Report to the Faculty Development Committee

 his past year I received an International Studies Grant from the Faculty Development Council here at Texas A&M—Commerce.  I used this award to take part in the summer British Studies program run by a ten school consortium based at the University of Southern Mississippi.  A&M—Commerce is part of this group.  The grant paid for my transportation, housing and class related expenses for the month I spent in London auditing a history course on the Second World War.  The session in London is the largest program that the consortium offers with courses in a number of academic fields such as literature, art history, drama, speech communications, advertising, finance, and economics.  All told, there are over thirty different courses.  About 250 students attended with about 10 percent coming from A&M—Commerce.  The consortium also holds smaller programs in Jamaica, Mexico, Spain, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, France, Belgium, Austria, Germany, Italy, Cuba, and Kenya.  These programs usually offer no more than two or three different courses.  The consortium also has semester and year long programs in Canada, Australia, France, Germany, Mexico, Spain, and the United Kingdom.  All students are eligible for financial aid.
 
 he month I spent in London was essentially a working vacation.  The rest of this report will attempt to explain the structure of the overall program and my individual experiences.  The three areas that I discuss specifically are coursework, tourism, and faculty development.

 he main intellectual reason for a study abroad program is to use exposure to a foreign culture as a teaching tool.  Students earn six hours of academic in London—the smaller, shorter programs offer three or four hours of credit.  American professors, who teach at one of the consortium schools, supervise the course and arrange for guest lectures and field excursions.   Speakers in the past have come from a wide range of professions and included the likes of Jeremy Irons, Kenneth Branagh, Ian McKellan, A.J.P. Taylor, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Sir Edward Heath.   Depending on the subject of the course, these trips might include visits to the offices of the British newspaper The Times, the Bank of England, Stonehenge, the many museums in London, or some of the theaters that populate the city.

 he history course on World War II was well designed to take advantage of the educational opportunities unique to London and the United Kingdom. The course emphasized the European perspective of the conflict.  The instructor, Andy Wiest, an associate professor in the history department at Southern Mississippi, is a veteran of the program as both an instructor and student.  Guest speakers included British academics, active duty British Army officers, and staff members at the Imperial War Museum. Collectively these lecturers put the defeat of Nazi Germany into a international context.  Students learned that the Battle of the Atlantic was an engagement between the Germans on hand, and the Royal Navy and the Canadian Royal Navy on the other, with only minimal American participation.  The Red Army got its due for breaking the German Army and Waffen SS.  The Royal Air Force and the U.S. Army Air Forces competed with one another, trying to prove which was more effective against the enemy: American daylight, or British night bombing.  The invasion of Normandy, D-Day to most, was a major allied effort, even if the U.S. was the senior partner.  Students learned about the home front in the United Kingdom, the social impact of the conflict, and the holocaust.  The reading assignments also focused on elements of the conflict in which the United States played a minor role, if any.

 s a group, the class took excursions to the Imperial War Museum, the Cabinet War Rooms (Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s underground headquarters) and Duxford Air Base.  All the airplanes at this airfield are kept in operational condition and guests can—for a hefty price—ride in the planes scheduled for flight on that day.  Visitors can walk through the hangers and watch mechanics work on the planes, smell the grease in the air, and see the offices where commanders plotted the course of aerial battles.  Talk about history coming alive.

 ithout a doubt the most moving trip was the weekend the class spent in France touring the beaches and battlefields of D-Day.  Students from a number of other courses joined this little expedition.  We traveled by bus and ferry to the other side of the English channel and began visiting sites familiar to many like Pegasus Bridge, Saint-Lô, Caen, Utah beach, Omaha beach, Sainte-Mère-Église, the Mulberry harbors, and Pointe du Hoc.  We hit most of the sites on the second day.  Three in particular deserve special notice.  The first is Omaha beach.  On the way there, we watched the first thirty minutes of Saving Private Ryan.  Then, we went to the actual spot where that scene took place in real life and read accounts of that day from the few men that survived.  The terrain and the geography of Omaha clearly worked to the Germans’ advantage.  The concrete bunkers and pill boxes were on high ground, designed to shot down the length of the beach.  There was no where to run, no where to hide.  The casualties were frightful.  It is one thing to see the slaughter in a film, it is another to visit the site in person.  I came away with a more perceptive understanding of what happened on that day than I had before I arrived.
 
 t Pointe du Hoc, where U.S. Army Rangers under the command of Lieutenant Colonel James E. Rudder—a future president of Texas A&M University—climbed up cliff faces to take German gun positions, the terrain is still cratered and pockmarked.  Shattered fortifications still stand where the Nazi put them.  The only change is that a thin layer of grass now covers the land.  (In 1944, the area would have been burnt and charred.)

 he most wrenching part of the trip was our visit to the American Normandy Cemetery in Colleville-sur Mer.  An immaculate, well tended lawn contains 9,386 white crosses peppered with an occasional Star of David. The sight becomes overpowering when you realize that under each one is a person who had their life cut short in a violent way.  As I walked through, I kept thinking about the contributions those 9,000 never got to make and the stages of life they never saw.  A few of us in the group had family members in the cemetery, but the thought that many of these men had rested alone, never having had the chance to have families of their own, or came from homes without enough money to travel to France to mourn and pay tribute made the loss all that more poignant.  Most of us had no relatives in the cemetery, but we all found the visit emotional.  The bus was quiet and subdued as we left the cemetery.

 tudents in every course must also conduct supervised research.  In the World War II course this required component took the form of a research paper based on original, contemporary documents.  As a group we traveled on the London Underground to the Public Record Office, where Her Majesty’s government stores its files.  We spent several days reading these old papers.  While students had to do the research in London, they have until October to turn in a finished paper.
 

 ost people taking part in an overseas study program have motivations beyond the academic and intellectual.  The trip is also part vacation, and the instructors and administrators of this program are aware of this fact.  (They want to have some fun too).  The courses and program provide the participants with opportunities to go out and be a tourist.  Every weekend is free time and students have the opportunity to take specially organized trips to places like Stonehenge, Bath, and Oxford.  During the week there are several days when classes do not meet, giving people opportunities to do things on their own.  The program also had a five day mini-break (which included a weekend) and arranged trips to Scotland, and Paris.  Many people used this time to visit other countries on their own.  Anyone planning to take part in the program should buy a guide book to get some idea of the things to see and do.

 ightseeing is one of the biggest leisure time activities.  Everyone in the program gets to take a tour of Parliament, and see parts of the legislative chamber that most tourists do not.  There are a number of other sights in London.  There are museums and art galleries galore.  Several people took walking tours of the city that explored elements of London society like the Jack the Ripper murders, the music of the Beatles, the lives of the Royal family, and the true stories of spies where fact is far more entertaining than fiction.  The Tower of London is a must see attraction (plan on spending several hours; I did and still missed some stuff).  Anyone in England should also visit at least one of the many palaces and castles that dot the land.
 
 ttending London cultural events is another popular activity.  London, rather than New York, is the capitol of live stage productions and many people took in a play while they were there.  Theaters pepper the central area of the city, with two only a few blocks from the dorm where people in the program live.  The actors performing in London are often well-known, first rate veterans of U.S. films and television.  Tickets sometimes are pricey, but there are outlets where you can buy tickets at a reduced cost.

 ating out is when you really learn you are away from home.  Ice in a drink is rare.  Refills cost extra.  Americans often find that English cuisine leaves a lot to be desired and is far more expensive than they are used to paying.  Familiar stores like McDonald’s and Pizza Hut abound, but even they are expensive compared to their American counterparts.  The ethnic cuisine in the city is often first rate and is highly recommended.  All participants in the program got a booklet on establishment that previous students recommend and several places near the dorm became British studies hangouts.  One favorite that was a far distance away was the Texas Embassy Cantina.  Having Tex-Mex in London might seem a little narrow minded, after all you can have that type of cooking back home any time, but after three weeks of no ice in your drink and paying a pound for a refill, it was good to get a taste of home.   Pubs are more than bars; they are the social centers of neighborhoods and towns.  If you want to get a feel for every day life in the United Kingdom, these are the places to go.  Some pubs are extremely old and have historical importance.  A good guide book will offer up a number of recommendations on the pubs worth seeing and the best places to eat.
 
 hopping is another fun activity in which many people partake.  Some of the super department stores are sights themselves and worth seeing even if you buy nothing.  The exchange rate between the pound and the dollar often makes shopping an expensive endeavor for the American traveler.  There is, however, some good news.  July is sale season in London and U.S. citizens are eligible to get tax refunds at the airport on the value added tax they paid in the store.  With these factors, Americans will be able to buy some stuff at a reasonable price.
 

 y now you might be wondering if this experience helped me advance my career.  The answer is yes.  My stay in London was important in two distinct ways.  First, an intellectual exchange took place in London from which I hope to profit and share with my students.  I am a U.S. diplomatic historian of the postwar era, so  I certainly know a good deal about World War II.  I have, however, focused my energies on studying the American presence in Asia and the Pacific.  As a result, I had an interest in learning more about European perspectives of this conflict.  Next semester when I will teach a world history course on international strategy, I will use my notes as the basis for my own class lectures.

  was also able to use my time in London productively on a research project that should result in an article in a scholarly journal.  I spent several days with the class at the Public Record Office doing research on British participation in the planned invasion of Japan.  I found a number of good documents on the motivation, diplomacy, and politics behind this decision.  In short, His Majesty’s government believed it had to help the United States defeat Japan, after the Americans had Britain defeat the Nazis in Europe.  If they simply watched from the side, there would not be much of a postwar relationship with the United States.  I used some of my free time to take a day trip to Southampton, where I explored the papers of Lord Mountbatten, commander of the Southeast Asian Command.  From this material, previously that no other scholars have used I discovered that General of the Army Douglas MacArthur wanted British units in on the attack and promised Mountbatten that the would not take soldiers under his command.  These findings clashed with material that I found in U.S. depositories and is taking my research in a new direction with a different interpretation than the one I originally had when I started.