that's in the beginning of saving private ryan ya? dam those soldiers really went thru hell. rip heroes
both my grandfathers served in WWII. one was in the army and fought in the battle of the bulge and was shot in the stomach crossing the rhine in march 1945. he was in a hospital in england for 9 months after that. he was the john wayne type and talked frequently about his service, including the killing that he did. it was the defining event of his life. he was a farm-boy who was pulled out of school in 8th grade to work on the farm and joining the army was his way to escape that. my other grandfather was a plane mechanic in the airforce. he actually joined before WWII started. grew up dirt poor on the south side of san antonio so the military was his way of making something of himself. he was stationed in india, as we were using british bases there. he met my grandmother there (she was half-british/half-indian) and after the war she came to america to marry him. he served in the airforce for 45 years and was also in korea and vietnam. he was very modest about his service (he never saw combat, but his base was often targeted for bombing in vietnam) and didnt really talk about it.
Today is the 75th anniversary of the surrender of Japan. The surrender was formally accepted by the allies on the USS Missouri. The Canadian representative signed on the wrong line forcing the subsequent countries to improvise. The Canadian was a colonel who was blind in one eye from WWI.
Is this a serious question? If it is, I wonder how you have survived on this planet for so long. If it's not, the humor escapes me.
Hitler wanted to pay back France - and the rest of Europe - for everything Germany lost in the Treaty of Versailles.
The loser Germany had to pay reparations to the winners and was forced to tear down it's military. France lost to Germany in an earlier war and had paid similar reparations. Germany's economy went belly up and helped trigger the great depression. Hitler rose from its ashes. The German side in ww1 wasn't evil. They just lost and as the new kid on the block, were terrifying to the older allied powers. Japan wanted to be considered one of the major powers and started breaking one sided international treaties regarding the military. They won a war against Russia so they wanted to carve up Asia like Europe did with Africa. I can't say many positive things for players in global order at the time but things started to cook when they couldn't handle newer nations rising up while resolving their own issues.
Ok, so these were certainly motivations and definitely propaganda to get the troops fired up but WWI and it's director's cut WWII were about colonialism. This was a trend for hundreds of years and Japan, Germany and Italy didn't get their share by the time they became world powers. Britain's empire was absolutely massive by the early 1900s, 24% of Earth's landmass. There was no 'new' area to conquer so these guys had to look for opportunity elsewhere. In WWII, Germany wanted the western portion of Russia for its productive farmland (this was it's objective in WWI). Italy for whatever reason wanted Ethiopia and other chunks of Africa. Japan wanted the entire eastern Pacific rim (you're right here). Japan and Germany also shared the whole 'we're the uber men' view. So it wasn't about payback, that's dramatizing things. It was about conquest and expansion of the nation. Of course, then Hitler did extract some 'payback' from the Jewish, and the Japanese brutalized the Chinese, but it wasn't the impetus of the wars.
I view WW2 as more a continuation of WW1 with a short pause in between. Nothing in WW1 was adequately resolved, just that both sides were exhausted and the US got to choose the winner.
My grandfather served in the French army. I don't know if he saw any combat, but he was put in a POW camp after France surrendered. According to the family lore, he escaped a couple of times to return to the family farm but was recaptured. His third escape, on October 3 (which I try to remember to mark each year), was a success.
regarding the atomic bombing of japan, ive heard the argument that we shouldnt have done it, but it was estimated that an invasion of japan would have cost 1 million lives. the entire country, including women and children were ready to fight to the death. i think one could make the argument that we didnt need to drop the second one. they probably would have ended up surrendering after hiroshima. we only gave them like 3 days before hitting them a second time. as far as the other side of the conflict, i wonder how 20th century history would have gone if the allies had done what patton wanted to do, which was arm and join up with the wermacht and attack the russians. we probably would have defeated stalin and the soviets...post WWII europe would have been a very different place.
I posted this in the D&D ages ago with citation, but the whole thing with saving lives was mostly US propaganda. Japan was on it's knees with the constant firebombing of it's cities, which were all made of wood. We completely controlled the skies and they had no chance, and their leadership was ready to surrender. The atomic bombing was more for showing the world we had the biggest dick as we already were seeing the next world order forming with the Soviets swarming into Eastern Europe.It was an easy sale with the hawks waxing. Edit: Found the thread. You're actually in it https://bbs.clutchfans.net/index.ph...c-bomb-attacks-hiroshima-and-nagasaki.197097/
My Grandfather was in the Pacific and they were already gearing for mainland invasion. He was absolutely sure he was going to die and it would be a fight for every square inch. Think about Japan invading the US during those time...you think the US would have surrendered? He was entirely convinced he lived through WWII because of the bomb. He saw how hard the Japanese fought on non mainland islands. I mean, MAYBE, they surrender without it, but it was probably worth it to not take a chance. Also, here's my list: My step Grandfather (my real Grandpa) was given an exemption to not be drafted because he was a machinist and welder and his skills were more valuable anyways. He couldn't take it and volunteered. Because he was 22 and most were teenagers, they slapped a sergeant stripes on him and gave him a squad of mechanics in New Guinea. He said they had these giant GE microwave blast furnaces. They would literally throw tank scraps into it and melt it into molten steel and cast all the parts they needed. The ingenuity was astounding. It really annoyed him during Katrina that they just didn't pull up huge boats to the broken levies and sink the ships in the gaps, because that's exactly how they fixed levies and built harbors in the middle of the Pacific. My "real" Grandpa on my mother's side was a rocket/bazooka engineer in France. He basically blew Nazis to pieces. He was in a fox hole when a mortar hit about 6 feet away, killing all his friends and most of his company. He survived with thousands of pieces of shrapnel for the rest of his life. To the day he died with he was 94, he'd randomly scab up and pick out pieces of metal. My paternal Grandfather was a clerk for a railroad, so when he showed up in the UK (after riding the Queen Mary) they handed him a typewriter and assigned him to some Colonel. He didn't see a lot of action, but he was typing orders out from houses and buildings that were being shelled. His "near miss" was a guy that he switched shifts with was seriously injured by a sniper in some small town in France. My Maternal Great Uncle was captured by the Japanese in the Philippines. He was one of the 750 or so Americans murdered in the Bataan Death March. My Grandmother never forgave the Japanese people for the rest of her life for murdering her brother. Her thought was if he died in battle, that's war, but murdering a prisoner is state sanctioned murder. I have a few other Great Uncles that served, but know less about them.
Do you think the American media and military leadership didn't paint this as a last resort to pad the collective psyche? Yeah, the 'Japs' were 'bad' but there's a limit to what people can stand and 100k+ dead in two cities is horrific by any standards. My grandfather was in the Japanese theater too, but he passed away when I was 12 so I never got to hear his side of things. I'll ask my grandmother the next time I talk to her and see if he had similar views.
Germany's economy went south because of the US stock market crash. The German economy had started to greatly improve because of investment from the USA.... there would be no Adolf Hitler without the crash. The destruction of the monarchy in German also played a big part in WWII. The German people were used to a strong and authoritarian ruler. The German's in WWI were still pretty bad. They were stringing up people on poles and hanging them, cutting their throats and shooting them based purely on their ethnicity. Germany was the cultural center of the world and outside of the USA had the highest standard of living in the world.
Good thread. On my own family history on my mother's side my grandparents were from the Suzhou area in China near Nanjing. I don't really know the details but based on that my oldest aunt was born in X'ian in Northern China and luckily were not caught up in the Rape of Nanjing. My grandfather was heavily involved in in the Republican of China (ROC) government and from what little I know it sounds like they were in Chengdu and Chongqing (Chungking) that were the seats of the ROC government during the war. For those not familiar with the history of WWII in China the Japanese had invaded what is now NE China starting in 1931 but officially WWII started there in 1937 in Shanghai. The ROC capital was Nanjing which is west of Shanghai but on the eastern side of China. The ROC government kept on fleeing westward until they got Chongqing in the mountains of SW China. From there they held out with US aid until Japan was defeated by the Allies. On my father's side I know very little as my grandparents died while my father was young. It sounds like they might've died in the Chinese Civil War following the end of WWII. My neighbor passed away two years ago at the age of 96. She grew up in rural MN and lived most of her life in Minneapolis. At her memorial service I found out that she had divorced her husband just before the war, something that was very radical for Minnesota then. She worked at Honeywell on bombers and was a real life Rosie the Riveter.
