Over the last few DDays it’s amazing to consider the scope of the war and how it truly was a global conflict. Simultaneously as DDay was happening people were not only fighting in Eastern Europe but also in the jungles of SE Asia, isolated islands in the Pacific and the mountains of China. My own family was at the opposite end of The Eurasian continent in Dday but we were as deeply affected by the war as the people of France. My grandfather was a member of the KMT nationalist government at the start of the war and and they fled Nanjing when the Japanese invaded. They went north to Xi’An and then fled further across Northern China in Winter to eventually to Chongqing which became the wartime capital. Along the way oldest uncle who was born at the start of the war died. I didn’t find out that I had an uncle who died as a child during the war until just a few years ago when another relative died and my oldest surviving uncle was telling family stories at the funeral.
Incredible family history. I am am amazed by stories like this. It's kind of like the BBS version of Finding Your Roots.
To this (amazing) thread's main topics (but not D-Day specifically) and to @rocketsjudoka's point, I can't recommend the following book highly enough. November 1942 by Peter Englund. The historian weaves together personal diary accounts from all over the world for just one solid month of the war, an arguably pivotal month, as things shifted from northern africa, to the battles outside stalingrad, to guadalcanal, on and on, all over the world. Harrowing gut punch on just about every page, but you really get a sense for the loss of life and what total war really means. His earlier book about WWI is called The Beauty and the Sorrow, also amazing. I never understood that conflict until reading that book.
from what i saw in saving ryan and brother's band, ww2 wasn't a good time. anyone saw the pacific? worth the watch?
Was thinking about another personal connection to WW2. Six years ago my neighbor passed away. She was 98 and was like a surrogate grandmother to me and some of the other neighbors. She would always bake and there was many a time I would come home to find a bag of goodies on my back stoop. She also loved to garden and I would help her with shoveling snow and near the end of her life mowing her yard. She never spoke much though about her past and other than that she grew up on a farm and had lived in the same house in Minneapolis for 50 years I didn’t know much about her life. At her funeral though I found out she had been an actual Rosie the Riveter and during the war worked in B-24 factory in St. Paul. That experience left her feeling empowered enough to divorce her husband after the war and then later going to work at Alliant Tech and later Honeywell as engineer where she worked on early computers and some of the guidance systems for the space program.
Thanks. In addition to that story my great grandfather was an officer in the last Qing Dynasty. China had good relations with the German Kaiser government and just before WWI had sent young officers to Germany to train in their military. My great grandfather was in Germany in WWI and when Germany lost and the last Qing Dynasty collapsed he and the other Chinese officers were stuck. They on their own traveled from Europe back to China across Russia.
So, to rj's point about these people sometimes being among us, I just read an incredible passage in this book, like last night. A Jewish woman, wearing her yellow star of David, is carrying her baby across a deserted nighttime plaza and notes a big SS guy tailing her and gaining on her. Another woman, an apparent stranger, is walking on a different path across the plaza, but the women see one another, and the second woman opens her arms slightly. They execute a handoff, smooth and stealthy, just like a minute before the SS man got to the Jewish woman. If that baby went on to survive the war, it is now 82 years old and it may not know that story about their brave mother and equally brave adoptive mother. (The story was put into a diary of a woman who observed the whole thing from her window and could not get it out of her mind.)
