The Cultural Impact And Legacy Of World War Two

Also: massive evacuation of urban children to rural areas ending, forever, isolation and innoculation of rural communities, massive geographical barriers within childhood culture broken down (as dissected in "Green and Pleasant Land" currently being repeated overnight on C4).

But, of course, Britain virtually bankrupted itself in fighting the war hence massive rebuilding job necessary, decay in public services, impossible difficulties for Attlee government (people had expected too much too soon ... as with Blair but to a far far greater extent) hence Tory revival in early 50s and decline of Labour not reversed until 1963/64. To an extent massive public desire to build more egalitarian society in immediate post-war years also dissipated in early 50s: hence huge interest in the 1953 Coronation etc.

Mark S: any of this coming up in the special issue of Crafts re. the Festival of Britain?

All hot stuff nevertheless.

Slaughter of millions on Somme, etc over what seems to me to be a gentleman's club dispute (oh you've invaded Austria , in that case we'll have to go and invade Greece etc) must have destroyed what faith 'the working classes' had in their leaders.

Plus October revolution (and womens suffrage) must have given people if not the will, then the idea that there could be an alternative to what in many cases was a feudal system which hadn't changed much in a few hundred years.

Mark: I was thinking more in terms of the Herbivore / Carnivore thing re. the Festival of Britain / Attlee losing / Churchill getting back, as put forward by Michael Frayn in *that* essay back in 1963 (reprinted in the Guardian just a few weeks ago). The thing that stood out most in my mind about the FoB was Peter Hennessy commenting in the 1994 C4 series "What Has Become Of Us?" that a new steam locomotive took pride of place: Britain had lost / was losing the race in technical innovation and this was, looking back, intensely symbolic, it being only 17 years before steam was abolished on BR.

(other great memory of that series: fantastic five-years-pre- Parr "Walking Back To Happiness" / M1 juxtaposition)

Not Dad's Army, no: that exchange was from the last series, I think, supposedly towards the end of the war, and says a lot about the new attitudes that came through in the 1945 election. I can *just about* imagine someone like Mainwaring swallowing his pride about voting Labour in '45, though that would have been the only time.

I suspect that their decline is in part for the fact that they were Govt which took us into WWI and in part disputes between Asquith and Lloyd George. I can’t believe that it was purely because Labour was more progressive as they’d done some good stuff pre-war e.g. Universal state pension.

Billy: I've always thought it baffling how slow and sluggish real change was after WW1. By the 30s, Stanley Baldwin seemed able to RECAPTURE the support many of those you'd have tht wd NEVER TRUST THE RULING CLASS AGAIN. But perspective is surely different depending on family history ahd background. My nearby family were not quite unTOUCHED by WW1 (my mother's two uncles were both gassed, to survived and became doctors), but let off strangely — I think unusually — lightly. Both my grandfathers were preferred occupations in WW2 (engineer, something in the admiralty), so saw no fighting. My mother's mother (13 when WW1 broke out) was a FIERCELY ANTI-WAR CONSERVATIVE, a position which I could really never fathom (she cried when the Gulf War broke out). My dad went all the way to London in 1965 to stand in the crowd as Churchill's funeral cortege went by (tho actually had flu and had to stay in bed). I watched it on a neighbour's TV, and painted a picture of St Pauls. I was given a Churchill Crown by an uncle, but didn't like the ugly scowling face on the coin, and grew up with a strange dislike of him (unrelated to politics or the war obviously), which erupted into an argument when I was 12, and I announced that I hated him. I had been told countless times that Hitler was a bad man, but when quite small I thought it unfair that the Germans lost the war AND got to be so disliked, and felt secretly sorry for them. I didn't root for them, but I was certainly very leery of the triumphalism of "We Won". In a funny way, I don't think this did any harm when punk came along and was just SO contemptuous of the sentimentality of community still being touted (Jubilee Street Parties as descendent of Spirit of the Blitz, etc etc), even though by then I'd read all abt the Death Camps and everything, and watched The World at War avidly. I think I kind of felt that not being taught about the Death Camps at school was part of the sentimentality (tho it was probably more accident than not: I hardly studied ANY history, becaue I wasn't in the history stream).

My mum says she LOVED the war: it was like a giant adventure playground (she was four when it began).

Not a complete explanation by any sense, but I do think this was a strong element. After seeing images of Auschwitz and Hiroshima, how could literature go on producing sensibly modernist novels? And note that the theory's upheld by the fact that postmodernism's initial twinklings can largely be traced back to central and eastern Europe -- particularly among Jews -- during the pre-war tension-development period. Which is to say: it explains Kafka and Schulz.

Of course you then have to work out where Airey Neave stood ...

http://fc64.deviantart.com/fs22/f/2008/002/0/1/World_War_Two__Simple_Version_by_AngusMcLeod.jpg

wild, never knew this!

http://ricks.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/02/18/a_pro_nazi_us_army_unit_in_wwii

Young Maple spoke many languages. But his favorite, alas, was German. At Harvard he got kicked out of ROTC for being vocally pro-German when that just wasn't cool, according to a separate article on him that I just read. Stymied in his hopes to do post-graduate work in Berlin, which was busy with other things at the time, he enlisted in the Army in 1942. The Army had just the place for him: the 620th Engineer General Service Company, which despite its innocuous name was actually a holding unit for about 200 GIs of suspect loyalty, many of them German-born. The unit, which was not given weapons, was located in Camp Hale, Colorado, which is far from any port, but happened to next to an detachment of German PoWs on a work party.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dale_Maple

However, he was pressured into resigning from the university German Club for singing the "Horst-Wessel-Lied" and other Nazi songs.[1][5] When he told The Crimson student newspaper that "even a bad dictatorship is better than a good democracy",[1] he was also dismissed from the campus Reserve Officers' Training Corps.[2][5]

70th anniversary of the Dresden bombing was yesterday and ended up getting sucked into a quagmire of moral relativism. Atrocities are atrocities...

sigh

they are but there are a lot of german people on the liberal spectrum and the nazi spectrum who remain heaviliy invested in the suffering of dresden

It is pointless to deny the horrific brutality of that bombardment, but foolish to rationalize it as equivalent to the crimes of Nazism. You will never hear the older citizens of European countries occupied by the Nazis saying the Germans suffered unjustly or the Allies were too brutal or inhumane.

if some country lucked into the exact # of ppl killed + buildings destroyed needed to accomplish war objectives, and didn't go over that calculation by even one, how would we even know? or does it not matter and all war is horrific brutality whether justified or not?

http://i.imgur.com/39570lm.jpg

Here we learn that a government that put some of its citizens in concentration camps shockingly committed the terrible injustice of depriving some soldiers of publicity.

I guess this is the general purpose WW2 thread?

im about halfway through Shirer's "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" and it has re-kindled my boyhood fascination for WW2. it's difficult, however, to wade through the dross (soooo many bad documentaries) and find the quality stuff. I picked up Max Hasting's "Inferno: The World at War," and it looks pretty good but I'm interested in something perhaps more...academic? Or at least something that remains comprehensive while having a point of view. a friend also recommended Timothy Snyder's "Bloodlands" which looks like the kind of thing I'm interested in.

Shirer book is a great read but tainted by prejudice and partisanship in the end i think

Bloodlands isn't really about WW2, it is purely concerned with the combined civilian genocide of Stalin/Hitler in the east. I just started The Maisky Diaries yesterday and have the Klemperer Diaries queued up. Max Hastings is a military fanboy wanker and completely untrustworthy imo.

The three volumes of Richard Evans' Third Reich trilogy is excellent, and heavily sourced in a way that's of the academy though these are not intended chiefly for an academic audience. I'm nearing the end of the third volume, focused on the war (the first two are on the rise of the Third Reich and its rule before the war, respectively).

I get the prejudice with Shirer (right or wrong I find it easy to ignore his obvious homophobia) and his slight digs at the nazis throughout (goering's "corpulence," hitler's tantrums) are really a relief in some ways. but maybe you mean something else with partisanship? too hard on chamberlain?

Max Hastings is a military fanboy wanker and completely untrustworthy imo.

shit. I liked the cover and it seemed like a decent refresher before tackling more in depth stuff.

Hastings does mention in the preface that gerhard weinberg's "the world at arms" is one of the best single volume histories of the war.

it's totally foolish to want to know what the single best literary/historical classic account of ww2 is, I know.

ignore me, it's probably best you come to your conclusions your own way. I got half way through his WW1 book and then ditched it for the way superior Christopher Clarke book and he decided MH definitely wasn't for me.

hethen

partisanship i was thinking specifically about crazy Hitler's tantrums tbh, they always read like he's unreflectively repeating Allied propaganda and become too cartoonified for me to take them seriously - i think in the context of a more rigorous historical approach i'd accept those stories more willingly

speaking of that sort of thing, Shirer is where the legendary "teppischfresser" thing originates, i believe.

quite possibly. even if all the details are true i think it undermines his credibility, but that's a personal foible probably.

Volker Ullrich's first volume of his Hitler biog is quite interesting. Although it seemed to be way too padded out with Goebbels diaries and I get the feeling way too many archives got reduced to ashes in the Nazi end days for there to be a flood of new information, like what came out of the Soviet archives in the 90's.

Bloodlands isn't really about WW2, it is purely concerned with the combined civilian genocide of Stalin/Hitler in the east.

this is true but still imo a tremendous work (and extraordinarily readable)

Absolutely. His account of the Babi Yar massacre is the probably the most harrowing depiction of real, pure evil I have ever read.

his more recent book, "Black Earth," also looks really good.

i think my problem is that im asking for two irreconcilable things at once: both a factual historical account (this happened, and then this happened), but also a kind of deep and sophisticated interpretive framework for *explaining* all this inexplicable carnage.

baba yar was one of the first events of the holocaust i learned about as a child (it was where my extended family who perished in the shoah were killed). i remember where i was when my parents told me about it - we were eating at a deli and i had just ordered a large dish of cole slaw for lunch (since that is all i wanted to eat at the time) and the restaurant made me a large dish of it despite it generally only being served as a side. i kept getting really confused because i thought they were talking about baba ganush.

Ordered both "Bloodlands" and "Black Earth" (the paperback, not out until September), very much looking forward to both of them. I'm particularly interested in the "lebensraum" stuff at the moment so I think Snyder is my guy for now.

The first half of Bloodlands is concerned with Stalin's collectivisation induced famine in Ukraine and his genocidal terror campaigns of the 30's, it is unremittingly bleak but hard to put down.

im sure this is a bit of a naive question but im here to learn...

so when i was a kid first learning about all this (late 80s) i distinctly remember that most of the books i read treated the holocaust as more or less ancillary to the military heroism of the allies while also quite de-emphasized--it was something certainly worth mentioning (in a chapter, say) and then passed over. the principle image of the destruction and chaos of the war was always "the bomb." I don't know if this is a correct impression of the "cultural status" of the war at that time but it's what i experienced.

thinking on it, i get the impression that the bomb carried much more symbolic weight as the central image of the war on through the 50s/60s/70s than the holocaust did. it seems to me that this has changed, and possibly right around 1989? and is the collapse of the USSR, and the subsequent greater understanding of exactly what happened in easter Europe, responsible for this cultural shift (if indeed i am perceiving it accurately).

it could simply be that my own (white, american, texan) consciousness of the holocaust has simply grown, and i certainly remember reading Anne Frank in school and all that--although quite strangely i dont remember the teachers being too explicit about the context for that book!

i think for decades after the true scope of the holocaust wasn't truly understood or disseminated properly in the greater culture, plus i think its nature as something that was only really even reported on after the war ended led to the primary narrative of WW2 remaining the conflict and the exclamation point that officially ended it.

at least for awhile, i mean it's not as if the holocaust was unknown or the scope wasn't understood to a degree, but i think WW2 in culture was about battles and air raids and sieges and u-boats or whatever for a very long time. and i think pearl harbor also played a part in the A-bomb having a more central role, bc that was obv the greatest generation's 9/11 and once the trauma from that event faded i think people started to get a better perspective on the whole war.

during the Cold War people were really terrified of being nuked so ppl were pretty obsessed with the bomb

for a long time the holocaust was culturally a little - i don't know if radioactive is the word but ppl didn't really know how to deal w/ it and a lot of post-war media that touched on it did so obliquely. i think the big change was first when Shoah came out (1985) and then the really big one was schindler's list (1993) which opened up a lot of dialogue and i think made ppl more comfortable w/ discussing it. i wish i had more specific examples of early 'oblique' references but for example Crossfire + Gentleman's Agreement both came out in 1947 and neither mentioned the holocaust at all which you'd think would be a big oversight in a film about antisemitism.

it would be interesting to find the first hollywood film that even mentions it.

I am struggling to recall the TV miniseries from the 80s (which was def prior to Shoah if memory serves) that addressed the Holocaust - it featured some scenes that really stuck in my mind like Jewish kids fighting as partisans/resistance fighters as well as a scene with a mother going to the showers with her daughter, assuring her that it was "just a shower". Was on PBS... shit what was the name of that thing...

might've been this?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust_(miniseries)

Just started the third Richard Evans after a bit of a layoff from the second one. (Only so many 1000 page histories of the Third Reich that you can take in quick succession.)

They're fantastic and the insight into the inner workings of the Nazi state (rivalries, patronage, gangsterism) is something that a lot of WWII history doesn't cover (being military or often presenting the upper echelon Nazis as a united front under Hitler). The only thing I vaguely remember feeling was missing was the psychology of life under Nazism and of being a Nazi, but that's probably not something under the purview of a history.

orson welles' "the stranger" is about a nazi fugitive and actually features concentration camp footage. it's from 1946.

Does Maus predate Shoah?

Camp footage also floated around Hollywood for years. The basis for Reagan's heinous fiction that he helped liberate the camps ("I was there, you know") was the footage he helped edit during his wartime service in Hollywood.

shirer really brings home the"gangsterism" as well. i think once i recover from this i'll have to check out Evans too.

Maus began in 1980

1944

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/None_Shall_Escape

v interesting! didn't know about these early films.

Henry Travers and Alexander Knox! Talk about 1940s mainstream.

billy wilder, _death mills_, 1945.

Day of Wrath was actually filmed within the third reich in '43 and is indirectly a movie about Nazi repression (transplanted into 17th century witch-hunts) but it is probably a stretch to term it a holocaust movie, but it is a great movie.
https://fathersonholygore.com/2016/04/30/carl-th-dreyers-day-of-wrath/

the american gis got the vicious and brutal "your job in germany" (directed by frank capra, written by theodor geisel) which jack warner re-edited for the public as "hitler lives".

i'm speaking adjacent to all of this ^^, not having read anything at hand but: just fwiw, there's a long, stirring passage in farocki's images of the world and the inscription of war speaking to that tension between the holocaust & the military threat, wrt the allies' strategy, if you haven't seen it.

it would be interesting to find the first hollywood film that even mentions it.

― ryan, Monday, July 11, 2016 5:42 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

First hollywood film i can think of that mentions concentration camps...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Be_or_Not_to_Be_(1942_film)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Zpgjyn7dgk

Chaplin's Great Dictator (1940) predates the gas chambers, but it certainly portrays the persecution of the Jews. Of course his films were essentially "independent," tho distributed through United Artists, of which he was a founder.

wiki:

In his 1964 autobiography, Chaplin stated that he could not have made the film if he had known about the true extent of the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps at the time.

One of the very first is Mark Donskoi's The Unvanquished from 1945, which is actually shot on location at Baba Yar. I'm trying to find that one at the moment.

Feldstein and Krigstein's 'Master Race' comic strip - first published in 1955 - must be one of the earliest cultural artefacts to address the holocaust so directly:

https://spaceintext.wordpress.com/2010/08/12/master-race-bernard-krigstein/

I have a copy of Antony Beevor's single volume history of WW2 on my pending pile at home - anybody read it?

I listened to his Stalingrad audiobook a few years back and didn't feel like investigating any further, not that there was anything massively wrong with it - but he seems a bit of a dull writer. *disclaimer - some of my opinions are often bollocks.

In a way, I still think the holocaust is somewhat culturally 'taboo'. A certain coded cultural representation has become common, even clichéd, but actually probing what happened, as in taking a standpoint and saying something different about it, is still scoffed upon. When Son of Saul came out, a lot of the critique seemed angry that it was different, didn't work the way these films should work, and that the director passed judgment on his characters. Peter Labuza ended his takedown this way: 'What makes Son of Saul more troubling than the prestige films of its ilk is that the intellectualism that grounds the film ends up being just as simplistic as the melodrama that infuses Schindler’s List. Nemes has stunningly created the intensity of camps, but it is one of his own making — a product for his own pet theories, never exploring the real traumas of the past.' As if we ever had access to explore 'the real traumas of the past' (never mind that Nemes based his film on a trove of primary sources). Being 'intellectual' about the holocaust is still obscene.

and on the other end of the spectrum--The Day the Clown Cried, Life is Beautiful, even Schindler's List--you find the "real trauma" diminished by sentimentalizing it.

on terrain that's a bit more comfortable for me, in a lot of recent biopolitical philosophy (I'm thinking mainly of Agamben and Esposito), the camps are more or less posited as the central trauma of the 20th century and in some ways even modernity. but i think both are beholden to by some idea (right or wrong) that the holocaust touches on something essential or universal by the nature of its extremity.

incidentally i just realized it's been 77 years since 1939. will be interesting to see what goes on in 2019-2020 (let alone 2039-2045). i remember the 50th anniversary stuff being a big deal.

my grandfather was in Patton's 3rd Army, and he's still around (though he can barely speak these days).

Yeah, I'm uncomfortable with that as well, also because they reduce the holocaust to the 'camp' aspect, and not the genocidal aspects connected to Baba Yar, the gas chambers, etc. In a way, that's perhaps simply because most of the philosophy about it has surrounded the canonical testimonies from Levi, Kertesz, and other survivors, and more people survived the camps than the chambers, for obvious reasons. In Chelmno there were seven survivors total, it seems.

talking or thinking about the holocaust drains sanity points. i feel like in the west we talk about it way more than we talk about any other historic atrocities- rape of nanking or w/e- and that's due to continued concerted effort made by a number of people against our natural tendency to not think about such things.

i don't watch holocaust flicks any more for that reason. first i've seen (and read) enough to last me a lifetime but also it is really emotionally draining.

The Holocaust is also unfortunately the go-to event for young writers doing historical fiction who want to lend some unearned gravitas to their work

coughjonathansafronfoer

& if that wasn't enough he did 9/11 for his follow-up

might've been this?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust_(miniseries)

This was a big part of my junior high school history/social studies class at the time (NBC produced an entire "Teaching The Holocaust" in school - maybe to offset the whole 'you're making money by running advertisements' criticism).

As for Shirer, I recall liking The Collapse of the Third Republic far more than Rise & Fall, but it's been at least 30 years since I read them.

I think it's hard for any current generation to grasp the magnitude of a war that deeply and directly affected every nation in Europe & North America, plus the USSR, China, Japan, India, Korea, Australia and large swathes of SE Asia, Africa and the Pacific island nations. Earlier today I was looking at the US flags once more flying at half-staff and thought, by today's loose standards of national mourning, the flag should have been lowered for five straight years during WWII.

on that note I think my current obsession is on some level an attempt to cope with what seems to me now a really violent and uncertain contemporary moment--ww2 has a way of putting things in perspective.

been pondering amateurishly an idea that ww2 represents in some way the last gasp of the nation state as a distinct ethno-cultural entity ("what is life? life is the nation"--hitler) and fascism in particular as a kind of third way between communism and capitalism (as explicitly stated by the nazis I believe). reading tony judt's "postwar" alongside shirer really brings this theme out. as sartre states, after the way you had to choose, in effect, between the competing universalisms of "Americanism" and communism.

also reading "HHhH" which strikes me so far as about that need to come back to this moment in history and come to grips with it on some personal level.

Maggie HabermanReporter
8:33 PM ET
Meanwhile, Trump is right now calling into Fox News, during his own convention, and providing additional programming, which is also unusual for a nominee.

shit sorry wrong thread

freudian post

i saw "HH" and thought we were talking about the RNC

Feels like ethnic nation state is really making a comeback tho or that it never went away but that the US makeup loomed larger in the international imagination post ww2 and really post Cold War but atm some of the luster has worn off

What suggests to you that it's "making a comeback" now? Seemed much stronger to me during the balkan conflicts.

i find it kinda funny that the original post begs us not to "turn this into another tiresome argument about who really won"

old ilx was always relitigating world war 2

wrt to some of my questions above about holocaust remembrance, i came across this (quite interesting) essay from Tony Judt's "Postwar":

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2005/10/06/from-the-house-of-the-dead-on-modern-european-memo/

it would be interesting to find the first hollywood film that even mentions it.

... the Holocaust, that is. The Pawnbroker was 1964.

paywalled

first film is addressed on some other thread, I forget what it was but it was contemporaneous w the war iirc

oh wait that was this thread nm

Indeed, I noticed The Pawnbroker hadn't been mentioned.

Sorry I didn't notice it was paywalled (I read it in the book and then had a hunch it was published other places as well).

Judt mentions a terrible sounding American miniseries called "Holocaust" that was then shown in Germany in the 70s or early 80s and caused quite a stir and led to quite a bit of historical reckoning. anyone seen it? it was denounced by the likes of Habermas and Lanzmann as a trivialization of the horrors of the camps.

I *believe* I saw that on PBS as a kid in the 80s - not sure if it's totally the same thing. The two biggest scenes/plot points I remember were a) a little kid (9-10) joining the Resistance, who subsequently gets captured and lined up against a wall and shot by the Nazis and 2) a mother going with her child to one of the gas chambers, attempting to reassure her that it is just a shower.

so my memories of it are harsh and traumatic ones

this must be it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust_(miniseries)

that's some cast!

Although the miniseries won several awards and received critical acclaim, it was criticized by some, including noted Holocaust survivor and author Elie Wiesel, who described it as "untrue and offensive."

lol

The series which was watched by 20 million people, or 50 percent of West Germans, and first brought the matter of the genocide in World War II to widespread public attention in a way that it never was before.[4] After each part of Holocaust was aired, there was a companion show where a panel of historians could answer questions from people phoning in.[4] The historian's panels were overwhelmed with thousands of phone calls from shocked and outraged Germans. The German historian Alf Lüdtke wrote that the historians "could not cope" as they were faced with thousands of angry phone-callers asking how these things could happen.

yeah that's it

I don't remember it being that bad tbh. it was plenty traumatizing for pre-teen me.

xp

I sort of remember it as being the first time anyone had heard of James Woods and Meryl Streep.

Judt mentions a terrible sounding American miniseries called "Holocaust" that was then shown in Germany in the 70s or early 80s and caused quite a stir and led to quite a bit of historical reckoning. anyone seen it? it was denounced by the likes of Habermas and Lanzmann as a trivialization of the horrors of the camps.

We were talking about this upthread.

http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/local-news/found-paisley-mill-worker-murdered-8831416#-/web/-1473849836564-trackingCode-vgSBQ9QsN9xtxKfRGalwJcsIjrdsKVYPJxCBN1ax3Dg=-articleId-369223054-vv-7ff13765-61dc-4069-8a08-c3ab1ef5da15

This an extraordinary story that I'd never heard of before, a heroic Scottish mill worker who was murdered in Auschwitz for trying to save Hungarian Jewish schoolgirls.

Makes me proud of the old home town ;_;

... how's about tearing down some of those statues of mill owners who got rich by working people to death and put up one of this lady instead, any chance of that Renfrewshire Council?

I've about 1/2 way through Bloodlands and as everyone has said it's great. Black Earth is next for me. and this article in the NYRB from a year ago is quite good:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2015/09/24/hitlers-world/

I'm not going to link it because it doesn't feel right but the first thing that popped up Googling Jane Haining was a Minecraft video dedicated to her life. It seems serious but I can't wrap my head around it.

upcoming doc based on Mark Harris's book

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5JuiCTz6Khw

^^^ did anyone else watch this? I enjoyed it--an interesting new angle. Some incredible footage (particularly of Huston's PTSD film...).

"A Memory of Justice" (running on HBO now) is outstanding. there's a few interesting moments with some mid-70s college students (both German and American) that suggest that the standard good vs evil mythology of the war wasn't quite so set then as it is now.

A good book I'm just half way through is Tooze's The Wages of Destruction. Short version of it so far: Nazi Germany was more akin to Poland + Bulgaria as a backwards agrarian type nation than they cared to admit. Nice autobahns, but only the middle class could afford deposits on the Volkswagon 1000 mark car that was never built (and didn't get their deposits till the mid 60's). The extreme re-armament programs had stressed their economy to a point of collapse before every aggressive move or war of annihilation. The breaking of the Maginot Line and myth of Wehrmacht invincibility was encouraged by incompetent allied generals who knew they had fucked up. The "socialism" of NSDAP was very New Labour and inadequate other than in giganto build projects like the Atlantic wall where colossal amounts of money were being spunked and Bricklayers were earning Doctor's wages!

It was a command economy, with all that entails: fast production of infrastructure and other major engineering projects, but weakness in consumer goods. Like Rome during its expansion, living standards benefited from expropriation from conquered nations (and of course, racial "enemies"). However, I wouldn't call it backwards or poor. Germany was a world leader in chemicals production, and behind only the U.S. in steel. When the Red Army entered East Prussia, the soldiers were amazed by the quality of farmers' houses, and couldn't fathom why Germany would attack a poor country like the Soviet Union.

Prior to WWII, German GDP per capita wasn't quite as high as in the U.S. or UK, but it was close.
https://i.stack.imgur.com/azSk3.png

Maybe "backwards" is pushing it, but outside of the Rhur + other industrialised regions was where most of the population lived in conditions much better than in the USSR but still pretty shit for such a highfalutin world power. And even in the cities some of the new social housing put up by the Nazis had no bathrooms and just basic lighting and no power circuits. Their pharmaceutical giants were world class manufacturers of top grade heroin and tank chocolate crank - no mistake!

http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/236248/ap-collaboration-nazis-reporting-news

A paper last year by the German historian Harriet Scharnberg titled “The A and P of Propaganda” and published in Studies in Contemporary History makes the case that beginning in the mid-1930s, the AP’s photo office in Germany made compromise after compromise to keep reporting under Nazi rule, obeying successive orders from the Hitler regime until it ended up as a Nazi information arm in all but name. Remaining in Berlin after its competitors departed in 1935 allowed the AP to serve as a “key channel” for German propaganda, she wrote, an arrangement the New York-based agency was eager to preserve—even if it meant removing all of its Jewish photographers in keeping with Nazi race laws, for example, and even if it meant issuing a statement to the official SS magazine swearing that the photo bureau was pure Aryan.

In the Nazi years, according to Scharnberg, the AP was selling German images in the United States and selling images from the United States in Germany, allowing photographs of American Jews and others to be used in some of the vilest racial propaganda produced by the Nazi state. The AP was, for example, the “leading supplier” of images for a propaganda book called The Jews in the USA, and in third place among suppliers of photos for the book The Subhuman.

Eventually, Scharnberg claimed, the line between the AP’s German photo operation and the Nazi regime effectively ceased to exist—even as the Nazis pursued projects like the concentration camp at Dachau, which opened in 1933, and the “euthanasia” of disabled children, which began in the summer of 1939.

What did the AP decide to cover, and how? Well, the head of AP’s picture service in Berlin went on to be an official Nazi photo censor. If AP photos from the German advance into Poland and Russia offered an image of the war that didn’t show things like the organized murder of tens of thousands of Jews and others behind the lines by the Einsatzgruppen, it was perhaps because the photos were taken by people like Franz Roth—who was, we learn from Scharnberg’s report, simultaneously an “AP photographer, SS-Oberscharführer (senior squad leader) and photojournalist in the SS Propaganda Company (SS-PK).” In his SS role, Roth took propaganda images showing Soviet prisoners as ugly human specimens—and AP, in turn, “received exclusive rights to the propaganda photos,” which were published in newspapers in Atlanta and Los Angeles.

While claiming to be covering Germany, the historian argued, the AP photo operation was, in fact, engaged in an illusion of coverage crafted in partnership with the Nazi regime. Instead of reporting on the reality of life under the regime, the AP—blinded and hobbled by its accommodations and relationships—helped obscure what was actually happening inside Germany and the way the Nazis waged war. The impact at the time is hard to determine, Scharnberg writes: “Nevertheless, it is reasonable to assume that the intuitive sympathies and antipathies of American newspaper readers were not unaffected, at least in the short-term, by pictures that usually depicted the Germans as triumphant blitzkrieg fighters and their opponents as sullen, sly military failures.”

from a photo gallery called This Guy Found Hitler's Secret French Bunker, 61 snapshots of...not much.

http://www.trend-chaser.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2017/05/bunker-8.jpg

In this room you can see the ceiling is ripping off and more rust stains located on the wall underneath what appears to be a shelf. What that shelf held, we are unsure but it probably helped contribute to the gore of WWII.

The ex-electrician in me is looking at the rusting steel conduit on the floor and thinking: those Nazi contracted Electricians made sure they did a tidy dog leg, even if it all just fell down after the War!

the end of Dunkirk got me thinking about the never-to-materialize German invasion of England ("Operation Sea Lion" I believe.) What dread that must have been to anticipate. Was the consensus that the lack of a German Navy prevented it? I believe that's Shirer's hypothesis but I'm sure there are more reputable opinions.

probably a combo of a weaker navy and lack of total air superiority to make a massive invasion work

i don't know much about whether or not this made a difference, but the german coastline along the North Sea was pretty minimal, the other half was on the Baltic. They probably couldn't have built an adequate navy, or adequate enough to compete with England. Their U-Boat game was relatively strong but then again how many of those could they have had? this isn't my area of war expertise...i guess it's possible they just didn't have as well-rounded a military as the U.S or the UK. My guess would be that their reputation on the seas at the time was one based on fear and subterfuge more than numbers, as opposed to their ground troops, Panzer divisions, the Luftwaffe, etc.

basically what the mayor said

Iirc from my readings: nobody in the German navy considered Sea Lion a serious prospect. Even during Operation Overlord, where the Allied Forces had much more seaworthy troop carriers (rather than the unfit for purpose industrial barges the Nazis had), the whole operation was hostage to weather forecasts. I think even at the height of his hubris, Hitler knew Sea Lion was unlikely to be a success, but maintained it's seriousness for propaganda purposes.

...as did Churchill

I used to find it amusing that amongst the Einsatzgruppen's UK Black Book list for executions was a Labour MP called Seymour Cocks. But I have grown up a lot since then.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Book

speaking of Churchill, Galipoli taught alot of folks that amphibious landings are HARD AS HELL to pull off so you had to be really comfortable in your ability to do it before you even make an attempt

was reading David Edgerton's Britain's War Machine earlier. He makes some persuasive arguments that in terms of having the most experts a UK gov has ever had, loads of brilliant engineers, an unparalleled weapons manufacturing industry of its era, superior tech, a hugely superior navy and a global trade network with shitloads of important war resources, the advantages of being vastly more GDP wealthy than Germany with half the domestic population to feed. That basically contrary to that popular Dunkirk/darkest hour narrative, that any lip service to Nazi peril was propagandist, and behind the scenes the UK war cabinet was actually supremely confident of victory. Even after some of the early defeats in the East and N Africa. Maybe bollocks and he does get a bit carried away at times, but he does successfully paint a picture of the mind boggling scale of the BE and its resources, and how it really was very much at odds with the plucky little underdog island nation holding out for dear life type claptrap that Nolan and The Mail and lots of shit politicians seem to find so stimulating.

Also he lays into the "Blairites" Cameron and Miliband for coming out with historically ignorant ww2 cliches!

The empire was mostly far, far from Europe. Britain was very near to Europe. Europe was largely in the hands of the Nazis, who were very well-equipped and operating at high efficiency. The empire did not mobilize for war until very late in the game and was slow to organize when war came. It is true the British government could have removed to Canada and continued the war at a safe remove, but that would have been extremely difficult. If the British government was supremely confident, it was as much a reflection of their consistent underestimation of the Axis as it was on their high estimate of the empire's war-making capacity.

btw, the "plucky little underdog island nation holding out for dear life" storyline was basically cooked up for contemporary US consumption, to counteract a fairly strong distaste for the British empire among Americans, initially to justify the lend-lease program, and after 1941 it blended seamlessly into the general war propaganda. Selling the US on the hardy, resourceful communists under Uncle Joe Stalin as admirable allies was a much harder storyline to put across.

Edgerton is a bit of a Dibnah and his appreciation and love of Engineering (he gets very excited about 30's innovations like Bristol sleeve valves!) is probably much keener than his understanding of social and military history. But I very much appreciate his attempts at cutting through the propagandist cliches with convincing amounts of data and stats. Not sure some of his assertions hold up, but he certainly isn't full of shit!

he also posits that the Luftwaffe were quite haphazard, improvisatory and individualistic (type of traits often attributed to British fighters) whereas the RAF were much better organised and run with what could be described as a cold Teutonic style of efficiency once they found their feet. And Bomber Command started bombing the shit out of German cities well before the Blitz or the Battle of Britain, while Hitler didn't lift the ban on the Luftwaffe operating anywhere but the front line till months later. Although it wasn't like he'd been shy of annihilating civilian populations from the air in Warsaw, Rotterdam, Guernica etc.. up to then tbf.

So...the erasure of Russia and the Eastern front from American accounts of the war is the source of no great mystery...it's obviously a relic of the Cold War and just general jingoism...however, I'd be curious if at any point this was a planned or systematic thing. Were textbooks edited, etc? Was there an actual propaganda campaign to claim the US "won the war against fascism" more or less on its own (with, of course, the help of the plucky British, whose ass we proverbially saved)?

America has to convince itself it's won at least one war since 1898

1898! When the USA stood up to the diseased remnant of the Spanish Empire and stole their lunch money!

But really now, don't you recall how we just crushed it in Grenada in 1983? Those poor bastards never stood a chance!

Doesn't the US have a better claim at deciding WWI than WWII?

I think the saddest lasting cultural impact of WW2, at least at this moment in history, is that baby boomers think they won it.

the gratest generation

I recall an All in the Family episode from the early 1970s in which Mike Stivic points out the decisive role of the Soviets on the Eastern front, I guess to counter some jingoistic bluster from Archie Bunker, which would suggest this matter was not quite settled in the American mythos at that time. Of course the Stivic character was the so-called "pinko" of the show, but he was also a baby boomer representative.

So...the erasure of Russia and the Eastern front from American accounts of the war is the source of no great mystery...it's obviously a relic of the Cold War and just general jingoism...however, I'd be curious if at any point this was a planned or systematic thing. Were textbooks edited, etc? Was there an actual propaganda campaign to claim the US "won the war against fascism" more or less on its own (with, of course, the help of the plucky British, whose ass we proverbially saved)?

― ryan

so it's not sourced but the wikipedia article on wwii historiography re: the eastern front mentions lack of access to documentation, which i think is a pretty good point - we didn't know what the soviet union did in the great patriotic war because, to a significant extent, they didn't tell us! the article also says that post-soviet union western historiography about the eastern front significantly changed as a result of access to soviet archives.

It seems like it's common to imagine D-Day as the pivotal event in the Allied victory, given how strongly it features in our collective memory.

iirc, the last book I read on this (Bloodlands) said that the war was basically unwinnable for Germany after the stalling of the USSR invasion in 1941.

they didn't have any winter gear for starters (which was possibly why Soso never believed the invasion was imminent - despite multiple Soviet agents within the Nazis reporting it was happening) so anything other than a rapid Autumn victory was going to be very costly whatever the final outcome. Goebbels seemed to think his winter coat donations campaign was good propaganda to rally the nation, rather than them looking like amateurs!

I feel like the US's greatest victory in WW2 is taking its sweet ass time to enter and let the combatants destroy each other so they could dictate the peace at the end. Didn't hurt that the British had to hand over most of its gold reserves during the war and dismantle the empire in the aftermath.

Every FDR, Churchill, and general knowledge WWII bio and history I've read in the last forty years not published by a conservative house has mentioned the Eastern Front: Stalin pressing FDR about opening it and joining him, the staggering number of Soviet soldiers lost between 1942-1944, and so on. Is the omission in textbooks?

textbooks, and maybe also movies/TV fiction/TV docs/political rhetoric? since we're talking about cultural impact and legacy. less scholarship, more storytelling.

It’s always interesting to me, WW2 in the American consciousness is pretty easy to romanticize since it was never on our doorstep, and so much of what we think of when we think of the war is through this nostalgia haze, and also there’s something very specifically momentous about the Normandy invasion in terms of being a battle to point to for Americans as this great glorious all-in valorous endeavor (this is less a comment on the personnel on the ground more a comment on those who are looking back at it from the other side of the ocean!)

The Soviet Union didn’t really get much of the gauzy vague elsewhereness part, losing 10 million plus soldiers and another 15 million civilians and getting a good bit of the holocaust as well. Which isn’t to say they haven’t traded in on the glory of the victory, but the cost and the more personal and brutal nature of the war makes it different and harder to be nostalgic for in the same way to put it mildly.

There's also something really striking and terrifying about the Normandy images which I don't think you get in much other war photography: the flat expanse of the beach, huge dark cliffs in the distance, soldiers wading through the breakers without any cover. No wonder it's impressed itself on our imagination.

since it was never on our doorstep

hawaii = not part of the US?

I feel like there is easily just as much lazy stereotyping and glossing going on in this thread as in any oiled-lens USA! USA! remembrances of the conflict

The Japanese shelled the west coast of the U.S.

Tomboto otm

as someone who grew up having school assemblies on pearl harbor day, field tripping to the arizona etc., and was kinda bemused in college to discover that dec 7 means literally nothing to most mainlanders, i would nevertheless like to raise an eyebrow at the suggestion that it's analogous to, like, stalingrad

however the pacific war in general was just unbelievably unpleasant and i can't imagine enduring a single sweating malarial xenophobically terrified second of it whereas tbh i think i could have handled europe with a little luck. that's where america put in its serious trauma time imo even tho i agree that people do talk as if we were the ones to defeat the nazis.

whereas tbh i think i could have handled europe with a little luck.

didn't Spielberg make a movie about just such a lad

funny, in school we learned twas irish volunteers that won ww2 is that not the accepted version

that's what i'm told but i've only seen the landing part xp

I was surprised to learn recently that the majority of US combat deaths were in the European theater...I had always assumed the Pacific was "worse."

This video kinda breaks everything down: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwKPFT-RioU&t=557s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwKPFT-RioU&t=557s

hmmm. well it's called "The Fallen of World War II"

since it was never on our doorstep

hawaii = not part of the US?

― El Tomboto, Tuesday, June 4, 2019 5:00 PM (thirty-six minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The Japanese shelled the west coast of the U.S.

― Οὖτις, Tuesday, June 4, 2019 5:12 PM (twenty-four minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

U-boats attacking shipping lines on the east coast and gulf of mexico too!

xps

Lord Haw-Haw was an exemplary Irish volunteer who might not have been mentioned at school :p

400k combat deaths for US feels like an astronomical number when abstracted from what other countrese experienced...and it's also worth pointing out that this was more (according to that video) than the UK.

I didn’t forget Pearl Harbor, but it’s not exactly the same as what the Soviet Union went through in terms of violence being visited upon the civilian population.

I’m not saying we didn’t get our hair mussed

I was surprised to learn recently that the majority of US combat deaths were in the European theater...I had always assumed the Pacific was "worse."

stand corrected and realize i'm being glib but it's just the vibe i dread lol

obv something like d-day is an actual nightmare

the russian sieges, tho-- the marching and raping back and forth across the civilian pops of eastern europe-- the camps and systematic massacres-- the millions dead-- hardly untrue to say that (non-native) (non-black) america has never experienced anything like that

xps

there is a decentish book called Savage Continent which gives accounts of the lawlessness and genocide occurring in "peace-time" mainland Europe including deadly pograms in Poland, mass genocide of the Ustache in Serbia, British backed genocide in Greece, the partisans all getting liquidated by Uncle Joe. It's no Band of Brothers!

yeah. it’s not diminishing the US experience of the war to note that the Eastern front was a world historical grand guginol. arguably the worst “thing” that ever happened.

A whole lotta Grand Guignol though

dec 7 means literally nothing to most mainlanders

erick erickson won't eat asian food that day

well that's certainly not how we observe it here

The Japanese shelled the west coast of the U.S.

tbf, in the context of WWII, this one brief, hit-and-run attack amounted to less than nothing

something like half of the civilian dead at PH were japanese-american; what an asshole obv

(again tho that's half of a v low number)

just in case dlh was referring to my post (an outside chance, but there you go), I was referring to a negligible Japanese attack in 1942, not Pearl Harbor.

nah "erik erickson"'s

agree that post-pearl-harbor attacks on u.s. territory amount to curiosities

otm my point was basically that WW2 for Americans (who weren’t actually in the war) is a distant event but for soviets and frankly almost everyone in Europe it must have been a waking nightmare for half a dozen years, or at least it was til you got numb to it all.

The Japanese shells destroyed a derrick and a pump house, while the Ellwood Pier and a catwalk suffered minor damage. After 20 minutes, the gunners ceased fire and the submarine sailed away.

^^^an event used to justify subsequent Japanese-American internment (one horrific atrocity visited upon American citizens in this country during the war).

And as for WWI...

agree that post-pearl-harbor attacks on u.s. territory amount to curiosities

― difficult listening hour

anybody want to compare and contrast with, say, the doolittle raid?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Bagration

this motherfucker makes D Day look like a bit of the old horseplay on the beaches eh what?

Yeah. Destroying like 3 german armies within a week is pretty mind blowing... and indeed the scale of operations on the eastern front (from Barbarossa till the end) make DDay pretty... tiny... (with less than 5.000 allied deaths over the whole DDay).

Yeah it seems like D-Day and landing in France was more geared toward beating the Russians to Berlin and taking as much territory as possible before they did since once they were there, they might not be leaving any time soon.

When you consider all the main battles in the west (DDay, Market Garden, Bulge, Monte Cassino...), they're all so small compared to the monstruous eastern front !

was surprised to see TM at the D Day commemorations as had forgotten she was still technically the prime minister.

she's just maintaining what is left of her cultural impact and legacy ... next to nothing.jpeg

Get the hell out of here with your crap about Merkel being in Normandy. She should be. Not only have the Germans done more than any country to look their past in the face, she stands for all the kids they were drafting by '44 and sent to slaughter.

— Richard M. Nixon (@dick_nixon) June 6, 2019

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Bagration

this motherfucker makes D Day look like a bit of the old horseplay on the beaches eh what?

― calzino

to be fair, when you achieve something like the soviets did with bagration you don't need to care who acknowledges your victory. america has never particularly felt a need to teach the battle of the philippine sea in history classes.

makes D Day look like a bit of the old horseplay on the beaches eh what?

I don't mean to in any way minimize the achievements or sacrifices of the USSR, which were ENORMOUS and under-appreciated in the modern west, but one should also consider that the USA supplied one hell of a lot of war material to the European & Russian theaters and agreed to "go slow" in the Pacific in terms of all-out commitment in order to prioritize the German defeat over Japan's defeat, and while the US and Britain were fighting the war in Asia, the Pacific, North Africa, Italy and the Mediterranean, the USSR threw everything they had into their one huge theater along the "Russian front".

It's weird how our leaders in the contemporary US were the people who helped the Nazis kill more American GIs than most German soldiers, like the Bush and Koch families.

We're a fucking weird country, right?

'what red army?' asks mike pence

Pence drawing a similarity between D-Day anniversary and Democrats advocating "socialism."

"It was freedom, not socialism" that won two World Wars, Pence says.

"America will never be a socialist country."

— Julian Routh (@julianrouth) June 6, 2019

This concept of "socialism" here is trapped in 19th century Prussia. Led by pied pipers like Chapo Trap House, DSA, Cortez, and New Yorker/CIA families.

It's a really funky framework game here. If any American could figure it out, they'd probably get threatened with murder and go on the run and disappear from any activity in politics except vague drunken shitposts on the internet.

yeah Aimless, US Lend/Lease scheme was essential to the survival of the Soviet Union, although they did well to move a lot of their military industry deeper east after the invasion it wouldn't have been enough to maintain such a huge front. But my simple analysis is that doing someone a solid by lending them some gear during a desperate struggle against dogged invaders can be costly but not as costly as profusely bleeding your own citizens. At this end listening to stupid pols talking like D-Day was that pivotal moment that turned the tide.. and never before has such a great sacrifice.. blah blah blah is just so annoying as fuck. I don't like agreeing with Putin .. but a stopped clock etc..

Would like to note that Stalin was profusely bleeding the Soviet Union's citizens long before there was a desperate struggle for national survival.

I didn't know that at all.. wow learn something new every day from you!

That seems to be a fairly personal response.

sorry if it sounded personal.. but ffs!

Look, obviously Mike Pence's historiography of WWII is nonsense, but rejecting one national myth doesn't require embracing the opposing national myth. Russian nationalist mythology is just as stupid as American nationalist mythology as far as I'm concerned. Certainly I'm impressed by Zhukov's generalship, but just because Stalin's meat-grinder was eventually effective doesn't make it any more valorous than Petain's.

It does occur to me that "total war" is the one kind of war where you actually do win by killing more of them (percentage wise) than they do of you.

I'm not being moralistic about Soso's reign of terror here, am coldly talking about raw numbers of whom did the most damage to the nazi regime's ability to wage war, just bringing the moralising to how much blood was shed per unit destroyed for the long suffering Soviets and how their annoyance at the western d-day hyperbole is pretty legit.

the bolsheviks had reason to exaggerate the extent of it but I think it's fair to say that like the tsar before them they were in a desperate struggle for survival & control long before the third reich arrived

I don't think it's about "embracing the opposing national myth" at all! The conclusion to draw from the idea that WWII was won by the Soviets wouldn't be "turns out Stalin was a good guy", it would be "turns out feel good narratives about freedom always triumphing are bullshit and the conflict was actually just as much or more about two despotic maniacs going to battle at the cost of an incredible amount of human lives". Doesn't really help fly anyone's jingoistic flag.

Soviet Union definitely did more to defeat the Nazis than any other country who signed a pact with them

I don't think it's about "embracing the opposing national myth" at all! The conclusion to draw from the idea that WWII was won by the Soviets wouldn't be "turns out Stalin was a good guy", it would be "turns out feel good narratives about freedom always triumphing are bullshit and the conflict was actually just as much or more about two despotic maniacs going to battle at the cost of an incredible amount of human lives". Doesn't really help fly anyone's jingoistic flag.

― Daniel_Rf

Is that the conclusion Putin's drawing from the Soviet victory? (I genuinely don't know, I don't follow these things). I think it's very easy to glamorize the Soviet victory, to make it into a national myth (which can just as easily benefit the successor state). You can talk up the decisive role of maskirovka in Operation Bagration. You can talk about the determined resistance displayed by the "Hero City" of Stalingrad. You can - and this is the stuff Calzino is implying that is bothering me - try to make it into a game of numbers, to say that D-day was a sunday stroll in the park, that the Battle of Britain was a tea party. I find those sorts of comparisons trivializing to the actual suffering people went through on the Western front. Acknowleding the mind-boggling disaster that was the Eastern Front doesn't require one to put down the actions of people on the Western Front in comparison.

..(trivializing to the actual suffering people went through on the Western front.)

lol, there is no cure for what you have!

I mean it takes a bit of work to turn criticising the pitiful ahistorical guff that comes out of Western leaders mouths - and the media - about WW2 - Into me trivilaising the dead of any non-Eastern military theatres by saying they suffered less and did less damage to the Wehrmacht.

bump to keep “I hate to agree with Putin” calzino from having the last word

I also thought this was a good thread:

Russia really does deserve far more credit, thanks, and appreciation for its WWII sacrifices than it currently receives in the West. But quite frankly it will never get such respect if it ties its military exploits to the Great Patriotic War narrative.

— 101 144 141 155 040 105 154 153 165 163 (@Aelkus) June 6, 2019

Another American windbag who seems to think you can't criticise bullshit national narratives without becoming tethered to other bullshit ones.

The usual disingenuous bollocks about Molotov/Ribbtrop like it makes a difference to how much their citizens paid in blood ...tell your twitter man the Soviet Union didn't have a hitler-pact referendum you know!

Trying to remember if any other Allied nations signed pacts with Hitler

so much suffering in the double/triple occupied zones as well, and not just the soldiers - the poor citizens and from ss and nkvd. But I'm guessing at this point I'm a tankie so I just ignore any funny business from Soso!

their annoyance at the western d-day hyperbole is pretty legit

as far as I can tell, nobody is really debating this point with you; you seem more broadly upset that American and U.K. politicians keep talking about D-Day on the anniversary of D-Day. I don’t know what to tell you there buddy.

I just like a moan and find it fucking insufferable!

I'm remembering some doc I watched recently and some captured allied solder was saying: as we were getting liberated from the camps those Red Army folks that managed to survive against the odds were getting shipped off to Eastern gulags.

10 years (post Iraq) of Help For heroes type shit at football matches has turned me into a raving Tankie!

On this day remember that Operation Bagration, on the Eastern Front, starting 23 June 1944 was very much larger than D-Day and Normandy, and so were casualties. In UK and US we forget that victory came in May 1945, not June 1944, in Berlin, not Normandy.

— David Edgerton (@DEHEdgerton) June 5, 2019

joking, obv. I like this guy on British WW2 era history and he's otm here.

The other problem with Pence's comment: no sector of the American economy so closely resembles the socialist (or Soviet) as much as the military industrial complex, to this day. During WWII, the US effectively became a command economy, with the War Production Board becoming our version of Gosplan.

I think the saddest lasting cultural impact of WW2, at least at this moment in history, is that baby boomers think they won it.

― El Tomboto, Tuesday, June 4, 2019 8:41 AM (one week ago)

https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/staggers/2019/06/today-s-75-year-olds-didn-t-fight-war-so-why-do-we-think-they-did

right on schedule

“WW2 was hell” say thousand yard stare dads born in 1946

these old UK bastards that weren't even a thought till after the Nuremberg trials might have experienced some austerity and rationing as children. But they still grew up in a relatively stable era in terms of the security of the NHS and the shiny new welfare state that hadn't been PFI'ed out of shape yet. I'd wager anyone growing up poor in the 70's had it maybe slightly better and without national service in their formative years, but much tougher afterwards - especially than these old bastards with property portfolios and substantial savings. aka the most selfish and deluded bunch of wankers generation.

I was born in 1954 and I will gladly tell you that "WWII was hell". So was WWI, for that matter. I won't pretend I fought in them. I even caught a break and missed being drafted to serve in the Vietnam War. I lead a charmed life.

My old mum, who was 5 or 6 when war broke out, used to tell me how much fun she'd had - kids being kids. Running about wild, getting the old gas mask on and spending the night at the bottom of the garden in the back court in the pathetically inadequate bomb shelter, cheering Uncle Joe Stalin in the newsreels at the pictures etc.

... I meant to leave out the word 'garden' there, she's didn't have a garden, of course, the very thought!

i guess this is a fair place to ask it: what are the non-shitty documentaries about WW2? i thought about watching the world at war a while back but doesn't seem to be streaming anywhere.

it's on You Tube innit?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0b4g4ZZNC1E

d'oh! yeah, should've looked there -- thanks! i assume that's one of the best ones? still seems to be highly regarded.

Have you seen the late 90's bbc series The Nazis A Warning From History? It's more about the holocaust and not the theaters of war and all that. but it is very powerful and the brahms requiem music in the title is appropriate. And someone who dobbed a gay neighbour to the gestapo get's ruthlessly shamed 40 years later.

yeah my mum also always said she enjoyed the war, she was 4 when it began

Unforgettable image courtesy the magisterial World at War. British soldier on the weather in Burma: "It was the only place I know, you'd open up a tin of corned beef, you could pour it out like liquid." Mmmm, gimme dat cawm beef smoothie! Kids these days are too damn picky...

— Ian Penman (@pawboy2) May 12, 2019

my favourite bit of World at War is always when it sets up the topic of the next ep, and sir larry's reading of the final line "Nemesis would come… from the SEA!"

i've posted this before, but I was working in a bookstore when the brokaw GREATEST GENERATION book was huge and we sold a lotta copies to people 21 and younger intending it for their parents. I guess the idea could have been that they figured their parents, as the kids of said generation, might dig it, but idk. Was that the final nail in the boomers' imagining themselves as rebels against the crusty old establishment generation that spawned them?

So...the erasure of Russia and the Eastern front from American accounts of the war is the source of no great mystery...it's obviously a relic of the Cold War and just general jingoism...however, I'd be curious if at any point this was a planned or systematic thing. Were textbooks edited, etc? Was there an actual propaganda campaign to claim the US "won the war against fascism" more or less on its own (with, of course, the help of the plucky British, whose ass we proverbially saved)?

like the interviewer I was quite surprised by how largely backwards and poor the late 30's German economy was revealed to be in Wages of Destruction. They were miles behind Britain and France in GDP, electrification, motorisation and hamstrung with stagnant growth and a bigger population to feed. Despite having a huge army they were a bit of a basket case really and their expanding reich brought as many new problems as short term benefits.

i also the remember the book mentioning some of the social housing built by the nazis was barely just 19th century standard with no power supply circuits nor toilets.

Enjoying that Vichy book by Julian Jackson. On Jacques Doriot who went full fash after getting booted out of the communist party (might be a warning from history to Tommy Yack Yack!):

Doriot's image of heroic, working-class virility made him attractive to self-hating middle-class fascist intellectuals. Until he became rather fat, Doriot looked the part of the fascist leader (except for his glasses).

sorry rushomancy , didn't catch your post at the time: no, I don't think that's what Putin's take is, and am somewhat baffled as to what Putin has to do with anything I said?

my favourite bit of World at War is always when it sets up the topic of the next ep, and sir larry's reading of the final line "Nemesis would come… from the SEA!"

― mark s, Wednesday, 12 June 2019 21:45 (yesterday) Bookmark

lol! been re-watching this tonight and my fave portentous epilogue by lazza was " the sun had set on one imperial power... on another.. the sun was still rising". if only Redd Pepper's voice had broken in them days..

Dan Carlin did a like 70 hour series on the Eastern Front a few years back, and I imagine a lot of people heard it

I mean more than will read a 500 page book about it

Just reading this review of Alexiviech's book, collected oral testimonies of people who were children during WWII. Love the two books of hers that I've read, but they are tough (especially Chernobyl Prayer)

https://www.bookforum.com/print/2602/last-witnesses-an-oral-history-of-the-children-of-world-war-ii-by-svetlana-alexievich-22005

Yeah, the concentrated child misery means I think I will have to skip this one.

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/597751/stalingrad-by-vasily-grossman-translated-from-the-russian-by-robert-chandler-and-elizabeth-chandler/9781681373270/

this sounds interesting.

i think this is the first year that i haven't heard a single peep about pearl harbor from any person or news organization.

As we remember Japan’s aggression in the Pacific, we need to ask ourselves this question: is the remilitarization of Japan, which is presently underway, truly a good idea? We need to be careful that shortsighted, self-serving leaders do not end up bringing us again face-to-face…

— Tulsi Gabbard 🌺 (@TulsiGabbard) December 7, 2023

xp. Seems reasonable. Pearl Harbor was 82 years ago. The national trauma du jour is now Sept. 11, 2001. You'll be hearing about that one until the day you die.

my annual report: hawaii still knows it’s pearl harbor day

lol @ that tulsi tweet. god she's a kook