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Herein we talk about World War 2, an event many people believe was the hinge between the world of today and the world of yesterday. A:) Was America's involvement in the war necessary? Could the Soviet Union have won the war against the Third Reich without American/Allied help? B:) Was America's dropping of the A-bomb necessary to win the war? C:) Was the war in Northern Africa instrumental in defeating the Third Reich? How about Italy? D:) Could the Japanese imaginary scenario for the summer of '42, their conceptions of the fleet actions around the Battle of Midway, have resulted in a sea battle that would have demoralized the USA into a negotiated settlement? E:) How did WW2 influence the beginnings of the Cold War, and the strategies of the powers involved? How did WW2 thinking influence Cold War thinking? F:)How was WW2 an end, or a continuation, of post-1815 European colonialism? How did colonies react to WW2? G:) How did the Holocaust impact European and American attitudes towards ethnic politics? How did WW2 affect the movement of peoples throughout the world? Was any of this just or right? All of these are just extremely general prompts, do not let them stop you from debating which tank was best.
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Dec 3, 2015 12:09
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Bip Roberts posted:WW2 was good. Discuss. What if.... it was actually bad?? Discuss.
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Dec 3, 2015 12:11
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Has anyone read "Deserters" by Charles Glass? I heard about it in the most bullshit way, off of NPR, but bought and really enjoyed it. The story of Alfred Whitehead was particularity enjoyable. It made me wonder if any good study has been done of the criminality of Allied personnel on mainland Europe in '43-??. Does anyone know?
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Dec 3, 2015 13:04
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Effectronica posted:Question D) is based on false premises, since it assumes a coherent Japanese strategy at the point of Midway, which didn't exist, and hadn't existed since Pearl Harbor was approved. I thought the strategy was lure the Americans away with a fake attack on the Aleutians, take Midway while they were distracted, then gently caress up the Americans when they immediately tried to steam to Midway's aid. Which is definitely A plan, not necessarily a good one.
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Dec 6, 2015 10:41
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Woolie Wool posted:I sometimes wonder what it was like to have been one of those Wehrmacht generals at the exact moment in '44 when he realized (a) what an catastrophic mistake the war was, (b) the enormity of what he was complicit in, and (c) the inevitable consequences, both for Germany and for him personally. Should have reconsidered your life choices, Herr Feldmarschall. Walter Model is the best example of the sort of general who was a murderous rear end in a top hat, but not a Nazi murderous rear end in a top hat. An actual soldier who lasted the whole war, mostly by being just exactly enough of a toady to Hitler to get by at just the exact proper times. At least he ate his gun rather than becoming a slimy Clean Wehrmacht memoir-writer like Guderian. Counterfactual, but there's no way the Western Allies wouldn't have tried to rehabilitate Model and use him for their own ends.
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Dec 10, 2015 03:18
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LeoMarr, I got dogpiled in the A/T milhist thread for calling the posters there "pro-Soviet", and my favorite popular historian is Norman Davies, and even I think you're being a moron.
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Dec 11, 2015 02:24
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Has anyone ever read Herman Wouk's "The Winds of War" and "War and Remembrance"? I don't exactly recommend them, but it's something to do. They're that kind of insanely overlong historical fiction saga that follows one family who just happens to be involved in everything important in WW2. I enjoy reading them to get a bit of a perspective on what people's feelings about the war were during the Cold War years.
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Dec 25, 2015 18:54
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Popular Thug Drink posted:yeah, one of my pet peeves is when people refer to ww2 as if it were a large single thing. it's like three or four wars that all happened at the same time with largely the same people. i guess if you're british you have the strongest claim to ww2 as a single entity The Great Patriotic War, in terms of men and materiel and miles, is probably the greatest war ever fought by humans. Great meaning large or immense.
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Jan 1, 2016 09:17
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Anything available online about how George Marshall was amazing? Because I've heard he was amazing.
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Jan 2, 2016 22:45
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Plan Z posted:You'd be surprised how many people claim "X SS Commander killed 40 American tanks without receiving a single shot!" When the only resource that claims it is the SS unit commander's diary or something. I believe it was the memoir where Gunter Grass came clean about what he'd done during the war, there's a great part where he describes the soldiers in the prison camp he was held endlessly refighting the battles they had participated in, describing them to others, saying things they could've done different, even building terrain models out of sand and dirt. These were the people whose memoirs shaped a lot of postwar opinions of how Reich forces fought the war, because we weren't about to trust some dirty commies.
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Jan 19, 2016 10:00
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Woolie Wool posted:Sometimes I wonder how much of wehrabooism comes from western Allied propaganda and folk history that inflated Germany into a supersciencey overdog to make their own victory seem like a glorious triumph against all odds rather than inevitable and minimize the importance of "the commies". The best allied narrative is how "plucky little Britain" stood alone against a mighty German empire in the space between the Fall of France and Barbarossa. Yes, the combined peoples of present-day Canada, Nigeria, the UK, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Egypt, Pakistan, India, Burma, Malaysia, Australia, New Zealand, and many more, with the finances of the USA, the unlimited oil of Saudi Arabia, the raw materials of places like the present-day DRC, all that was utterly nothing against the mighty juggernaut of a gimcrack empire/alliance consisting of present-day Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Denmark, Poland, Norway, Austria, The Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, and Northern France. Really British propaganda being such an excellent myth-maker is a thread than runs through both world wars. The worst part about it is that so many Americans were ready to discount early Holocaust reports as more British lies, especially after being burned so bad in WWI.
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Mar 31, 2016 10:31
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Ze Pollack posted:To truncate the previous answers: militarily speaking, yes, it could have been prevented, at great cost. "If you liked everyone you know dying for the independence of Belgium, you'll just LOVE everyone you know dying for the independence of Czechoslovakia!" This was hard when it seemed like Czechoslovakia didn't even want to be a country itself, and even friends of the West like Poland wanted a slice. It wasn't just Germany invading some small country and taking it over, it was a complicated dismantling. Also Hitler super triple promised that this was the last territorial expansion of Germany.
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Apr 10, 2016 23:27
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Also noteworthy that the Americans who like to talk so much poo poo about Neville Chamberlain and appeasement were totally cool with letting the USSR annex a chunk of Czechoslovakia after the war, because standing up to dictators is super hard. This piece is still a part of Ukraine today.
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Apr 10, 2016 23:40
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My Imaginary GF posted:It's not like Stalin was engaging in a campaign of genocide against Poles within the Soviet Union at the time when his offer was communicated. Surely, making friends with France and the UK would save Poland from its neighbors!
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Apr 13, 2016 12:54
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Koesj posted:Yeah, Tooze very much shows how the nazi economy was macroeconomically constrained by resource and manpower shortages, and was pretty much propping itself up through aggressive foreign 'acquisitions' from the Anschluss onwards. The Nazi war economy was fueled by plundering, the Allied war economy was fueled by American money. One of those was a much deeper and inexhaustible well than the other.
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Jul 11, 2016 03:34
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I'm not trying to go USA = Hitler here but what he ultimately envisioned was something like the late 1800's in the American west, with the natives wiped out and replaced by homesteaders, but with a bit of the dangerous frontier to toughen up the youth.
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Aug 24, 2016 09:29
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Disinterested posted:That is the most apt comparison, except with much greater brutality than even that pretty sordid chapter. And he wasn't proposing to wipe out the remnants of a civilization already mostly wiped out by disease either, but the whole thing top to bottom. You wouldn't find a self-justifying ideology of it being 'done for their own good' either, and I doubt you would have seen children taken away and given to white families etc. Just a war of annihilation, and slavery designed to work people to death. Slavic children that looked sufficiently "Aryan" were absolutely kidnapped and given to German families.
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Aug 24, 2016 09:50
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Disinterested posted:That's true, but that's not the condition attached to the programs of ethnic cleansing in, say, Australia. The whole point of the children Germany abducted is that they were regarded as racially German but not culturally German, not non-Germans altogether. I guess I was thinking of superficial similarities, such as the destruction of their names and their native language.
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Aug 24, 2016 10:33
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Disinterested posted:I'm not making light of anything. In the Austrlian case they're stealing mostly mixed race children, so there's still a clear continuity of practice, but the Nazis represent the most extreme version of the behavior possible: everyone who's not deemed to be German in a Slavic country is subject to their direct and violent annihilation, as soon as practicable. The slaves aren't even livestock, they're just to be worked until they die. Don't sell the Nazis short, their plans specifically included teaching future slavs how to read traffic signals.
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Aug 24, 2016 11:06
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The worst weather conditions during WW2 in terms of injuries and deaths was probably the black rain full of radiation that fell after the atomic bombings. If you want to talk about large-scale misery, the Soviet army experience during the Winter War sounds pretty nightmarish, as does the Reich army experience during the winter of '41. Smaller scale I'd definitely go with various jungle conditions in the Pacific or the Arctic warfare. Even smaller I'd go with conditions faced during the Aleutian Islands campaign. That was probably the worst for any actual soldiers. edit: if you want a real rough source document: http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a273052.pdf Teriyaki Hairpiece fucked around with this message at 05:32 on Aug 25, 2016 |
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Aug 25, 2016 05:30
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I've always thought that the soldiers of Wang Jingwei's government were probably the worst-off soldiers in all of WWII, in terms of their experience of being a soldier. Them or Romanians.
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Aug 25, 2016 20:19
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Rosscifer posted:Why would they stand up for "Dutch colonial interests" at a time when they wouldn't even stand up for the existence of France or Britain? I can't see FDR speaking in congress about some imperial profits being threatened when American children were literally malnourished. The Japanese might have gotten away with invading some of South-East Asia if they hadn't tangled with the Americans. But the embargo was literally in response to Japanese occupation of Vietnam? That seems like involvement to me.
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Sep 16, 2016 19:27
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They had some pretty good and severe training of even the average infantryman.
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Sep 27, 2016 06:15
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underage at the vape shop posted:Its just really bizare that you can go through a traumatic experience first hand and not think its complete and utter poo poo in every way imaginable. It wasn't just Hitler, lots of big Nazis saw some of the grimmest of WWI.
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Oct 13, 2016 01:01
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Disinterested posted:Other countries had plural voting. In the UK a university degree conferred another vote in a university constituency. 40% of men had no votes, unlike all of them in Germany. A country where most men sang and baked bread was turned into a phalanx of military automatons by British propaganda. The true study of a "special way" would involve how one country and its people could become so thought of as uniformly evil. You could even divide this discipline into pre- and post- 1945 areas. I've always hated the sonderweg hypothesis for imagining that mass murder was a German thing, when it has categorically proven to be an anybody thing.
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Nov 4, 2016 08:08
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Disinterested posted:This is also a kind of nonsensical point because the Germans themselves were heavily involved in this own critique/identification of their society. I think you'll find that Germans were pretty down with portraying themselves as fat, rosy-faced merchants who loved opera and Rhine wein and poetry and building pretty farmhouses. It's Prussians who believed in Teutoberg Forest and Siegfried and Leuthen. Also, yes, the anti-German stuff came from elsewhere at times, but it was the British who were the harshest critics and the most efficient disseminators of the most virulent propoganda.
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Nov 4, 2016 09:15
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