Are You A World War II Nut?
I'm currently watching what must be the longest WWII documentary ever made.
https://www.amazon.com/Second-War-Diary-Day/dp/B00KXSS326
This film literally traces the entire war on a day by day basis. They tell you what happened in all parts of the war every day, every single day, starting at the beginning through to the end.
The style of the show is pretty old fashioned, not up to current expectations. But the information is extremely rich. Tons of great footage that I'd never seen.
I'm currently at the critical turning point, the invasion of Russia. Absolutely amazing. Biblical scale.
https://www.amazon.com/Second-War-Diary-Day/dp/B00KXSS326
This film literally traces the entire war on a day by day basis. They tell you what happened in all parts of the war every day, every single day, starting at the beginning through to the end.
The style of the show is pretty old fashioned, not up to current expectations. But the information is extremely rich. Tons of great footage that I'd never seen.
I'm currently at the critical turning point, the invasion of Russia. Absolutely amazing. Biblical scale.
Comments (36)
Day by day? You'll be done watching it in about six years then.
Anyway, who's winning?
Why would you recommend Churchill? Certainly not for reliable information, right?
Quoting Maw
I didn't become interested in WWII until I was about 70. For the last decade or so I've been reading to fill in the large holes which high school and college left. There are many good books, television, film--even radio programs which cover the war.
The Thames Television program The World at War, must have been made in either the late '60s or 1970s; it was a many-episode history of documentary film and narration. I say it in 1980, about. Very good program.
Because world war is a watershed with endless political, financial, military, social, technical... consequences, there is no end to the topics and angles that can be pursued. It's a really rich area for study, which the war in the Crimea or the Franco-German war isn't, by comparison.
Yes, the film goes on forever, just as the war did. Each daily segment is not a day long though. :-) Usually maybe five to ten minutes, depending on what happened that day.
Quoting Apollodorus
At the moment the story has just reached the critical turning point. The Nazis have invaded Russia, an enterprise of Biblical scale. They've been doing great up until now, but problems are just starting to arise. Their tanks are out running their supply lines and supporting troops, so they are forced to slow down. This gives the Russians time to organize their reply and, we know how it goes from there.
There's truth in that. But I've been a WWII nut since childhood. In the fifties WWII was still very much a part of the cultural landscape.
It's just a great story. I mean, looking at it purely from a story telling perspective, as a novelist might. It has all the elements of an epic tale about good and evil etc. The Nazis played the villain role to perfection. There are too many hero stories to begin to count.
Here's an example, specifically suggested to the young folks among us. The guys who flew the bombers over Nazi Germany in the middle of the night, night after night after night, were your age. Twenty somethings. Usually early twenties.
You're up there in the dark, high above some enemy city. Flak is exploding all around you. Your pals in the plane on the left get hit and go spiraling towards the ground. The plane on the right of you gets hit and one of it's engines catches on fire. And you keep flying on towards the target.
And then you do it again the next night. And the next.
Balls of steel!!
Just kids. Barely out of high school. Sticking it to the man. In an incredibly impressive manner.
And then they had their own kids. Who turned in to hippies. What a let down!!! :-)
The German Army would race forward, typically crushing anything standing in their way. Normal warfare.
But right behind the German Army came the SS. While the German army fought other armies, the SS fought the civilians. They would round up anybody who posed the slightest threat to German rule and execute them.
As example, an order came down from on high to get rid of the gypsies. So the SS rounded up all of them, some 14,000 in one incident, and slaughtered all of them, men, women, children, everybody, without mercy. A tidal wave of such insane evil madness swept across Eastern Europe deep in to Russia. The scale of it is just breathtaking....
As best I can tell, yes. But Pearl Harbor hasn't happened yet. Coverage of the war in China seems minimal so far. Mentioned, but few details.
I used to love horror movies when I was a kid but later they didn't scare me any more so they all started to just look silly and I gave up on them.
But, are you sure your movie isn't just Stalinist propaganda or something? Of course, it isn't right to kill civilians, but according to some sources there were communist guerrillas and agitators among them, so the Germans didn't have much choice. There was too much at stake to take any risks.
Plus Stalin killed many more Russians than the Germans and then don't forget Hiroshima, etc.
In the old days it was common practice to wipe out a whole defeated tribe with maybe a few kept as slaves or wives for the leaders. Just read the OT and you'll get the idea.
[quote=Government Announcer (The Purge)]12 hours every year of legalized crime (well, actually 6 whole years 1939 - 1945) if we want to save our country, we must release all our anger in one night...tonight we'll see the good and evil in everyone...at the siren, all crime, including murder will be legal for the next 12 hours (6 suns) [...]your government thanks you for your participation.[/quote]
No, I really don't think so. It's more like the kind of social studies history lesson you might have seen in high school. I don't detect any agenda. But of course, this film was made in the West, so it's not exactly trying to be fair to the Nazis. So I'll do that.... :-)
Imho, the Nazis were clearly world class evil doers who needed to be shot on sight. Would posters, and especially mods, please read that sentence again. Thank you very much.
However, the Nazis were really just trying to do the same thing that the Brits and Americans did in the creation of their empires. I know the American story better. First we committed genocide of the native peoples, and then we brought in some slaves to improve the land which had been stolen. This is the same game plan the Nazis were working.
The problem the Nazis had was that they were late to the game, and they played the role of evil doers too honestly, thus mobilizing global resistance more than they should have.
One thing that interests me is the degree to which Americans truly and sincerely believed there was a complete total difference between America and Nazi Germany. Meanwhile, while the Nazis are getting rolling in the thirties, we're still lynching blacks in the South, and the Klan was on the march. We'd only finished our big genocide project a generation before.
But anyway, America has slowly moved beyond the worst of that, and I doubt Nazi Germany ever would have. So yea, death to all Nazis. Thank God for the Russians, cause we could have never done it on our own.
What if...just what if...WW3 will be fought over time? I know the idea seems outlandish but consider the following scenario: Imagine the global ecology has collapsed and the earth's ability to sustain life is damaged beyond repair. Some benevolent aliens come to the rescue and open a portal to an inhabitable planet where we can start afresh. However, this portal is open only for a short duration (say 30 minutes at some specified location). Barring some kind of agreement between the nations of the world to maximize the chances of a favorable outcome for the human race as a whole, there's a non-zero probability that a world war (WW 3) will erupt for that 30 minutes the portal will remain open. War, not for space but for time!
Come to think of it, this isn't as crazy as I thought it was. Don't we all compete (a "war" by any other name smells as "sweet") for each other's time? :chin:
I think it's because of the complexity of Great Power politics back then. I find the Great Game conflict between Russia and the UK in Central Asia particularly fascinating.
By contrast, Germany in WWII was led by people who believes their own extreme ideology, and made them ignore military and economic realities. While Germany could conceivably win WWI without too many things changing, it's very hard to see a situation where they could win WWII. It was essentially hopeless.
So, I collect memoirs from around that period, mostly diplomatic. But selection is pretty limited, so I pretty much just grab all 19th and early 20th century diplomatic memoris I can find.
One can speculate how victory for Germany in WWII might have been accomplished.
Instead of invading France and attacking England Hitler might have done this.
All the capitalist powers feared communism. Hitler could have told the Western powers that he was going to end that threat for them. Forget about WWI, make peace with the West, shower France with love notes, don't rock that boat, and attack Russia first. So long as England and France didn't have a target on their back, they may very well have quietly looked away while Hitler crushed communism.
And then, once Hitler has the vast resources of Russia in his pocket, and no more need to fear a two front war, he then can turn westward.
Hitler wasted vast resources bombing England and the Atlantic sea war. All those resources could have been aimed at Russia.
I don't see Poland and the Baltics letting the German army in for an invasion whose success would have been dubious.
And even if we allow this, which is a pretty huge leap, negotiating to invade Russia through other countries means losing the element of surprise, which was Germany's only hope. Once they got into a war of attrition they were doomed against the USSR.
Maybe if they get material support from the Western Allies? But that seems fanciful.
There really was no surprise, everybody knew the Germans were about to invade Russia, except apparently Stalin.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Yes, the key all along was a quick knock out blow. They came pretty close. A few changes here and there, and we'd be typing these comments in German.
:rofl: The last one to find out was supposed to have been the first one to find out! How ironic!
Literally just a few Paris Taxis away from victory :wink:
Quoting Foghorn
In a way, Germany had won a war after the Munich agreement without firing a shot. Versailles overturned, a greater Germany realised. Of course it could only get there because it was planning a wider war.
Quoting Foghorn
Or so everyone thought at the time. In reality, a knock out blow would have to have been political, in the sense that the Soviet Union simply looses the will to fight. In retrospect, this seems unlikely.
Quoting tim wood
Yeah, maybe, though of course there is no shortage of memoirs about the war.
Yea, good point. But once all your tanks and factories have been destroyed, the will no longer matters. I still think German victory was within reach, but obviously they blew it.
That tends to be my view too. If we leave aside the issue of which side murdered more people than the other side, it seems to me that this was simply a struggle for resources, i.e. a continuation of the imperial expansions of the 1800s and early 1900s.
Basically, the Allies couldn't afford to let the Germans grab the oil fields of North Africa and the Mid East just as they were not prepared to let the Japanese seize oil and other resources in the Dutch East Indies and French Indochina. This is why the Germans were hoping at least to get their hands on Russian oil. But for some strange reason they messed up that opportunity.
But I agree that Hitler made the same classical mistake as Napoleon. Taking France that was just next door was a good move but Russia was a totally different thing altogether. You need to have serious logistics for that and I'm not sure the Germans were really prepared for it.
If the Germans had taken French North Africa and its oil fields, it might have been different but as it was, how do you conduct a war of that magnitude without oil to fuel your tanks and planes?
I don't know much about the war to be honest, but I think a lot of questions remain unanswered. The Soviets had been planning to conquer Germany in the 1920s when they invaded Poland and Stalin had similar plans in the 1930s. Both Hitler and Stalin were strategic chess players. Did Hitler think he could beat Stalin before Stalin made his own move on Germany? The way Hitler and Stalin divided Poland between themselves looks very suspicious to me. They must have had a reason for that and that could only have been that both of them planned to invade one another. What do you think?
Yes, the scale of the effort was breathtaking. You have to feed millions of soldiers, and keep fuel in thousands of tanks. And both keep getting ever farther away from home.
Quoting Apollodorus
Yes, Hitler wanted to lock down Poland before he took on Russia. Russia was hoping the Germans would be happy with Poland, or least that the Russians could buy time. Even after the German invasion of Russia Stalin was still hoping he could negotiate. The irony is that ever a person as ruthless as Stalin didn't fully grasp how utterly ruthless the Nazis were.
It reminds me of the movie Independence Day, where the President asks the alien what he wants from us. The alien answers, "Die!"
Didn't they move all those behind the Urals? Also I think the Soviet field armies were destroyed twice over, but were replaced regardless.
Quoting Apollodorus
I think it'd be a mistake to ignore the extend to which Hitler's ideology motivated the course of the war. Resources were but one part of the equation.
Quoting Apollodorus
He just thought it was the natural course of events. To Hitler, nature ordained that Germany and Russia would be enemies and that the superior Germans would win.
However, the rhetoric about Russia being England's weapon on the mainland suggests a lot of resentment about the UK's stubborn refusal to yield was part of the equation. To Hitler, that probably was a betrayal of their "race" just as the declaration of war over Belgium in WW1.
Well, we can't ignore the fact that England had its own agenda. After all, we are talking about the largest empire in history and I'm sure there were plans to recover or at least save some of that past glory. And resources like oil were definitely a large factor in the equation. Conflicts of this type are always over resources.
I think it's difficult to establish Hitler's exact thinking. He had only come to power recently and he was probably still developing a coherent strategy. Stalin had been in power from the 1920s, so he had a long history and is much easier to read. Also, he had a comprehensive Marxist ideology to back up his actions.
In a way, when two big guys like that decide to fight it out some might be inclined to think "fair enough, let's sit and watch" or something. But the tragedy is that there are many smaller guys that get dragged into it and they just get squashed for no fault of theirs.
Also, Mao came to power and that was another big tragedy for Tibet, Vietnam and other smaller guys. A big and tragic mess really. It isn't just about Hitler and Stalin.
Yes, Nazi ideology, built on top of resentments over WWI, the Versailles treaty, and a decade of weak government and economic problems during the Weimar Republic drove German policy from the early 1930s.
Germany had a number of critical resources (land, coal, iron ore, industrial know-how) but 20th century technology required a lot of materiél that it didn't have--various metals, rubber, petroleum, and so on. If it was going to feed itself and a large military, it needed more food production. (A good share of German agriculture was not very efficient or was conducted on heavy wet soils.). If it were to be independent of imported food, it would need more agricultural land.
It is open to question whether Germany ever had the resources to win the war it attempted. Take population: in 1939, there were 12,000,000 German men between the ages of 15 and 34. A large portion of these were already in the military. Granted, some soldiers would come from acquired lands, but the pool had definite limits. By the end of the war, children were being pressed into service.
Suppose the USSR had collapsed, or at least retreated east of the Ural Mts; world peace a la Deutschland uber alles would not have been the instant result. Generals in both Japan and Germany warned their leaders about the untapped military power of the United States. The USSR had resources east of the Ural range, and (presumably) an intact and effective government. .
Still, had the USSR collapsed or retreated, it would have been exceedingly bad news for the rest of the world.
I put the start of the war before then. Maybe at the time of the destruction of the Tower of Babel.
I'm going to take a more abstract (philosophical?) stance on WWII. I think WWII (mainly German Nazism, Italian Fascism, and Japanese nationalism) and the Soviet Union are products of differing notions of 19th century ideas of "progress" in a metaphysical/totalizing form. It's the idea that society itself is some reified existential being that has its own trajectory and will. One can place it even earlier with the 18th century notions of Enlightenment (the French Revolution/Reign of Terror). First off, Nazism/Fascism is an ideology, as is Marxism/Communism. These ideas developed from:
1) Utopianism ala Enlightenment-progress. This first reared its head in the French Revolution. You had the Jacobins, Sans-Coulattes, and Dantonists who wanted to start history anew with months like Thermidor and the like. This got its wings in Marxist ideas of the "withering of the state" after a workers takeover.
2) Hegelian ideas of "progress" in history. He thought that each stage in history had nascent in it a contradiction leading to the next level. To him, the Prussian State circa 1820s was the height of historical progress and the last stage.. but it was the groundwork for Marx's economic version of this.
3) Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil and Ubermensch. Certainly, the version corrupted by Hitler/German racists was not what Nietzsche was necessarily saying, but the idea that a new dawn of history where morals of the past were set aside for a new one based on taking power (yes yes not in the original sense but still influential in its corrupted form).
4) Karl Marx- took Hegel's approach and made it about economic stages.. At the end is withering away of state and a final stage in history-society.
There's some other ones liker Herder and Fichte, Sorel, Spencer, and the like in there, but these are the major ones I believe.
The Soviet Union, Italian Fascism, and German/Japanese ethnic-based fascism are all kind of totalizing ideas of history that was a culmination of the 19th century ideas in political-social theory.
The Anglo-American ideal of a relatively free economic system was a holdover from the 18th century ideas of market ideas.. The liberal version of this is mixed economy with strong emphasis on multiculturalism.. a holdover from mainly pragmatism of late 19th early 20th century. Cultural pluralism, etc.
I agree that the Three Fascisms were totalizing systems as was the USSR. Stalin was bad news all round--ruthless, dictatorial, paranoid, etc. but that doesn't make the USSR fascist. Fascism is not the clearest ideology. There are differences among the three. A brutal state doesn't have to be fascist, but fascist states tend to brutal. Do you count Francisco Franco as a fascist?
No, I don't think we can lay the blame for Fascism, whether in Germany, Italy, Spain, Japan, or anywhere else on the Enlightenment's doorstep. Marxism is a different matter. It seems to me that fascism is a rejection of enlightenment values. What does "authoritarian and racialized ultranationalism, characterized by dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition, and strong regimentation of society and of the economy" have to do with the enlightenment?
:up: That probably wouldn't be wrong.
History of military conflict has twice proven (Napoleon & Hitler) that to invade Russia is to invite Russia. :rofl:
Somehow the two words, "invade" and "invite" got lost in translation. Anyway, if one must at the end of the day invite Russia, why invade in the first place? Around Jack Robinson's barn we happily go!