Comparative Mutinies: Case Studies of Working-Class Agency in the 2nd Maine Volunteer Infantry Regiment, 1863, and the Australian Imperial Force, 1918

Abstract

In May-June, 1863, more than one hundred men of the 2nd Maine Volunteer Infantry Regiment, veterans of over two years of hard fighting throughout the eastern theater of the US Civil War, protested their treatment by military authorities. Fifty-five years later, in September 1918, several battalions of volunteers from the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) conducted a similar series of protests on the Western Front in World War I, also as a form of resistance to their treatment by military authorities. These were very different fighting forces in very different wars, but remarkable similarities exist in the causes of their actions, in the sentiments expressed by the soldiers, in the nonviolent nature of the action, and in the eventual resolution of the issues at the heart of the action.