The Real War 1939-1945 (1989)
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
I can also recommend his book Poetic Meter & Poetic Form, but for different reasons.
Other books in the same vein:
- The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle by J Glenn Gray (Gray was a philosophy PhD and a 2nd Lieutenant in the war)
- War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning by Chris Hedges (Hedges was a war correspondent during the balkans and numerous other conflicts, this is much more interested in the psychological build up to war in common society, and its effects on society)
These books make me very pessimistic about human nature, but Nicholas Wade's Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors provides a nice antidote: the total number of people killed by warfare in the 20th Century, if we followed similar patterns to our prehistoric ancestors, would have dwarfed what actually happened. We are becoming less warlike, even if its not cured.
Mila Štula comes to mind.
I still remember watching the hysteria on Radio-Television Belgrade in disbelief that people would actually believe it. But they did. And the rest is history, as they say. Ugly, murderous, and utterly unnecessary history.
I see some signs of this in the contemporary US media landscape, and I worry the consequences might be similar.
Mila Štula is mostly remembered by the public as one of the leading media poets of the Milošević regime on Serbian Radio and Television from the beginning of the 90s of the last century. She became famous for her famous comments in the daily Dnevnik in which she disqualified the opposition and its leaders. Her statement that Vuk Drašković has a villa on Lake Geneva is particularly noteworthy, which has never been proven.
The other side saw her as a victim of Tuđman's regime, who became unwelcome in Zagreb after HDZ came to power, as she provoked, or asked unpleasant questions, to the first president of independent Croatia at media conferences. She was a journalist for "Danas" in Zagreb. The Croats, among other things, accused her of working for the counter-intelligence service of the JNA. This led to her moving to Belgrade in 1991.
Imagine Alex Jones-level “journalism” directed by the government, blasting from the official and more-less the only widely available TV station in the country. Štula was one of the most notorious examples, but I’m not surprised she’s a relative unknown to the people who didn’t watch her with their own eyes.
The most disappointing aspect about the whole situation was that it was so transparent. It was obvious what they were doing, and yet the population at large somehow went along with it… the socialist apparatchik Milošević won elections at the time Eastern European countries were getting rid of their old communist/socialist power structures. Not that he was the only problem, far from it, but to this day I believe that reformists like Ante Marković would have had a fighting chance if not for Milošević.
And then, when there were no answers to economic problems, it was easy to put blame on others: your neighbors and far-away foreign powers alike. Do that in a powder keg that is the Balkans, where so much blood was spilled in the past and everybody remembers it, and the consequences are predictable.
I think that people who lived in democracies their whole lives underestimate how dangerous the malicious journalism and misinformation can be when enough people start believing it.
Even without going to the extent of war, I find "primitive life" is probably still healthiest for us existentially. Maybe using proxies like sports as symbolic wars.
Incidentally, if anyone knows of a worthy successor, I'd love to read it. His observations remain remarkably accurate in most cases (his completely-off take on "Class X" notwithstanding) but there must be more to say on the topic since then.
argh sorry, limited preview only.
The Unwomanly Face of War by Svetlana Alexievich
https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/book-review-u...
The only relatively reasonable case for starting a war today is a war for independence, for liberation from someone else's strangling control. It does not always lead to prosperity as a result though; look at Eritrea, for instance.
You've missed the point. Yes, a war is generally a losing proposition nowadays. But a credible threat of war often is not.
Even more to the point, wars were often winning propositions in our ancestral environment, and so we are more likely to be descended from people who were willing to wage them in the past. That is a very difficult legacy to overcome.
natural selection/Darwinism isn’t any sort of genius. from one angle, you outsmart it every time you use a condom. from another angle, if Darwinism leads to such an apparently contradictory behavior — one which popped into being suddenly, after millions of years without — how certain can we really be about the outcomes this mechanism will produce into the future?
Not really. All you're doing is moving the needle a tiny bit so that in the next generation there will be fewer people inclined to use condoms.
> if Darwinism leads to such an apparently contradictory behavior
What contradictory behavior are you referring to? The ability to suspend disbelief is useful to survival in all kinds of situations, especially in our ancestral environment. Where is the contradiction?
so you claim, yet condoms have been around for generations now and my perception is that their use has only increased over generations. am i mistaken in this?
> What contradictory behavior are you referring to?
i said "apparently contradictory": on first look it appears to be contradictory, whether it objectively is or not. better would have been for me to use "unexpected", best would have been "unpredictable": because evolution produces so many random effects along the way.
> we can't all just get along, because we live on a finite planet with finite resources, and at the end of the day it is Darwin who runs the show
Darwinism suggests here that solving for limited resources will someday be required for an organism to be successful. it doesn't care how that's solved for: how can you be so confident that the emerging solution won't be coupled with "all [of this organism] just getting along?" for example, an unending arms race over physical superiority may be disastrous against resource use, and a more successful strategy might be some level of cooperation that avoids that arms race. if today's humans are a Darwinian product consider that they differ from parts of the past both along increased large-scale cooperation (e.g. cities) and less individual-against-individual violence (e.g. violent crime). that already looks a lot more like us "just getting along" than many stages of the past.
how long will this be stable? where lies the next local optima? can anyone really know?
Condoms only go back a few hundred years, and that happens to coincide with a period of time where evolutionary pressure on humans was generally low because of the economic prosperity brought about by the industrial revolution. So all kinds of alleles have been able to survive in the last few hundred years that would have had a much harder time before.
Condoms are hard to analyze because they offer not only birth control but also protection from sexually transmitted diseases. Their effects are also temporary, so someone who uses a condom can still reproduce.
> Darwinism suggests here that solving for limited resources will someday be required for an organism to be successful.
You have to remember that evolution advances the reproductive fitness of genes, not organisms. This is most dramatically illustrated by hive insects where the vast majority of the individuals are sterile. Humans are ridiculously complicated compared to any other life form. But one of the things that is observed across all human societies across all human history is the segregation of human populations into in-groups and out-groups. This can take different forms: tribalism, castes, social classes, nation-states... but human populations that embraced all other humans as part of "us" are nearly unheard of. I don't know of any examples. And it's pretty easy to understand why: any such group would be easily conquered when it came into contact with a more militarily aggressive group, and so genes for aggression will tend to dominate genes for getting along with everyone.
You are correct that "solving for limited resources" will eventually be required, but that can just as easily take the form of killing off a lot of people as it can wisely planning for the future. Evolution doesn't care about our sensibilities. Evolution doesn't actually "care" about anything, except in the sense that water "cares" about flowing downhill. Genes build brains that care about things, but the genes themselves don't care.
I suspect many during and after WW2 felt this way.
your choice to shoulder this burden for all, is well your choice. but be advised that this choice may have unintended consequences in a longer term. consequences of your choice to witholding bad things "for them".
I don't belive you're doing this (bearing the horrible things) only to shield your relatives from your past. it is important you recognize that it's something you do for yourself, you are the main person who doesn't want to remember whatever horrible events you had to experience; don't pin this choice on them.
"I did it for them!".. sure, why not? but my point is that first and foremost he's making those choices for himself; which is pefrectly fine. what's not fine (IMO) is to pretend such choices aren't selfish.
I speak from my own experience, if it helps it helps, if it doesn't just leave it. maybe it wasn't meant for you
Your claim of selfishness seems to be unwarranted (and perhaps a little mean spirited), how can you possibly tell?
One of the things that most non-veterans don't grasp is just how mundane day-to-day military life can be, even in a combat zone, like how people without a security clearance can't imagine how mundane most SECRET material really is. I find it hard to explain, but life is both different in quirky ways (various restrictions on freedoms, being judged professionally by your height/weight and 2-mile running time, random attacks by mortar fire, etc.) and dominated by many of the same experiences and concerns of civilian life (time spent just acquiring and eating food, dealing with traffic and bureaucracy, being frustrated by your assigned Windows machine on the enterprise network, etc.).
One of my personal takeaways from my time in Afghanistan is just how widely variable everyone's "combat" experience can be. I flew helicopters, so I saw the whole range of living conditions on a daily basis: everything from the smallest observation posts where squads lived in filth and got attacked routinely by well-aimed direct fire, to the large airbases like Bagram where people worked 9-5 in a cubicle and had many amenities that were even nicer than what was back home at Fort Bragg. And where you ended up on that spectrum seemed quite arbitrary and luck-of-the-draw. Some otherwise interchangeable helicopter units just flew VIPs back and forth between Bagram and Kabul while others flew SEAL teams on very-high-risk raids every night. So when someone says they did a tour in Afghanistan (even if they earned a Bronze Star or a Combat Action Badge), that doesn't mean much to me, in itself. Edited to add: I think the variance among people who "served in WWII" is orders-of-magnitude greater. There were just so many millions of people in uniform in so many diverse places.
So if you were drafted, even as a German you had a nearly 50% chance to be assigned a position where you weren't expected to see combat. And on top of that there's the combat troops defending targets that weren't attacked by the enemy.
But with some bad luck you might have ended up fighting at Stalingrad. War isn't fair, on so many levels.
Interesting. Until very recently, as far as I could know, my mother's life began at 16. She refused to talk about anything from her childhood.
I don't know if, like you, she didn't want to traumatize us or simply didn't want to think about it at all. But now, in her late 80s, she'll sometimes absent-mindedly relate some story from her childhood. They are all kid stories, but the perspective in them can be hair raising. (She was a child in an occupied country during WWII in the pacific; then immediately as the war ended the country became a different war zone, so she only knew living in that kind of environment until she left the country to go to university).
Recently I've been thinking of this because of the Ukraine war. I have seen at close range the impact of a generation of kids (like my mother in law, and others in her village) who grew up in postwar Germany with essentially no adult men around. That whole generation is pretty screwed up, and their kids (my generation) also reflect that impact. While my personal opinion is that Germany is not doing anywhere near enough to help Ukraine, I think they should be preparing a for a huge postwar assistance, not just money for rebuilding, but psychological / therapy based on their experience to try to reduce the effects of wartime trauma on Ukraine.
We take lots of refugees. I would argue this is already a very effective way of preventing further traumatizing.
But as far as I am aware, those who come do not easily get offered psychatric help, even if they already are traumatized.
But the psychatric sector is pretty much operating on its limits anyway.
There is sadly no shortage of countries with large populations who suffered in war. But Germany is a large, wealthy country which is a good example of what Ukraine will face in postwar reconstruction. And yes, Germany still owes an old debt to Ukraine (instigation of war) as well as a contemporary one (holding off Russia with limited German assistance).
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/11/29/5672649...
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/06/07/7304045...
In the long term we all benefit.
That is, if they can get over that calvinist/puritan mental health == weakness/stigma thing, which seems to be slowly happening.
Germany already hosts around one million refugees from Ukraine. The exact numer is difficult to say, since the EU has provided all Ukrainian refugees visa-free entry. Which is unprecedented. Most of them are women and children. The winter is coming.
Providing them psychological help is important, but the sheer number of people from Ukraine (not speaking German) makes this very challenging. The Germans themselves also have the problem of finding psychological help, since the number of people needing it has been rising because of the pandemic, the war, the economic instability, etc.
Well, perhaps they should, but I'm not sure they can. My parents never mentioned any help regarding postwar trauma being available in Germany. Perhaps mental health issues weren't recognized as such then, perhaps they had other priorities. The first few years after the war "were difficult".
Yes, but it is now the 21st century.
Only as an adult have I come to realize the gift he gave me.
When I was a child, I spent a ton of time with him, he had a big hand in raising me. The picture he painted for the young me formed the foundation of my world view. He chose to share with us the Japanese cooking he learned while living there, he taught us how to use chop sticks, one of my most prized possessions is a silk he brought back and gave me in his will. He never once spoke negatively about any group of people, especially those who were "enemies", he stood up for anyone who was being treated negatively and wouldn't stand for it. He harbored no ill will, and therefore didn't put it in me.
It's only as an adult through research into his service that i have realized the full gravity of what he did during this service and the fact that he was a truly happy, blissful, and forgiving man after all that.
I can say to you, having been one of the recipients of the kindness and forgiveness you are showing in your own life now, and sharing in this comment - thank you. This is how the world moves on.
Had another relative who was a Marine. Was present at many of the worst battles. Including Iwo Jima. I never heard his stories. He never talked about them. My mom pressured him into talking one day. She regretted that for the rest of her life because the stories were so traumatic and it left him in tears. He was a gentle man. Became a Methodist minister after the war. I never once heard him raise his voice in anger. One of the kindest men I've ever known.
This is a sample size of only two. So I'm not assuming combat, or the lack of, shaped these men into what they would later become. But it's a little interesting to me.
Since I myself am older, I have some relatives who go way back. My grandmother was once visited by her great-uncle when she was 6. He was a veteran of the Mexican War and the Civil War (on the Confederate side). He also wouldn't talk about combat. But he did tell this one story where he and some buddies snuck out of camp. Somewhere in northern Mexico. Found a bar and flirted a little with girls. Then the girls suddenly rushed the men out of the bar and hid them in a barn. Mexican soldiers heard there were Americans in town. The Americans hid under a bale of hay and were narrowly missed by a Mexican soldier who shoved a pitchfork into it. That great-uncle loved that story and would tell it often. Laughing every time.
US worries were legitimate (atrocities perpetrated against civilians, future control of Europe/Asia, the international economic order and security of global trade networks, etc.) but “urgent” invasion wasn’t one of them.
It wasn’t a very successful invasion. They held a couple of islands for two months at the cost of 4000 of their 8000 men.
The Philippines was US.
We were literally invaded.
They also bombed the West Coast.
The mainland US was not in any danger.
What I mean by this is that the average US citizen was completely safe (well, until drafts)
Two bombs, and it was basically a non-event. The intent was to start massive forest fires, but they failed.
They also shelled the West coast, and all they did was damage a baseball backstop at Fort Stevens and tear up the beach a bit.
You are right that the Philippines was invaded, and was at the time a US territory. But it was at that point under a government intended to transition it to independence. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hare–Hawes–Cutting_Act
From what I can tell (this was decades before my birth and I have not extensively studied it, so I probably have an oversimplified impression) for mainland Americans, the Philippines was not really considered to be part of the country in the same way as, say, Illinois or Texas, and Filipinos were not considered to be Americans in the same way. (e.g. after WWII the Congress voted to strip benefits from Filipino veterans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rescission_Act_of_1946) I’m sure the US wanted to maintain some navy and trade presence there though.
The Japanese also occupied the Aleutian islands of Kiska and Attu (part of Alaska territory). But it’s hard to imagine that people 3000 miles away in, say, Oregon were worried that the Japanese would be imminently launching an amphibious assault from there.
(a) This balloon bombing was covered up and essentially nobody about it at the time, so clearly not something people were urgently worried about.
(b) This militarily irrelevant bombing of a handful of random civilians is hardly an “invasion”.
Disclaimer: I am not an expert in contemporary American understanding of WWII.
Edit because I’m exhausted and not being mindful about finishing thoughts, I didn’t mean this to be fighting words so much as clarifying words: they cared about mass attacks on civilians in some cases but not others. Bombings of allied cities was absolutely a concern. Mass murder or German and mostly eastern European Jews wasn’t such a concern. There wasn’t any such reaction to sending Jewish refugees back to be murdered.
The whole concept of actually caring about nazi atrocities on the scale they they committed them, to the victims they were committed against, was a retroactive set of moral concerns. And that’s unsurprising given that the US was the primary inspiration for those atrocities.
I presume the famous American educashun kicked in and geographically spoiled the slogan of bad bad America.
How do you explain that war is long periods of excruciating boredom punctuated by moments of heart pounding panic? Not well if you weren’t there.
I beg to differ. It was radar-guided anti-aircraft guns, and proximity fuzes for artillery shells. This had the effect of doubling the firepower.
Another was high-octane gasoline, which enabled much more powerful aircraft engines.
The Axis did not have these technologies.
interesting, it's rarely mentioned indeed. Also I wonder if that was the reason for developping those flares scattered by planes ? or maybe that was only after the invention of guided missiles.
What the Germans didn't have, however, was connecting the radar directly to the weapon.
A similar fuze was also made available for use in bombs, but I don't know if that was used in Europe. It was used in the Pacific against airfields, late in the war.
The 8.8cm german flak gun WAS a radar-guided AA gun.
> and proximity fuzes for artillery shells
The axis may not have had proximity fuzes, but the 8.8cm flak was so accurate that during a statistical analysis it was determined that the part of the gun that introduced the most accuracy were the timed fuzes. They switched to shells that detonated on impact and actually ended up scoring more kills than before.
The actual piece of equipment that made this thing so accurate was the fire control computer, the Kommandogerat 40.
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1UnrEetRYIuLoUT--ic0i...
Here is a Google Drive link to some scans I made in college of the book written by the designer. It explains all the calculations that the analog computer is doing.
It seems that not that many were built:
> The 8.8cm german flak gun WAS a radar-guided AA gun.
The Kommandogerat 40 was a rangefinder/computer, not a radar. It had the capability of being radar-guided, but was not necessarily radar-guided by itself.
For the Kommandogerat 40 you needed a direct line-of-sight (they were still used in overcast conditions though) but it would compensate for the velocity vector of the incoming targets, altitude, wind, and would relay fire controls to all the flak pieces in the battery. Not as nice as a radar, but it was able to be fielded in mass quantities, and I think it deserves its place as 2nd most devastating weapon of WWII. Especially since towards the end of the war, the Germans were the ones playing defense. It made the strategic bombing campaigns of the allies very painful. The RAF bomber crews had a 44% death rate. That's deaths, not casualties.
It also excelled in direct fire roles against ground targets.
I've also read numerous times that the searchlights would find and "pin" a bomber so that the crews could dial in the coordinates for firing. Wouldn't need that with radar guided guns.
I well know the death rate for B-17 crews - my father flew 32 missions in 1944 in one. The casualty rate was 80% (killed, wounded, POW). He told me that the way he dealt with it was simply accept that since he was going to die, he'd do the best job he could. I have the letter he wrote his father, dryly saying he'd completed his missions and would be coming home.
The Bismarck was well equipped with anti-aircraft batteries, which failed to stop the torpedo attack by slow-moving, obsolete biplanes. The Japanese navy didn't have much success with anti-aircraft batteries, either.
Regardless, the 88 was an excellent cannon.
I am not trying to be pedantic, just wondering out loud. 16,000 shells per bomber sounds like a lot, but I am sure you are familiar with the statistic that 250,000 small-arms rounds were fired for every insurgent killed in Afghanistan, and 25,000 rounds fired per kill in WWII. I can't find an actual hard source on the ratio of bullets per kill though. Bombers obviously cant hide behind cover, but I wonder if that 16,000 number isn't as unreasonable as it seems.
> I well know the death rate for B-17 crews - my father flew 32 missions in 1944 in one.
He sounds like an amazing man. I get queasy in light turbulence. I can't imagine the stress and horror of even a single bombing run. That's more than anyone should ever have to go through.
> He sounds like an amazing man.
He was, but I'm rather biased :-)
He told me once he wouldn't trade that experience for anything, and wouldn't do it again for anything. He also said that when he felt down, he'd think of the men he knew who didn't get the chance to live, and would fix his attitude.
To be fair, only a small part of that is aimed. Much of it is "covering fire", the intent of which is to cause the enemy to hide while your guys advance. There are also soldiers who do not wish to kill, and do not aim their shots.
The larger point is that if the accuracy of the flak were doubled with radar guidance, it would have been impossible for the 8th AF to continue the mass bombing campaign. If 5% are lost on a mission (and that did happen now and then) repeatedly, then it ain't long before there isn't an Air Corps left.
Of course, I’m only speculating; I’m not a sociologist or a psychologist.
During the 82-day battle of Okinawa, I believe American lieutenants were in combat on average less than two weeks before being killed or becoming a casualty through traumatic injury (and it was worse for the Japanese troops), which cannot be passed off as long periods of boredom. The article is specifically about front-line experience, which (it is claimed, plausibly) is very different than even that of rear-echelon troops, and commingling the two does a disservice to the former.
I feel fairly confident in saying that watching a horror movie is nothing like any of it.
What is most clear from that is what a disaster for humanity WWII was. It's much harder to romanticize it in the face of that kind of unguilded brutality.
Similarly, the experiences of underground fighters and the partisans paint a picture of unredeemable cruelty. When the slightest mistep will cause your compatriots to bury you in a shallow grave, the bullet in the back of your head branding you a traitor forever whether you deserved it or not, it's hard to sell the idea that valor is rewarded with proportional glory. The mess of war is indiscriminant.
"Losing the War" by Lee Sandlin
https://www.leesandlin.com/articles/LosingTheWar.htm
Sandlin refers to Fussell's writings on the war too. It's long, but every time I look it up I end up re-reading all of it.
And when they ask us
And they're certainly going to ask us
The reason why we didn't win the Croix de Guerre
Oh we'll never tell them
No we'll never tell them.
There was a front, but damned if we knew where.
[WWI soldier's song, based on a popular song of the time]
I suspect he shared that with us younger folks to illustrate that war is not glamorous, even if you win. Yes they won, but it was a disgustingly ugly affair for all parties involved.
I'm glad he shared that, because I have a very healthy aversion to unnecessary conflict, in part due to a few stories shared by him.
I think he had liberated a concentration camp. I wish I had remembered it better.
I think that this informed a lot of the fury towards the ordinary German population, that they could allow something like that to happen, or that they would ever just get used to it and go on with their lives. I'm probably conflating that with a scene from Band of Brothers, or some other written work.
Memoirs can be raw too:
- https://gerikson.com/blog/books/read/Helmet-For-My-Pillow.ht...
- https://gerikson.com/blog/books/read/With-the-Old-Breed.html
And even before 1989 novels like Waugh's "Sword of Honour" trilogy problematized WW2.
And everything beyond heavy weapons, like boots, load bearing equipment, trucks, rubber, food, sweets, you name it, the Western allies were lightyears aheaf of the Nazis. And since those things hint at highly effecient supply chains, the Allies also out performed the Nazis on spare parts and medical supplies.
EDIT: That the author was a WW2 vet doesn't mean he couldn't fall for some scewed view of the enmies capabilities, because of course you can. Not war related, but the things that go well are taken for granted while the things not going well, in reality or just perception, stand out.
The Wehrmacht fought tenaciously in Western Europe using second-rate troops compared to the Eastern front where the real struggle was. Defending is easier than attacking, and the defenders were inching closer and closer to their homeland. This counts for a lot in warfare.
The most striking thing about war is that most people only need the slightest of nudges to start blowing each other to bits. We are a thin crust on bottomless savagery.
The current difficulty in Russia with actually mobilizing many parts of society gives one a glimmer of hope: they have a handle mainly on marginalized and poor village dwellers. Maybe the modern living standards and communications landscape does ultimately make people more resistant to being mobilized for dumb wars, even if for 100% selfish reasons and (sadly) without necessarily getting rid of imperialistic nationalism. This one of the crucial reasons defending untampered speech is important, and why communist China has the information policies it has. (To be sure, draft evasion was very much a widespread thing even in republican Rome.)
I sometimes think that middle 20th century was such a horrible time in many respects (not to deny earlier and later brutality) because they did have many technological means of communication, coordination and mass broadcast already--but to the degree it was usable only by the central elite. Thus they could enforce social conformity and mass projects, often wars, with relatively little difficulty. Compare how war journalist work is described in the article.
Despite the wartime propaganda efforts, Fussell notes in this piece that one of the things King George VI may have been ignorant of was that all his jails and prison-camps were full to bursting with deserters and draft-dodgers, as D-Day approached.
There's a long, recent history of draft dodgers doing well in high places.
For Goebbels, as a cripple who never fought in any war, maybe so, but not for Hitler, at least as far as combat violence was concerned. The man was a repeatedly wounded veteran of the first world war who had served right in the worst of front line duty, and knew exactly how brutal the carnage could be for every one of the millions of soldiers he later ordered out to battle through his generals. Cluelessness might apply to his ordering of the holocaust, because a thing like that pretty much had no precedent in human history, but not quite so much for his war-making.
Curiously, while, as far as anyone knows, Hitler himself never witnessed one of the mass killings his death camps were performing daily, Himmler did want to see what it was truly like, and nearly fainted at his first sight of all those regular people being gassed at once. Didn't stop him from continuing to approve the whole monstrous thing though...
One thing I disliked early in my career were the many tutorials and demos that named the first object Foo and the next object Bar. I doubt any of these tutorial authors served in WW2 or in any war. It seemed to me similar to suburban raised children mimicking Gangster Rap. It feels fake and phony to me. War is horrific and evil. Writing a tutorial is the complete opposite. I guess I am the dude who yells at kids to get off my lawn.
I mean, that actually ends up being kinda the thesis of the article.
The author seems to have little understanding of how much this was true of World War 1, or probably every large scale war ever. The home audiences for news reports in World War 1 (in pretty much every country) were not allowed to know how FUBB'd things were, and it was only after the war ended and troops went back home that the word partially got out. There were governments that did not let troops go on home leave for long periods because they didn't want them talking to the civilian population.
I don't think this was something unique about World War 2.
“IN THE POPULAR AND GENTEEL ICONOGRAPHY OF war during the bourgeois age, all the way from eighteenth and nineteenth-century history paintings to twentieth-century photographs, the bodies of the dead are intact, if inert, sometimes bloody and sprawled in awkward positions, but, except for the absence of life, plausible and acceptable simulacra of the people they once were.”
It turned out, this was kind of bad for the morale of the civilians, who were expecting heroics and glory and were devastated by the gruel pictures of reality of war and so they never showed it again in this shape. (I try to find the video again)
Fussell wrote _The Great War and Modern Memory_, so I'd say he was pretty well-versed on how WW1 was portrayed.
A similar vibe to Fussel is in Farlay Mowatt's war writing, or arguably Spike Milligan's pretty bizarre but also honest autobiography of his PTSD
Countries that advocate a war or conflict, should fight this out on their own territory. This would solve a lot of problems in the world and would make up for the developmental deficit.
US participation in WWII was clearly vital and pivotal. Korea and Vietnam were unfortunate necessities - anyone that believes otherwise is naive and has no idea of the true horror communism always brings. The Cold War was ultimately the very long tail of WWII...
After those times there wasn't any need for the US to be an aggressor in other lands.
World War II casualties - Wikipedia
Soviet Union 8,668,000 to 11,400,000
Germany 4,440,000 to 5,318,000
China (1937–1945) 3,000,000 to 3,750,000+
Japan 2,100,000 to 2,300,000
United States 407,300
United Kingdom including Crown Colonies 383,700
Italy (in postwar 1947 borders) 319,200[68] to 341,000Besides, is there any requirement that such a piece be utterly comprehensive before it can be so-titled?
It's not bizarre at all.
It's a complete American fantasy that our forces played a major role in the downfall of Germany, or that our blood sacrifice was particularly crucial to the outcome of any aspect of the war as a whole. Certainly U.S. resources like oil and materiel were critical to Allied success, not to mention the atom bomb in the defeat of Japan, and the (severely delayed) opening of a western front in France 1944 helped contain Soviet victories (in other words, impacted the Cold War), but it is pretty insulting to the 20X more USSR trooops who died and the nearly 10x more Chinese forces who perished to say that an account of the "Real War" could possibly exclude them like this.
Please indicate which part of the article is claiming this.
> I think it's near impossible to tell the story of "The Real X" -- that's a pretty sensational/trollish way to title something
I think most people find such a title for a piece like this is appropriate and communicates its meaning just fine, if they're not going out of their way to find "gotchas".
Hmm. I didn't address the point about primary sources because it didn't seem like the main point. Right after you brought that issue up, the next sentence seemed to cast aside the importance of the issue: "Also what, exactly, would adding those [sources] change about his essential point..."
I wasn't sure the key point, and the last sentence seemed to be the most likely crux of what you were saying, but maybe I misread.
Maybe you're right about the sources, I can't claim to have looked for books or papers by ex Soviet soldiers. Although given how many Soviet soldiers there were, and given the USSR's incentives to highlight German brutality, are you sure on this score that there are not raw recollections of brutal war in USSR in ww2?
Anyway, I think a piece by the same author without such a sweeping and judgmental title ("real" is a very loaded word in this context that, as I've said, I don't think is earned here) would work just as well.
Using this as an example of the horrors of combat in ww2 just further underlines my point because it’s so incredibly mild compared to the combat on the Eastern Front or against the Japanese in China. Most US service members, as grateful as I am to them, were far luckier than almost all other soldiers in ww2 — better equipped, coming in stronger numbers, and with much better odds of survival. The story the author wants to tell is fundamentally not an American forces story (but talking about Soviet suffering wouldn’t sell in 1989 or even today).
BTW I suspect that the widely portrayed in media horror of being in the attack boat on D-Day was something of a common occurence for Soviet soldiers. They were routinely ordered to perform near-suicidal attacks, as Stalin's strategy was "strength in numbers". That's how he "achievied" the record number of casualities across all countries in the war.
[1] Can't find it right now, so I can't say how accurate it was, or how widespread.