarhead that you talk about could feel a greater solidarity right in being cast away by the civilian growth it reinforces a lot of the training elements of what's going on in the military anyways that you don't really want to be a part of the civilian world they're different they're soft they're effeminate right and so in a way something that might be emasculating right your woman leaving you for another man is something that and ends up being part of being reborn into an aggressive martial environment you have to lose something to be reborn in this way I think I think that's really important it also shows how as Greg related to the in the stand-up routine how this culture revels in sex and romance that the uniform might entitle you to but also reviles women at the same time in that confusing way this also dovetails a bit with what Greg had said about what the the interest of using this for our students but I think it's something really worth highlighting just what the teaching utility of this book might be this obviously has so many applications for what we do in war and society or war and gender modules but I think it's even broader than that I think when we're designing our research methodology modules this is a book that should be a part of it right this is something that does such a compelling way of looking at written sources and thinking about the mythology that develops around them that I think that we can do something really interesting with it as you talk about in the last line that others have highlighted too right there's more voices to bring out here and one of the most interesting things that I think we can point students to is how silences are built into the creation industry here and of course invoke in the foundational attacks silencing the past and it's really important to understand how the marginalized are often excluded and destroyed in the production interpretation of record sources and archives and I think we can see what you're doing here in Dear John is grappling with that problem I really like how open you are in the introduction of just saying I contact these archivists they were absolutely certain they might have a Dear John in there and it wasn't there and I think that's so exciting that one of the most formative and memorable war time experiences might not even be found in an archive centered on the military experience so it's a really useful way for us to think about how silences are built into archival materials and how we try to recover them right and how we recognize when the silences are there as I said before Dear John pushes historians to avoid simply taking these letters and communications at face value as I think you point out a lot of the concerns too easily done in the past some even swallowing what are clear myths and fabrications so I think in that sense we have another model to give students how to interpret written materials and how to understand the creation of myths genres that shape our perceptions of war loyalty of civilians why wars were fought for one in loss as we've talked about at the beginning the through line through this book which is so exciting is Ann and Sam's relationship and of course the Dear John initially introduced the beginning is something much more different when we get to the act so the last major point that I wanted to talk about here is kind of wondering about how many corollary and related forms exist in other cultures of war one of the things I just wondered is how other people in other cultures have dealt with love loss and separation during wartime especially during this period what kind of corollary and similar Dear John Dear Jane forms exist and how do those genres manage the negotiation of loyalty and faithfulness in wartime especially among different genders I was mainly drawn to land dates l a n d a y s if you want to look it up this is the poetic form used by afghan women it's a source of use for a long time in teaching especially among women in in in past trimestown so these these poems are very interesting they're couplets and basically they've emerged as a very important form of writing during wartime ever since the soviet era but even more accelerated since 2001 and interestingly this form of poetry which is overwhelmingly associated with war for women in afghanistan the audience is other women often in private but increasingly with the penetration of internet on facebook you can find many forums where women in afghanistan share these kind of couplets the poems use wartime as they're setting with an intense and often a cervic wit and a remarkable humor that I think surprises students when they look at them um they look mainly at the relationship between sex violence loyalty and betrayal and the relationship to the men who are fighting so I wonder again how much more is there that we can find on this there's a great collection of these online if you're interested at the poetry foundation that was collected by uh lisa griswold so I think let me shift now to my questions and and it'll build off what I've just said here is there's something unique about the u.s. form of dear johns and james and can similar forms and other cultures to the degree that we know about them tell us something that is unique about the u.s. wartime experience of romance combat and all these things I also wondered to the degree to which there were differences in the experience of a dear john or how it was received or how it was understood amongst the different ranks of of troops so did the non cons and elisted have a different experience of it did officers have a different experience I'd like to know whether that hierarchy in some of the class built into that impacted things I think Kara pointed this bit already but you know did being dear john in wartime different than peacetime if you're serving in south korea but not necessarily on a front line in wartime does that change things as well uh joanna talked about this too but perhaps we'll talk more about it to what degree do you actually believe the psychological theories offered up by the military particularly in chapter six is when you go into that I think the other thing too to consider and maybe it's the last two things what impacted the military's goal of separating the civilian world from the military world in a lot of its training having driving the divisions and breakups among capitals and families and does the all volunteer force change this in some significant way or not and lastly I would say to what degree can we think the dear john letter as a kind of conscious protest by one of the early cons that I have um other than I just want to say thank you it's such an enjoyable interesting book it made me think of so many different things that I would change about how I teach about world war two and gender and wartime so thanks so much for sharing this with us all right um thanks for that Aaron um so now we've heard from all our discussants I'll turn it over to professor uh for others to respond um so Susan please go ahead okay well I am thinking I need to write another book very fast so I can have another event have a chess sit and drink wine for an hour or more and listen to people say incredibly flattering things about what I've just written I I haven't had a book launch before so firstly I need to say a huge thank you to DeMarc you have spent a lot of time cutting through bureaucratic red tape and trying to figure out how to spend Cambridge University Press's money under the ages of King's College London and this I know has not been easy and I would like to say a huge thank you to Joe, Greg and Aaron for providing such not only monetary and deeply humbling comments on my book but also for engaging so thoughtfully with with what I've done it's a real honour and thrill to be sitting here absorbing um all of this sort of positive energy and your very thoughtful responses so I'm going to keep my comments brief in the interest of allowing both the audience sitting here and anyone who's listening online to to to offer their own responses both to the panelists as well as to to me um I didn't prepare any remarks in advance this is another great thing about being the recipient of comments on a book launch panel I wrote the book I didn't have to sit down on and come up with remarks in advance but I'll say a few things I obviously can't do justice to all of the many many questions that the four of you including Cara have opposed to me but I guess what's worth stressing for the benefit of those of you are here or listening watching online later and who haven't read the book which I'm guessing is probably pretty much everyone who didn't just offer comments um so the first thing to to underscore which you've probably uh sensed by now is that I chose to write a book about this phenomenon the dear John letter break up note written by a woman to a man in uniform in the near total absence of there being extra dear John letters that have been um the queased archives and that people like me can can go and dig up I expected when I started researching this topic that I would define at least some and as various of the panelists have hinted I found essentially none with only a handful of exceptions which I could probably count on the fingers of one hand so the iconic dear John that has been mentioned by by several of you is is a v-mail that was written by a young woman in New York New Jersey which for more than a decade was my adoptive hometown so it's worth also stressing that I lived and worked in the United States for 15 years um and it was during those 15 years that I became intrigued by dear John letters and started work on this topic so I've particularly drawn to this one of a tiny number of of letters that we know without a shadow without a shadow of a down sorry that a woman actually wrote and we can know with total confidence the form of words that she used she told her boyfriend who she had never met it's also worth stressing this was one of those um I call it one or two relationships in which young woman's rather daringly started to write to a young man who was the friend of a friend um who she had never actually met and didn't meet for many years and at a certain point about 18 months into there the crystal record ship she wrote in this furious one when I told him to go to hell and he was so piqued by getting this that he promptly sent it to yank which was the army's weekly magazine he was stationed somewhere in England at the time and yank's London based edition printed it and they printed it in facsimile form so you can see it's the first or maybe second illustration in the book a copy of this it appeared later the same month that Anne had sent it and because of the mail which was a sort of a new innovation of World War II sort of patriotic stationary which was microfilmed and sent overseas on on reels of film and then printed off and reproduced at the other end um microfilm a bit like an aerogram had a space in the top right hand corner in which the sender of the female um placed her own name and mailing address and because yank printed this as it had been sent to its recipient sam kramer Anne's address was entirely legible so Anne received well over a hundred pieces of mail from random servicemen um anyone really who had encountered her female to sam so she intended to of course be an entirely private communication um it became thoroughly public and she kept all of the mail she received which was well over a hundred letters and other emails from people in the states people in Britain people all over the place who had all sorts of things to say to her about this and I encountered this in the course of a collection of women's World War II correspondence that was later um the Queen's Chapman University and this was billed as the only sort of authentic dear John letter that the compilers that collection had received and other historians had written about it including the two historians who put that together and they suggested that Anne received a lot of emails speaking there's a Freudia so emails and letters rebuking her for having done this most treacherous thing in wartime namely dumping a man serving away from home off in the European theater of operations the correspondence Anne received is actually at Cornell University in the special collections and it was the very first research trip I made I think in the summer of 2016 shortly before I moved back to the UK myself and what I found was really my opening because only some of the letters were actually rebuking Anne for doing this most treacherous thing I would say far more of the correspondence she got from complete strangers was of a type that went something like this hey Anne you're obviously a feisty girl and definitely you're single so how about when this will finally end you keep a spot on your dance card for me because you know I'm looking for dates so maybe you'd like to write to me oh and could you send me your photo quite a lot of them as I point out I responded to this in part because it was a New York New Jersey story and I lived there for a long time they had both shared Jersey origins work with some of their hometowns and one of the things that was so intriguing to me about this correspondence was that here are all of these young men who appreciated that letter writing in wartime was surrounded by this dense thicket of rules they understood that there were rules but they didn't know exactly what the rules were they knew that Anne had obviously broken them but that didn't determine any of them from wanting to list Anne as a correspondent pen pal of their own but I was immediately plunged into this sort of world of letter writing of relationship formation in which a constant negotiations going on between observing rules trying to figure out what they were and breaking them or circumventing them sort of testing the elastic limits of the rulemaking that was so densely going on in wartime so I thread this story through many chapters of the book I use it in part to elucidate the theme of rules of engagement how over successive decades the military the wartime state as several of you have pointed out tried to discipline women and discipline affective life on the whole front but also all sorts of other people took up that work and to me that's perhaps one of the most unexpected things I encountered in research in the book is that it wasn't just wartime state that wanted women to both write letters man in uniform enter into emotional emotional relationships with them and sustain them through the power of fidelity and loyalty all sorts of other people civilians were doing that as well and a lot of women especially characters who we in Britain would call academy arts in other words magazine advice commerce I think some of the most strenuous strenuous vociferous and energetic disciplinarians of homefront emotion so I can't respond to all of the questions I'll just pick up a few of them that I sort of have perhaps remember the most from my attempts to take notes and drink wine over the course of the last hour so perhaps I will preface this by saying that for those of you who picked up on you know one of the things that you might do with the book in a teaching setting was just to think about the use of evidence what do you do when the thing you want to write about doesn't exist in the form of dozens hundreds of dear John letters and what I found was that that absence actually was incredibly telling because where dear John's do exist and where they perhaps exist most profusely is in the male oral story tradition that surrounds them so what I ended up doing was writing a book that's about letters but also about stories and about storytelling and it's really as I see it about the interplay between letters letters written by women but also the dear John genre as I see it you probably might say has been authored by men and it's been authored by men in sorts of stories that they share primarily with other men about being dumped about being being abandoned being betrayed and so several of you picked up on on the way in which female treasury turns out to be an incredibly valuable emotional resource for male bonding solidarity it gives the recipient of a break up note immediate sort of credentials to enter this particular cadre of rejected men who can bond perhaps in an especially intensified form over the fact and fate of being jettisoned and dumped by women and and the sort of particular singular awfulness that is imputed to the women who presume to do that so to me that was one of the biggest challenges of the book but it also provided me with perhaps the biggest epiphany of what I was doing is that we need to approach this singular letter around which so much swells through the prism of male storytelling and male bonding so I agree with you that my own heartfelt final line about it's time to hear other voices I would love to be able to to actually access more of those voices in other words the voices of women who sent dear John letters on the one hand what were they thinking I know a bit about what and goodness the New Yorker who sent the girl to help female was thinking but Sam didn't keep her letters so we have the female only because he sent it to Yang and Yang publicized it and it generated all of that attention women's voices appear in much more fragmentary ways so in one or two various women tried valiantly to raise their voices to gain space in a very limited bandwidth that was available to women who'd be jolted by servicemen so as many of the panelists pointed out this is indeed a story about about gendered double standards about the latitude that's extended to men to dark women and order sleep with other women while serving in uniform and get away with it that behavior is not only condoned but often lauded whereas it was another story for women and women try they told journalists about this they too wrote letters to Yang to stars and stripes saying well wait a minute what about the men who dumped us what about our nobody had coined the phrase dear Jane letters but they also pointed to another phenomenon that nowadays we refer to as ghosting the fact that more often than not that men in uniform who betrayed women whether civilian women or women in uniform simply disappeared speechlessly silently and to me that seemed a particularly cruel way perhaps of ending relationship but I was struck that some of these agony answer women at nice calls told women basically suck it up you know or told men it was an acceptable way for them to end relationship because sooner or later she would get the message but of course as anyone who has been trying to decipher silence what it might mean when a friendship or relationship ends without any verbalization of what might have given rise to that rupture nothing is more indecipherable more open to multiple interpretations than silence and of course women were anxious to wondering about what had happened to their loved one in uniform who is serving in a frontline theater overseas I think might well have been forgiven for thinking that this was a particularly cowardly way to end relationship because of course the woman's going to worry that it didn't just mean that things are over it might have meant something much more lethal had happened to the man and not just to the relationship so I would love to figure out ways in which we can hear more about women's experiences and perhaps as I forget who it was perhaps it's Kara's letter that suggested that oral history with women and particularly women in uniform and this is one of the most obviously silenced groups that my work deals with is the fact that in all of the dominant wartime narratives about emotional relationships about the importance of intimacy the necessity to sustain it for the duration the presumed sort of default setting for who the partners in these heavily freighted wartime relationships are is that it's a man in uniform and a woman and the presumption is that it's a female civilian and of course this totally was the fact that the large numbers of women in fact 400,000 women served in uniform in the United States in World War II and growing numbers of women have joined served in the armed forces over successive decades in the 20th and 21st centuries and it seems to me that their voices and their experiences are perhaps more thoroughly absent from the record than any other and if I were to follow up my own work with more work on this I'm not doing this right now but if I were to or if I were encouraging students or others to take up this sort of baton I would say that those would be the voices to try to find and perhaps particularly with women who serve more recently with whom oral histories can still be undertaken that I think would be a particularly rich avenue to explore as it is and perhaps the single most important source of material for my book was the veterans history project at the Library of Congress in Washington DC and I spent literally hundreds of hours listening to recorded oral histories with veterans of course from World War II onwards the vast majority of them were with male veterans and only one or two not one or two more than one or two but a very tiny proportion of the total that I listened to with women so I would hope as we move forward and as archivists become more self-conscious perhaps about the gendered imbalances and their collecting policies that female veterans as well as women's civilian wartime experiences will garner more attention. I can't as I kept saying to justice to all of these comments I think Joe your point was well made that in my chapter that deals particularly with how cyber professional psychiatrists psychologists and others have have sort of tried to psychologize the dynamics of wartime relationships and pathologize often the waiting wife and especially the military wife who didn't wait and do do too much lumping together and in self-defense I would simply say that that was one part of one chapter but you're absolutely right that there's far more that one could say about military medical professionals how this the sort of psychiatric and psychological professions have been militarized and how that's evolved over time it's a much more complicated story there's also much more that could be said about the chaplaincy that branch of the the military that occupies very particular another nebulous space part social worker part some emotional caretakers as well as spiritual counselor that does so much work in shaping emotional life in wartime for many women women in uniform provide counseling and extremists but also doing a lot of work touch only briefly about the racialized contours of my topic and the military the military chaplaincy I think played a tremendously important role in in World War II and Vietnam in trying to channel men in racially appropriate marriages and relationships and that's something that I would love to spend more time researching I think I've probably said enough perhaps even more than enough and I'm going to cease a visit right there and invite those in the audience both here in this room thank you for coming and sticking with us and anyone who's in the zoom call or whatever technology we're using to ask their own questions all right thank you very much Susan