As German troops entered Paris following their victory in June 1940, the American journalist William L. Shirer observed that they carried cameras and behaved as "naïve tourists." One of the first things Hitler did after his victory was to tour occupied Paris, where he was famously photographed in front of the Eiffel Tower. Focusing on tourism by German personnel, military and civil, and French civilians during the war, as well as war-related memory tourism since, War Tourism addresses the fundamental linkages between the two. As Bertram M. Gordon shows, Germans toured occupied France by the thousands in groups organized by their army and guided by suggestions in magazines such as Der Deutsche Wegleiter fr Paris [The German Guide for Paris]. Despite the hardships imposed by war and occupation, many French civilians continued to take holidays. Facilitated by the Popular Front legislation of 1936, this solidified the practice of workers' vacations, leading to a postwar surge in tourism. After the end of the war, the phenomenon of memory tourism transformed sites such as the Maginot Line fortresses. The influx of tourists with links either directly or indirectly to the war took hold and continues to play a significant economic role in Normandy and elsewhere. As France moved from wartime to a postwar era of reconciliation and European Union, memory tourism has held strong and exerts significant influence across the country.

This is the first volume to fully explore the complex relationship between war and tourism by considering its full range of dynamics; including political, psychological, economic and ideological factors at different levels, in different political and geographical locations. Issues of peace and tourism are dealt with insofar as they pertain to the effects of war on tourism that emerge after the cessation of hostilities. The book therefore reveals how not only location, but also political strategies, accidents of history, transportation linkages, and economic expediency all have played their role in the development and continuation of tourism before, during, and after wartime. It further show how the effects of war are seldom if ever simply a negation or reversal of the effects of peace on tourism. The volume draws on a range of examples, from medieval times to the present, to reveal the multi-faceted development of tourism amidst and because of conflict in a wide variety of locations, including the Pacific, Europe, the Middle East, North America, Africa and South East Asia, showing the diverse ways in which tourism and war interacts. In doing so it explores how some locations have been developed as tourist attractions primarily because of war and conflict, e.g. as resting and training places for troops, and others flourished because of the threat of danger from conflicts to more traditional tourist locations. This thought provoking volume contributes to the understanding of the interrelationships between war, peace and tourism in many different parts of the world at different scales. It will be valuable reading for all those interested in this topic as well as dark tourism, battlefield tourism and heritage tourism.

This volume explores the complex relationship between war and tourism by considering its full range of dynamics; including political, psychological, economic and ideological factors at different levels, in different political and geographical locations.

Moving beyond traditional state-centered conceptions of foreign relations, Christopher Endy approaches the Cold War era relationship between France and the United States from the original perspective of tourism. Focusing on American travel in France after World War II, Cold War Holidays shows how both the U.S. and French governments actively cultivated and shaped leisure travel to advance their foreign policy agendas. From the U.S. government's campaign to encourage American vacations in Western Europe as part of the Marshall Plan, to Charles de Gaulle's aggressive promotion of American tourism to France in the 1960s, Endy reveals how consumerism and globalization played a major role in transatlantic affairs. Yet contrary to analyses of globalization that emphasize the decline of the nation-state, Endy argues that an era notable for the rise of informal transnational exchanges was also a time of entrenched national identity and persistent state power. A lively array of voices informs Endy's analysis: Parisian hoteliers and cafe waiters, American and French diplomats, advertising and airline executives, travel writers, and tourists themselves. The resulting portrait reveals tourism as a colorful and consequential illustration of the changing nature of international relations in an age of globalization.

In Securing Paradise, Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez shows how tourism and militarism have functioned together in Hawai`i and the Philippines, jointly empowering the United States to assert its geostrategic and economic interests in the Pacific. She does so by interpreting fiction, closely examining colonial and military construction projects, and delving into present-day tourist practices, spaces, and narratives. For instance, in both Hawai`i and the Philippines, U.S. military modes of mobility, control, and surveillance enable scenic tourist byways. Past and present U.S. military posts, such as the Clark and Subic Bases and the Pearl Harbor complex, have been reincarnated as destinations for tourists interested in World War II. The history of the U.S. military is foundational to tourist itineraries and imaginations in such sites. At the same time, U.S. military dominance is reinforced by the logics and practices of mobility and consumption underlying modern tourism. Working in tandem, militarism and tourism produce gendered structures of feeling and formations of knowledge. These become routinized into everyday life in Hawai`i and the Philippines, inculcating U.S. imperialism in the Pacific.

Holidays in the Danger Zone exposes the mundane and everyday interactions between two seemingly opposed worlds: warfare and tourism. Debbie Lisle shows how a tourist sensibility shapes the behavior of soldiers in war—especially the experiences of Western military forces in “exotic” settings. This includes not only R&R but also how battlefields become landscapes of leisure and tourism. She further explores how a military sensibility shapes the development of tourism in the postwar context, from “Dark Tourism” (engaging with displays of conflict and atrocity) to exhibitions of conflict in museums and at memorial sites, as well as advertising, film, journals, guidebooks, blogs, and photography. Focused on how war and tourism reinforce prevailing modes of domination, Holidays in the Danger Zone critically examines the long historical arc of the war–tourism nexus—from nineteenth-century imperialism to World War I and World War II, from the Cold War to globalization and the War on Terror.

Focusing on Western tourism behind the Iron Curtain, this chapter introduces the main research questions addressed in the volume: firstly, how and why Eastern Europe became a tourist destination for citizens of the West; secondly what impact this had on the development of a tourism industry in the Eastern bloc; and thirdly to what extent the experiences of Western tourists in Eastern Europe influenced mutual perceptions and Cold War stereotypes of “the other”. The chapter situates these questions in three debates in recent historiography: the history of transnational tourism, of the cultural Cold War, and of mobilities in the supposedly backward and static societies in Eastern Europe.