Just when you think you'd heard the worst of it ...

[AmateisGal]

Along these lines I was listening this afternoon to a CBS radio news broadcast from London from the summer of 1940, in which the correspondent described a squad of British recruits undergoing bayonet training. They were charging sacks filled with animal blood, so that when they pierced the sack they ended up doused in gore. "HATE! HATE! HATE!" screams the instructor. "HATE YOUR ENEMY! SPILL HIS BLOOD! HATE! HATE! HATE! HATE YOUR ENEMY! YOU WANT TO SEE HIM BLEED! YOU WANT TO SEE HIM DIE! HATE! HATE! HATE!"

You can't have war without hate.

That is absolutely frightening.

 

[Treetopflyer]

There is nothing pretty about war. It is humanity at its worst.

 

[AmateisGal]

There is nothing pretty about war. It is humanity at its worst.

Agreed.

 

[DesertDan]

"The doom of men is that they forget." - Merlin

 

[pawineguy]

Yes. And boy, did they ever. Of course, I think a lot of it was in revenge for what the German Army did in Russia.

Together, the Soviets and the Germans reaped such destruction upon each other...just a level of horror and hatred that I can't even comprehend.

Yes, although I think that the Soviets get let off lightly often when it comes to WWII because they have managed to paint themselves largely as victims of German aggression, and that all Soviet acts were in "revenge." Antony Beevor is one of the historians who has rightly refused to excuse this behavior.

Poland, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Hungary, Manchuria, the Soviet mass rapes of their own women and Polish women as they liberated them from camps, the record is so sickening and horrific that if they had been on the losing side they certainly would have faced their own Nuremberg.

 

[AmateisGal]

Yes, although I think that the Soviets get let off lightly often when it comes to WWII because they have managed to paint themselves largely as victims of German aggression, and that all Soviet acts were in "revenge." Antony Beevor is one of the historians who has rightly refused to excuse this behavior.

Poland, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Hungary, Manchuria, the Soviet mass rapes of their own women and Polish women as they liberated them from camps, the record is so sickening and horrific that if they had been on the losing side they certainly would have faced their own Nuremberg.

I agree. I hate that we were Allies with them. And because of that status, people largely refuse to see that Stalin was a worse monster than Hitler.

 

[fashion frank]

The Soviets even took the toilets and shipped them back to the USSR.
What they did to the Germans and their women was unspeakable but remember history is always written by the winners!

All the Best,Fashion Frank

 

[Treetopflyer]

remember history is always written by the winners!

Or not written at all. That way there can be no record of it.

 

[Big J]

The Soviets even took the toilets and shipped them back to the USSR.
What they did to the Germans and their women was unspeakable but remember history is always written by the winners!

All the Best,Fashion Frank

Worse than that, in Beevor's book about the fall of Berlin, he explains how many of the Soviet Divisions were made up of men recruited from far-flung and undeveloped parts of the USSR- men who were not ethnic europeans. Seen as disposable (no one wants to be the first or last man to die in a war), the cultures they came from were so pre-industrial that they were stealing lightbulbs in Berlin on the misapprehension that they could take them home and attach them to the ceilings of their own houses with none of the associated wiring and electrical supply.
These men never returned home, they were sent to gulags for being influenced by the Allied troops they met (although, more likely, they were sent to gulags to stop them to returning to their home towns with the realization of the huge disparity in quality of life between them and ethnic russians).

 

[pawineguy]

Worse than that, in Beevor's book about the fall of Berlin, he explains how many of the Soviet Divisions were made up of men recruited from far-flung and undeveloped parts of the USSR- men who were not ethnic europeans. Seen as disposable (no one wants to be the first or last man to die in a war), the cultures they came from were so pre-industrial that they were stealing lightbulbs in Berlin on the misapprehension that they could take them home and attach them to the ceilings of their own houses with none of the associated wiring and electrical supply.
These men never returned home, they were sent to gulags for being influenced by the Allied troops they met (although, more likely, they were sent to gulags to stop them to returning to their home towns with the realization of the huge disparity in quality of life between them and ethnic russians).

Beevor's Berlin and Stalingrad books are the best I've ever read on their respective subjects. IMHO, he strikes a remarkable balance between respect and scorn, often for the same groups of people, acknowledging that in the complexities of war, today's hero can be tomorrow's criminal.

 

[Big J]

I asked two of my friends on Twitter (both leading WW2 historians in Britain) and one said that this is a "natural corrective to the last few decades, as long as it is within reasonable bounds."

Regarding the raping in Berlin...the book, "A Woman in Berlin" by Anonymous is a gripping read.

I would also say they would be counting Dresden among the atrocities, but yes, you have a very valid point with Coventry. It comes down to what we consider "atrocities", I suppose, and how we define it. War is hell, as William T. Sherman so famously said, and horrible, horrible things happen in hell.

An English friend of mine (from Sheffield) is working in Frankfurt. She is appalled by what she considers to be a strong sense of revisionism regarding the war that paints Germany as the victim. She's lived in Japan also, and described it as being very much following the Japanese pattern of denial and nit-picking over detail of war-crimes ('What? 200,000 people killed at Nanking? That's a nasty Chinese lie! It was only 20,000! Anyway, all armies were doing the same. There's no international agreed definition of 'massacre'. It was 70 years ago, why can't you move on? Remember Hiroshima! We are the victims!').

An interesting example of how this has entered the German main-stream is the mini-series 'Generation War'. It is relentlessly apologetic in exactly the same manner as Japanese apologists have been since the end of the occupation, and as such, follows a formula Japanese apologists have established;
1. 'Ordinary' german people bear no responsibility, it's all the fault of a small number of 'leaders'.
2. The war was terrible, really terrible for Germans, after all they were people too!
3. War crimes? Maybe, but THINK about how terrible it must have been for the people whoactually had to carry out those war crimes.


Anyway, the Germans invented the fire-storm, which they discovered by accident on the WW2 Coventry raid. This led them to invent a verb for making a fire-storm; 'Coventrate'. We simply analyzed how it happened, and then subjected them to it on a much more massive scale. And then the Japanese. Sir Arthur Harris (a hero for me) recounts how the objective of the RAF's air war against Germany was, given that Germany had already lost WW1 within living memory, and then gone on to start another war, to 'give the Germans such a terrible cultural memory of what it was to lose a war, that they would not start another for 100 years'.

The Germans are remembering the 70th anniversary of Dresden this year, so Harris succeeded in his goal on our behalf.

I, for one, am not going to sit back in the safety and comfort of a society that only exists because we won the war, and use the social freedoms that would have been denied to me had we lost, to second guess the decisions that were made or the people who made them. Quite frankly, when I hear Americans telling me that Hiroshima (for example) was a war crime, I think they need a bloody good slap to get over their fake white guilt. You don't see many jews apologizing for the holocaust, and quite rightly so.

As an aside, my Japanese wife was harangued in the street by a female Japanese nationalist last weekend. The nationalist's agenda included reverting to the pre-surrender Imperial Japanese Constitution. My wife pointed out that Japanese women have only had the vote since the post-war constitution written by GHQ allowed a jewish lady on the staff to insert it into the draft. Of course, the nationalist became incensed and accused my wife of being a 'Korean spy'.

 

[bentusian]

('What? 200,000 people killed at Nanking? That's a nasty Chinese lie! It was only 20,000! Anyway, all armies were doing the same. There's no international agreed definition of 'massacre'. It was 70 years ago, why can't you move on? Remember Hiroshima! We are the victims!').

Very well put in a nutshell Big J, which reminds me of PM Abe's recent cringing speech to the US congress. (I think I would feel sort of ashamed if my President makes a similar speech at a foreign parliament, no matter how good the bilateral relations are)

Cold realpolitik speaks there yet again: they may well genuinely feel sorry to the one who vanquished them, but not to the rest of the 'Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere'. If it had not been for the Korean War and the start of cold war....

 

[Big J]

Very well put in a nutshell Big J, which reminds me of PM Abe's recent cringing speech to the US congress. (I think I would feel sort of ashamed if my President makes a similar speech at a foreign parliament, no matter how good the bilateral relations are)

Cold realpolitik speaks there yet again: they may well genuinely feel sorry to the one who vanquished them, but not to the rest of the 'Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere'. If it had not been for the Korean War and the start of cold war....

Yeah, absolutely. Japanese war-guilt evasion is uniting both Koreas and China. It's not helpful to US interests.
Maybe you know, Obama offered to visit Hiroshima and apologize. The Japanese government told him that it wasn't required- all is forgiven.
This isn't being honest. The Japanese government refused his request because Hiroshima (note, the Japanese never get upset about Nagasaki, who knows why?) is Japan's 'Trump Card' that allows them to 'get out of jail free' for all of their war crimes (in their opinion). After all, it's hard to portray yourselves as the victim of the war when POTUS has given an up-front, no holds barred apology.

Again, the fact that an apology was offered incenses the Japanese right wing because they refuse to do the same, or acknowledge the validity of apologies made by former PM's, in exactly the same way as the humanity of US occupation makes them angry since it stands in stark contrast to Japanese occupation which was so brutal.

There is nothing wrong with a balanced accounting of history. However care must be taken that those who sympathize with defeated ideologies do not take advantage of the social freedoms their defeat gave us, to cross the line from honest accounting to apologism, and then denial.

As WW2 will soon pass from living memory, deniers, apologists understand that this is their opportunity to subvert the narrative since the vast majority of descendants of victors have forgotten and moved on (and believe that everyone else has too), or have no awareness of the stakes involved. Meanwhile, apologists and deniers bear a grudge so large that it can never be reasoned with. I note with interest that PM Abe felt compelled to mention his war criminal grandfather, Kishi, in a positive light during his Congress speech.

We are harboring a viper to our bosom.

 

[bentusian]

As WW2 will soon pass from living memory, deniers, apologists understand that this is their opportunity to subvert the narrative since the vast majority of descendants of victors have forgotten and moved on (and believe that everyone else has too), or have no awareness of the stakes involved.

Yet another interesting point! I think that sheds a lot light on the tensed-up historical discourse among those northeast Asian countries, particularly over the sex slaves in the Imperial Japan's military. With the people of first hand account literally dying out, I guess now is the last chance for either side.

 

[Big J]

Yet another interesting point! I think that sheds a lot light on the tensed-up historical discourse among those northeast Asian countries, particularly over the sex slaves in the Imperial Japan's military. With the people of first hand account literally dying out, I guess now is the last chance for either side.

I think the real struggle for a historically lasting narrative of WW2 is about to come to a head.
Modern Germans are rejecting our 'good war' narrative, and the Japanese never believed it anyway.
There are enough right-wingers in both of those countries with a ability to make their voices heard, that they will pose a serious challenge to the way accepted history stands. The lack of interest and fake liberal guilt held amongst former Allied powers is a weakness they are exploiting.
It is interesting to see that nations occupied by the Axis powers are most strongly defending the accepted narrative of history.

I notice you're in Korea. Korea is great, I really enjoy visiting. Unresolved WW2 issues are poisoning regional relationships for the sake of a few old mens misplaced pride. Such a shame, such a waste.

 

[Stand By]

Such good points made since I left the office yesterday …

And back in the day and growing up in Sheffield and living there until I was 29, for the longest time, there was evidence of the blitz everywhere if you cared to look for it - the massive stone patch on the Wicker Arches bridge where an UXB crashed right through and was repaired - the lack of the upper storeys of The Marples Hotel where so many people took shelter during the raids and the landlord moved his bar into the cellar and invited everyone downstairs as he claimed that no bomb could ever get them through 7 floors and they could drink their way through the blitz. The hotel took a direct hit and their bodies were covered in quicklime and sealed up - they couldn't get them all out. A house opposite ours was huge - on a street full of semi-detaches - and it was huge because it occupied the space of two lots that were demolished due to a Luftwaffe bomb. So many examples I could give here. Lots of areas were left as rubble right through to the 80s (which made Sheffield seem a bit sad for a long time to outsiders)… and every street had at least one veteran on it. The war was so evident to me then, and as a keen model builder with an equal interest in military history, I didn't have to look far ...
Today all the land has been revitalized with condos and parks and shops - and the veterans are all very old now … and I'll never forget my nephew (who was 15 at the time) when I took him to the air show at RAF Duxford 3 years ago asking me "Were we fighting the Germans? Why would we do that?" ?!?!
I didn't know where to start.

I hadn't heard about an apology being proffered to the Japanese over Hiroshima … it's unbelievable.
But then again … it's so evident that we live in a world with increasing memory-loss problems and everything is being turned upside down and dumbed down. What a terrible squandering of the lessons that were once so hard-learned by so many others …

 

[Big J]

Stand By, you grew up in Sheffield? There's another member, Ronrinay who is a Sheffield man, and I spent a couple of years there. It's a small world, but I guess everyone's gotta come from somewhere.

 

[Stand By]

A small world indeed!
Yes I did - I was born in Chester in 1967 and we moved to Sheffield (where my parents were from) when I was 5 … so as well as Toronto, I call it home. I was back there last year for the first time in 3 years (and was there for the start of the Tour de France and I felt so proud and it was hailed as the best Le Grande Depart ever! And the city looked great and the people really make it what it is) and it's a great place. It's cleaned up nicely!

As we've been chatting about the Soviets entering Berlin, as coincidence would have it, I've just seen this in today's Daily Mail - some excellent photos of Berlin 1945 versus how it looks today!
And it's no wonder the youngsters can forget the maelstrom that went before … it's an "out of sight, out of mind" sort of mentality, I think.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...ng-German-capital-1945-scenes-look-today.html
But man, war is HELL.

 

[AmateisGal]

I think the real struggle for a historically lasting narrative of WW2 is about to come to a head.
Modern Germans are rejecting our 'good war' narrative, and the Japanese never believed it anyway.
There are enough right-wingers in both of those countries with a ability to make their voices heard, that they will pose a serious challenge to the way accepted history stands. The lack of interest and fake liberal guilt held amongst former Allied powers is a weakness they are exploiting.
It is interesting to see that nations occupied by the Axis powers are most strongly defending the accepted narrative of history.

I notice you're in Korea. Korea is great, I really enjoy visiting. Unresolved WW2 issues are poisoning regional relationships for the sake of a few old mens misplaced pride. Such a shame, such a waste.

Excellent points, BigJ. I get really tired of the apologizing mentality that seems to permeate US culture nowadays. It's misguided and dangerous.

 

[Big J]

A small world indeed!
Yes I did - I was born in Chester in 1967 and we moved to Sheffield (where my parents were from) when I was 5 … so as well as Toronto, I call it home. I was back there last year for the first time in 3 years (and was there for the start of the Tour de France and I felt so proud and it was hailed as the best Le Grande Depart ever! And the city looked great and the people really make it what it is) and it's a great place. It's cleaned up nicely!



As we've been chatting about the Soviets entering Berlin, as coincidence would have it, I've just seen this in today's Daily Mail - some excellent photos of Berlin 1945/how it looks today! And it's no wonder the youngsters can forget the carnage that went before … it's an "out of sight, out of mind" sort of mentality, I think.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...ng-German-capital-1945-scenes-look-today.html

Sheffield's great! I had many happy days there and made friends that I still see.
The Daily Mail photos are really interesting. One of them shows a German 88mm flak gun set up for use against Soviet troops/armor. A few years ago I found pictures of the city I live in now, Kobe, from the war. Some great shots taken from a B-29 of a raid on the Kawasaki factory and rail marshaling yard (with most of the bombs missing the target), and raid evaluation pics taken the next day that shows the whole city burned to the ground. I found some photos of the city right after the surrender, it's a real shock when you know those places.