‘Khaki crusaders’: crusading rhetoric and the British Imperial soldier during the Egypt and Palestine campaigns, 1916–18

Kitchen, James E.

doi:10.1080/19475020.2010.517432

Cited by 29 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…In an important contribution to the understanding of expeditionary identity, Kitchen asserts that instead of the soldiers being seen as the modern reincarnation of holy warriors, they were more appropriately "the region's first mass tourists." 104 Kitchen, however, is less convincing when accounting for the popular frequency of crusading rhetoric and its inclusion in postwar writings. Rightly observing that the definition of the campaign as a crusade did not begin exclusively in the postwar period, he suggests that "clear commercial benefits" to the work's author and, presumably, its publisher, encouraged such references.…”

Section: mentioning

confidence: 99%

“Buried Alive”: Experience, Memory, and the Interwar Publishing of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force in Postwar Britain, 1915-1939

Fantauzzo¹

2013

jcha

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Over 450,000 British soldiers fought as part of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force during the First World War. Between 1915-1918, they fought their way across the Sinai Peninsula, into southern Palestine, captured Jerusalem, and overran the Turkish Army, leading to the surrender of the Ottoman Empire in October 1918. Despite being the war’s most successful sideshow, the Egypt and Palestine campaign struggled to gain popular attention and has largely been excluded from First World War scholarship. This article argues that returning soldiers used war books to rehabilitate the campaign’s public profile and to renegotiate the meaning of wartime service in interwar Britain. The result of sporadic press attention and censorship during the war, the British public’s understanding of the campaign was poor. Periodic access to home front news meant that most soldiers likely learnt of their absence from Britain’s war narrative during the war years. Confronting the belief that the campaign, prior to the capture of Jerusalem, was an inactive theatre of war, British soldiers refashioned themselves as military labourers, paving the road to Jerusalem and building the British war machine. As offensive action intensified, soldiers could look to the past to provide meaning to the present. Allusions to the campaign as a crusade were frequently made and used to compete with the moral righteousness of the liberation of Belgium.

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Section: mentioning

confidence: 99%

“Buried Alive”: Experience, Memory, and the Interwar Publishing of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force in Postwar Britain, 1915-1939

Fantauzzo¹

2013

jcha

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“…The mass exodus of people from every stratum of society made soldiers in the First World War "trailblazers," in James E. Kitchen's words. 15 Because the "enforced touristdom"' of the Second World War was again the product of state-funded volunteerism or conscription, the New Zealanders that travelled to the Middle East were a more democratic group than virtually all their predecessors as tourists.…”

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confidence: 99%

“Certainly Getting About the World”: New Zealanders’ Experience of the Middle East as a Place During the Second World War

King

2021

JNZS

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New Zealand’s longest and most important campaign of the Second World War was in the Middle East. When New Zealand’s Middle Eastern war is discussed, the focus is usually on combat and the lives of New Zealanders on the battlefield. The limited discussion of life behind the lines is dominated by a picture of racism, drunkenness and debauchery with its focal point in Cairo. This article uses primary sources, including diaries, letters and soldier publications, and focusses on how New Zealanders saw the Middle East as a place, through the lenses of the desert, the city, the Holy Land and the ancient world. An examination of these topics reveals a complex and rich picture of respect and loathing, delight and disgust, wonder and disillusionment. Such a picture shows that the one-dimensional understanding of racism and poor behaviour is an entirely inadequate representation of New Zealanders’ Middle Eastern war.

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German Soldiers and the Occupation of France, 1940–1944

Torrie¹

2018

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‘Khaki crusaders’: crusading rhetoric and the British Imperial soldier during the Egypt and Palestine campaigns, 1916–18

Cited by 29 publications

References 11 publications

“Buried Alive”: Experience, Memory, and the Interwar Publishing of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force in Postwar Britain, 1915-1939

“Buried Alive”: Experience, Memory, and the Interwar Publishing of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force in Postwar Britain, 1915-1939

“Certainly Getting About the World”: New Zealanders’ Experience of the Middle East as a Place During the Second World War

German Soldiers and the Occupation of France, 1940–1944

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