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Post by DAS (formerly BushAdmirer) on Dec 31, 2018 16:09:08 GMT
We're planning a trip to New Orleans where the recently opened National WWII Museum is getting great reviews. I thought it would be good to bone up on my WWII history prior to that trip, With that in mind I read Allies by Winston Groom and Inferno, The World at War 1939 to 1945 by Max Hastings. Allies is an in depth study of three men and their activities during the war: Winston Churchill, Josef Stalin, and Franklin Roosevelt. As you might imagine, it is a sort of a top down view of the war. Inferno comes at it from the opposite direction. It is a sort of bottom up view of the war with numerous antidotes about individuals, families, and communities involved in the war. There is much to learn in these two books. For instance, I didn't know that most of the French people supported the Vichy government. Those French people involved in the resistance were a very small percentage of the population. Of course, they were deluged with Nazi propaganda and constantly assured that the Germans were going to win the war. Getting on the winning band wagon may have been one of the reasons. Nor did I realize that there was so much anti-semitism in France at the time. There wasn't much popular objection to rounding up Jews and shipping them off to concentration camps in the east. The support of the French people began to shift to the Allies side when it became clear that the Allies were wining the war. Another factor that had escaped me was Stalin's extremely cruel policy toward Soviet POW's. If you were in the Russian army you were instructed to fight to the death and never surrender. For that reason, repatriated POWs returning to Russia after the war weren't treated as military heroes but rather as criminals. They were typically shipped off to hard labor in Siberia. This policy was common knowledge amongst Russian troops. For this reason they were tenacious fighters. However, both sides had a lot of deserters going over to the enemy. I hadn't known that either. The Russian army was to live off the land as much as possible. When they had moved through an area there weren't many cows, chickens, or sheep left standing. This was very different from the Germany army which depended almost entirely upon logistics and a supply chain for supplying the troops. The further they got from Germany, the longer their supply chain, and the more vulnerable the Nazi's became. The Japanese had one 'Comfort Girl' for every 40 soldiers. Comfort girls were drafted for duty just like soldiers. Throughout history, I've never known of forced prostitution like that. Many of today's left leaning liberals contend that the Allied bombings of civilian targets in Germany and the Hiroshima/Nagasaki A-Bomb attacks were just as bad as the Nazi's treatment of Jews, Poles, Gypsies, and everyone else they didn't like. They miss the point that those bombings had a beneficial goal of ending the war. No such admirable goal stood behind the ethnic cleansing orchestrated by the Nazis. In Germany it was a capital crime to criticize the Nazi government. There were examples of people being shot by the Wehrmacht because they were overheard predicting an Allied victory in a beer bar and reported by eavesdroppers.
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