D-Day, as told by paratroopers

It's a movie. There has to be a narrative on some level.

This take is baffling... in SPR the protagonists lose man after man over the course of the movie, right up until the end. A central theme is the irony and tragedy of how the mission to rescue a single man costs so many lives.

> The point I am trying to make is that the opening is the 'low point' and then it becomes an action movie with the heroes in control.

To be quite candid, I did not appreciate the brutality of WW2 until I spent a few months a decade ago researching the progression of events from 1939 to 1945. I say this as someone who had a fairly decent exposure to WW2 (Gramps was a B29 bomber pilot). Even now, every time I do a little digging or reading about a certain WW2 event/battle/massacre, I am still left shocked by the absolute brutality that occurred on a large scale. Conflicts since WW2 have not approached the same level of killing intensity, thank god. Perhaps nuclear weapons are indeed proving to be the ultimate moderator of human conquest ambition.

Sorry for rambling a bit: Back to your quote about it being a hero action movie - in my opinion WW2 kinda was an action movie with many stories of heros who sacrificed themselves or risked their lives directly to save their buddies - on all sides. The reason we hear so many of these stories from that time period is due to the massive number of engagements and opportunities presented near daily for men to attempt extraordinary maneuvers (e.g. flank attacking an overwhelming force who has their squad pinned down).

Some of the stories you hear from WW2 are absolutely over the top insane (risky). You will never hear nearly as many "hero" stories these days in my opinion due to all professional militaries employing similar risk-mitigation strategies to avoid unnecessary losses. Times were different back then.

I thought the 2022 remake war great and very close to the original.

At least I got the same feeling of senselessness and morbid callousness from the leadership while watching it.

Watching the remake made it clear that soldiers were literally seen as fodder on all sides and nobody in charge cared how many died.

"The right path is never clear when you're in the valley of the moment."

Also in hindsight it is not always clear, if the choosen path was really the best.

>> There was a US isolationist strain as strong as it is today

As strong as? I don't see much of an isolationist strain in the US today at all. The paleoconservatives are isolationist, but they barely exist any more. The Biden administration appointed a neoconservative as Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs.

I would remark that the isolationist strain developed after WW I, and included a fair bit of the liberal intelligentsia, e.g. Charles Beard. The Library of America Reporting WW II cheats on this, and implies that isolationism was a fetish of Republican congressmen from ethnic districts. Not so.

You said that now we see it as more complex. You should read about the actual arguments that were being made for and against intervention at that time. There absolutely was not an obvious consensus in the US until Pearl Harbor.

What cooperation ?

France has a border with Germany - UK & France were supposed to launch an attack on Germany from there. In reality, they did a half-assed attempt to invade Germany and called it quits.

I believe that if UK & France did react, mobilize fully and went to war with Germany on 1 September 1939, the war would be much shorter.

Quite similarly, if the West did provide advanced arms (which we are providing now ! way too late) to Ukraine 2 years ago, Russia would be unable of unwilling to take any land and the war would be much shorter.

When Germany invaded Poland, the vast majority of its (believe it or not limited) fighting power was fully tied up in that conflict. During that same time, The larger, stronger, better equipped French army could have (with the aid of the BEF) invaded Germany from its border with it (and possibly even through Belgium) and caused absolute chaos in the German's plans for expansion. ven if the French/British had failed to make that invasion decisive, it would almost certainly have broken the back of the entire chain of lightning victories and support for Hitler that came later. At the very least, that preemptive invasion attempt would have been able to mobilize the French Army enough to completely forestall the terrible consequences of low morale and rapid military collapse that eventually befell France when it actually was invaded so spectacularly.

The above is in my view a near certainty if it had happened that way. More speculatively, had Churchill been Prime Minister instead of Chamberlain at the time of the Poland invasion (instead of becoming PM right at the time of the invasion of France), the British response would have been much stronger and that would have prompted an also stronger French response that could have dramatically curtailed the scope of the European war.

Hitler's army in 1939 simply wasn't good or well provisioned enough to sustain anything serious against any major enemy. It pulled off what it pulled off in the following months more through a mix of luck and sheer blunder by its enemies.

Were any axis leaders tried for war crimes related to bombing campaigns? Most of what I've heard of relates to smaller more specific warcrimes and ones related to genocide.

I'm sure there's more examples, but the only allied case I can think of was a soldier convicted for hiding in an ambulance and shooting from it.

> A prime example of history is written by the victors.

Not quite; that requires equalities; the Nazis and that version of Japan were not nearly equal in their evil or atrocities to the Allies. My point moreso was that the Allies were doing a thing in war we don't do anymore, which is matching force with force - which today is illegal. We have the Geneva Convention that stops us from doing that anymore. Now of course, late in the war we discovered the death camps and that is the post-hoc rationalization that I'm referring to but nonetheless the Geneva convention is a byproduct of the shock of what it took to win. It more or less attempts to put a ceiling on the ferocity of war.