History - questioning the winners and how we arrived at this point

[alfablue]

Re: History - questioning the winners and how we arrived at this point

There were rules (such as they were) on Western Front. There were none in the Pacific Theater or on the Eastern Front.

How does that make it more culturally significant?

Heck, it's a better story that we won a war when there were no rules.

 

[joecct]

How does that make it more culturally significant?

Heck, it's a better story that we won a war when there were no rules.

read the last line or 2 of sovo's 1st paragraph. The Pacific War was kill or be killed. At least your surrender was usually honored on the Western Front.

 

[alfablue]

Re: History - questioning the winners and how we arrived at this point

read the last line or 2 of sovo's 1st paragraph. The Pacific War was kill or be killed. At least your surrender was usually honored on the Western Front.

And?
Kill or be killed gives a situation less cultural impact, somehow? Fighting "fair" Germans is better, somehow?


Again, it's a better story that we won a war where the enemy would rather die than give up. But it isn't. Far more difficult fight, and we won.

 

[Slap Shot]

Re: History - questioning the winners and how we arrived at this point

Battles such as D-Day and the BotB - and to larger extent the entire theater in which they were fought - resonate more for several reasons. Some of this is simplified but I think for most part make sense:

1. Depiction in film. It’s easier to film battles on land than on sea. Granted much of the gains in territory in the Pacific were the result of combat on land, for the general public the war in Europe felt more conventional. This massively misses the point that war is hell and barbaric at any level, but the masses…
2. Also while the war in the Pacific initially garnered much attention (They Were Expendable and The Sands of Iwo Jima for example), that dedication eroded over time and filmmakers have devoted far more time to the war in Europe until we saw another resurgence with The Pacific and Eastwood’s complimentary pair of films.
3. Additionally battles in Europe were much more expansive. They were often fought across huge swaths of land, in huge forests, across bridges and rivers, hills and mountains, the enemy was engaged while circumnavigating city streets framed by blown out buildings, we saw the liberation of cities and countries alike in which inhabitants had parades and made for a more photogenic backdrop, etc. Wars in the pacific on land typically were in more confined spaces and included having to flesh out the Japanese from behind and under every rock, and of course in some places immensely dense jungle.
4. The war in Europe ended with a full surrender while troops closed in on Berlin. The Pacific ended with 2 atom bombs.
5. Ike and Monty, et al. The war in the Pacific of course included many men of prominence, but the aforementioned seem to supersede all others and I think if most people were they asked would associate Churchill with the war in Europe.
6. Hitler.
7. Tanks! I want tanks!
8. The Germans were a more traditional enemy including surrendering at times by the thousands, some fanatical, many saw the Americans as humans. There was less animosity between Americans and Germans which was not the case with the Japanese. Additionally there’s been the emerging understanding that the Pacific war was underpinned on both sides by racial hatred.
9. The European enemy was much more familiar. There’s a reason we didn’t intern Germans.
10. Story time. The war in Europe just comes across as sexier valid or not.
11. Casualties. Without looking I believe Americans were lost 4 to 1 in Europe vs. the Pacific
12. For whatever reason there was more of an unwillingness of veterans of the Pacific to pass on their memories of combat, while those who fought in Europe more likely did. Also the unfamiliarity of its locations, contributed to the gradual forgetting. Most people didn’t have to look at a map to know where France was. Guadalcanal was a different story. Americans got to know these places – Guam, Saipan, Wake Island, Bougainville, Okinawa – but it was never quite the same.

 

[MaizeRage]

Re: History - questioning the winners and how we arrived at this point

I think you're missing the biggie--which has largely been retconned in--but the war in Europe had the effect of ending the Holocaust. The level of German atrocity makes it a much simpler good guy/bad guy scenario on the grand scale.

 

[Kepler]

Re: History - questioning the winners and how we arrived at this point

3. Additionally battles in Europe were epically expansive. They were often fought across huge swaths of land, in huge forests, across bridges and rivers, hills and mountains
7. Tanks! I want tanks!

Kursk alone is unbelievable. The Red Army used 400,000 men just to dig trenches. Everybody remembers the tanks but the Russians lost 2,000 aircraft just as sugar on top.

 

[Slap Shot]

I think you're missing the biggie--which has largely been retconned in--but the war in Europe had the effect of ending the Holocaust. The level of German atrocity makes it a much simpler good guy/bad guy scenario on the grand scale.

You're right. I did list Hitler but didn't expand on that massive component.

 

[SJHovey]

Re: History - questioning the winners and how we arrived at this point

I apologize if there is another thread for this...

Remember when you read THAT book or article, or watched THAT documentary or movie that caused you to pause, take a step back and realize some of the things you've taken for granted as solid fact are in essence a fiction created by the winners (whether that be winners in war, philosophy, financial influence etc)? Obviously that happened quite a bit in high school and especially college. But now that I've entered my 40's I haven't felt this in a long long time....until now

So the real Ty Cobb is not necessarily the stereotype I'd grown up hearing about for so many years (Ken Burns, ahem, I'm looking your way)
https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/who-was-ty-cobb-the-history-we-know-thats-wrong/

https://soundcloud.com/jfk-lancer/butler-bringuie-oswald - I've never heard this before, it's an absolutely fascinating window into the early 60's commie scare

and related to that last link (boy was my ignorance on the bay of pigs exposed after reading this one) - http://www.maryferrell.org/pages/Essay_-_Why_is_Fidel_Castro_Still_Alive.html


so...now it's your turn, what have you read, watched or listened to (podcasts etc) recently that caused you to rethink some element of what has generally been considered historical FACT?

I grew up thinking Dan Devine was a pretty good guy, but fortunately Rudy Ruettiger cleared up that misconception for me.

 

[alfablue]

Re: History - questioning the winners and how we arrived at this point

I think you're missing the biggie--which has largely been retconned in--but the war in Europe had the effect of ending the Holocaust. The level of German atrocity makes it a much simpler good guy/bad guy scenario on the grand scale.

Oddly enough, when I look back, it seems as if contemporary news didn't want to write about that, too. The worse the situation on humans, the less we want to hear about it. Heck, there was a lot of post war denial, still, in the US.

It seems as if the more the suffering, the less we want to hear about it. Even though invasions were larger, there were more MOH winners, etc etc.

 

[alfablue]

Re: History - questioning the winners and how we arrived at this point

Kursk alone is unbelievable. The Red Army used 400,000 men just to dig trenches. Everybody remembers the tanks but the Russians lost 2,000 aircraft just as sugar on top.

Again, we barely give credit to the Soviets, so that battle doesn't count.

 

[Jimjamesak]

Having been to Normandy- Germany also has a memorial burial site there. It's really odd, and hard to accept, given that they were the enemy.

Still, the US pattern has been for a long time to do a war where we sacrifice as little as possible to win- from Spanish American War up to the present- we've never really put out as other countries did (or were seemingly gladly to put in harms way- which is odd, too). Even with 400,000 deaths in WWII, we did whatever it took to minimize that. The interesting thing about Yamamoto was that knowledge- the attempt at Pearl was to make the sacrifice so big that it would be something we'd want get into. It wasn't, and then putting the factories on line was just part of the battle. So it was a long and painful loss that was already known.

One other thing on a perspective thing. If you look at how we treat June 6 vs. other invasions that were much larger than that later in the war, it is interesting to me that we focus so much on Europe. Again- I am guilty of that, too.

The Civil War and its carnage has rested on our collective psyche for generations. It's because of that experience we've spent plenty of money and time trying to figure out how to fight wars without expending as many people as possible.

 

[Kepler]

Re: History - questioning the winners and how we arrived at this point

The Civil War and its carnage has rested on our collective psyche for generations. It's because of that experience we've spent plenty of money and time trying to figure out how to fight wars without expending as many people as possible.

I think you might be surprised that large swathes of the country don't give the Civil War even a passing thought. Growing up in NY there was zero discussion or interest beyond that it was just another war fought somewhere else -- it may as well have been the War of Jenkins' Ear. Through the 1980s this seemed to be the case throughout most of the country except the South, who were still butthurt, and the Mid Atlantic, who had figured out how to monetize it.

Then Ken Burns ruined everything for a while, and the mouth-breathers getting their guy in power in 2000 kept the ball rolling for a while, and Obama having the temerity to be black ruined their day and we had to listen to their whining, but it's finally calming down again.

I'd bet a decade from now the only people giving mindshare to the Civil War will be the kind of clodpates who get drunk and weep about the Battle of Culloden.

 

[FreshFish]

Re: History - questioning the winners and how we arrived at this point

If Benjamin Franklin had his way, we would not have sought independence from Great Britain, but merely from Parliament. He'd have been happy if we had a "Parliament of the Colonies" for self-rule, remaining loyal to the King. "Taxation without representation" could very easily have been satisfied without independence.



Hmm....would the colonies eventually have merged with what is now Canada under that outcome???

 

[Kepler]

Re: History - questioning the winners and how we arrived at this point

If Benjamin Franklin had his way, we would not have sought independence from Great Britain, but merely from Parliament. He'd have been happy if we had a "Parliament of the Colonies" for self-rule, remaining loyal to the King. "Taxation without representation" could very easily have been satisfied without independence.

Hmm....would the colonies eventually have merged with what is now Canada under that outcome???

If we had still been part of Britain the French would not have sold the LA Purchase to us. We would have had to take it by force (which we would have, quite easily).

It also may have made life a lot harder when it came time to steal the West from Mexico.

Another problem is that the extension of British land holding and titles would have made America an even worse class-ridden catastrophe than the UK. The Southern Planters were bad enough -- these yahoos would have had royal authority behind them. Delay the inevitable reaction from the 18th to the 19th century, and the American Revolution might have been less John Locke and more Karl Marx.

 

[WeAreNDHockey]

Re: History - questioning the winners and how we arrived at this point

I grew up thinking Dan Devine was a pretty good guy, but fortunately Rudy Ruettiger cleared up that misconception for me.

And another falls victim to the myth of "Rudy."

Most movies "based on actual events" are loaded with inaccuracies and dramatizations but Rudy was more fiction than fact. Even scenes where Irish football players tap the "Play Like A Champion" sign are wrong. Lou Holtz had seen that sign in an old book, probably a picture of the one the Oklahoma football team had been using for decades, and had one painted and installed in the stadium in 1986 at the dawn of his tenure in South Bend. Ruettiger had been gone for a decade by then.

For the record, it was Devine who assured Ruettiger that he would indeed suit up and play in the season's final game. The rest of the team did not threaten a boycott (the scene with the jersey's on Devine's desk is entirely fictional). As well, the student section didn't chant his name until AFTER he got into the game. Ruettiger also did not have a resentful older brother ("Rudy" was the oldest Ruettiger boy but had older sisters) and in fact his entire family was supportive and thrilled, not only that he got into Notre Dame but also for his connections to the football program.

Rudy also became an insufferable arrogant little turd in the years after the movie.

 

[WeAreNDHockey]

Re: History - questioning the winners and how we arrived at this point

In keeping sort of with the theme of the OP, Richard Rhodes' series of books on nuclear arms and The Making of the Nuclear Age (as he refers to the series) have caused me to rethink some of views and assumptions about nuclear weapons.

 

[SJHovey]

And another falls victim to the myth of "Rudy."

Most movies "based on actual events" are loaded with inaccuracies and dramatizations but Rudy was more fiction than fact. Even scenes where Irish football players tap the "Play Like A Champion" sign are wrong. Lou Holtz had seen that sign in an old book, probably a picture of the one the Oklahoma football team had been using for decades, and had one painted and installed in the stadium in 1986 at the dawn of his tenure in South Bend. Ruettiger had been gone for a decade by then.

For the record, it was Devine who assured Ruettiger that he would indeed suit up and play in the season's final game. The rest of the team did not threaten a boycott (the scene with the jersey's on Devine's desk is entirely fictional). As well, the student section didn't chant his name until AFTER he got into the game. Ruettiger also did not have a resentful older brother ("Rudy" was the oldest Ruettiger boy but had older sisters) and in fact his entire family was supportive and thrilled, not only that he got into Notre Dame but also for his connections to the football program.

Rudy also became an insufferable arrogant little turd in the years after the movie.

I suck at sarcasm.

 

[WeAreNDHockey]

Re: History - questioning the winners and how we arrived at this point

I suck at sarcasm.

Apparently I suck more!

 

[MaizeRage]

Re: History - questioning the winners and how we arrived at this point

Oddly enough, when I look back, it seems as if contemporary news didn't want to write about that, too.

That's why I've said that narrative has mostly been ret-conned in. Sadly, the suffering of Jews just didn't move the needle much back then, nor do I think many understood the scale of what happened. The change largely comes from A) Jewish groups (rightfully) keeping the issue in the spotlight and highlighting just how awful it was and B) 50 years of progress rounding off the sharper edges of anti-Semitism. Jews have pretty much just become another bunch of white people for everyone but a small radical minority.

If Germany offered the unconditional return of all western territory to status quo ante and withdrawal to pre-war German western borders...

If Hitler had been a magic wizard, that might have helped too. The Nazis started from an immovable position of extreme nationalism. It was either full speed ahead with their dominance through superiority nonsense or cut the legs out from their entire movement with another "stab in the back". They were pot committed and couldn't afford to make a savvy political move. I wish I could think of a modern day parallel, but none come to mind.

1790s-1800s: Screwed over the French when they asked us to honor our treaty in defense of their revolution (inspired in part by ours)

Screwed over feels a bit harsh. I don't think they were capable of helping much if they had wanted to. Blame France for calling in their favor so early.

 

[Wisko McBadgerton]

Re: History - questioning the winners and how we arrived at this point

I often think about these kinds of numbers when I visit the Viet Nam Memorial. I wonder how the Wall would look if it bore 400,000 names instead of 58,000. I find it impossible to even imagine the magnitude of the kinds of losses the German or Soviet military suffered and cannot begin to picture the space required to similarly memorialize those numbers of dead.

The words "Here We Mark The Price Of Freedom" are inscribed below the Freedom Wall within the National WWII Memorial on the mall. Each gold star in the field represents 100 lives lost. There are 4,048 gold stars.