The introduction seems questionable. Practically in every category that counted Americans were ahead. Artillery The God of War, number of tanks vastly outnumbering Germans and Sherman was as good as PzIV, Airpower, motorized transport. Most importantly logistics Americans had food, clothing, fuel. The way that intro is written it sounds like he is talking about Finland vs USSR ;)
The Real War 1939-1945 (1989)
21–30 of 172 posts
Re: The Real War 1939-1945 (1989)
#22No post body was provided.
Re: The Real War 1939-1945 (1989)
#23I watch https://www.youtube.com/user/funker530 for this reason. It is not a gore channel. Their intent is to document what actual combat is like. I have never served and likely never will given my age. My only rational is to stay informed. One of my enduring memories of childhood is the nightly casualty reports on the news and pictures of body bags from Vietnam. The US military is incredibly professional now compared to the 60's which is good. The downside is that our Gov't is quick to use them without thinking about the long term consequences.
Re: The Real War 1939-1945 (1989)
#24This meditation on World War II and memory is probably my favorite essay ever: "Losing the War" by Lee Sandlin https://www.leesandlin.com/articles/LosingTheWar.htm Sandlin refers to Fussell's writings on the war too. It's long, but every time I look it up I end up re-reading all of it.
If anyone is interested in Vietnam "The Things They Carried" by Tim O'Brien is excellent.
Re: The Real War 1939-1945 (1989)
#25I think Fussel had a point in 1989, but after that there's been plenty of depictions of war that have been less sanitized. "The Pacific" comes to mind in TV, and "Fury" in movies, even if it's very formulaic.
Memoirs can be raw too:
- https://gerikson.com/blog/books/read/Helmet-For-My-Pillow.ht...
- https://gerikson.com/blog/books/read/With-the-Old-Breed.html
And even before 1989 novels like Waugh's "Sword of Honour" trilogy problematized WW2.
Re: The Real War 1939-1945 (1989)
#26I can strongly recommend Fussel's (the author of this essay) book "The Boys' Crusade", which provides a very eye opening account to WWII. It is most likely a longer version of this essay (I haven't read this essay). I can also recommend his book Poetic Meter & Poetic Form, but for different reasons. Other books in the same vein: - The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle by J Glenn Gray (Gray was a philosophy PhD a…
Not about war, but the same author's Class: A Guide Through the American Status System , published in 1983, is insightful and very entertaining. Incidentally, if anyone knows of a worthy successor, I'd love to read it. His observations remain remarkably accurate in most cases (his completely-off take on "Class X" notwithstanding) but there must be more to say on the topic since then.
Bobos in Paradise by David Brooks is "what happened when the upper middle class became class X". You could argue whether it's worthy or not, but it's what we've got.
Re: The Real War 1939-1945 (1989)
#27"They knew that in its representation to the laity, what was happening to them was systematically sanitized and Norman Rockwellized, not to mention Disneyfied." The author seems to have little understanding of how much this was true of World War 1, or probably every large scale war ever. The home audiences for news reports in World War 1 (in pretty much every country) were not allowed to know how FUBB'd things were,…
The author does mention this: “IN THE POPULAR AND GENTEEL ICONOGRAPHY OF war during the bourgeois age, all the way from eighteenth and nineteenth-century history paintings to twentieth-century photographs, the bodies of the dead are intact, if inert, sometimes bloody and sprawled in awkward positions, but, except for the absence of life, plausible and acceptable simulacra of the people they once were.”
It is because the propaganda machine does not want you to see what the war is about. They dont want you to see bodies of desecrated children spread all over the place.
Re: The Real War 1939-1945 (1989)
#28Bizarre to write something called "the real war" that is focused on American forces, who were, by any measure, enjoying vast advantages and resources unavailable to other combatants (including being able to choose the time and place of engagement). Below is a table of WWII military casualties by nation:
World War II casualties - Wikipedia
Soviet Union 8,668,000 to 11,400,000
Germany 4,440,000 to 5,318,000
China (1937–1945) 3,000,000 to 3,750,000+
Japan 2,100,000 to 2,300,000
United States 407,300
United Kingdom including Crown Colonies 383,700
Italy (in postwar 1947 borders) 319,200[68] to 341,000Re: The Real War 1939-1945 (1989)
#29I didn't fight in WW2 obviously, but I did fight in a war. For me, the reticence to describe every detail to people who weren't there boils down to this: I don't want my wife, my children, or my neighbors to be burdened with thinking of something so horrible. I want them to be happy and safe, that's why I went. No need to bring it to their doorstep if I don't have to. I suspect many during and after WW2 felt this way…
> I don't want my wife, my children, or my neighbors to be burdened with thinking of something so horrible.
Interesting. Until very recently, as far as I could know, my mother's life began at 16. She refused to talk about anything from her childhood.
I don't know if, like you, she didn't want to traumatize us or simply didn't want to think about it at all. But now, in her late 80s, she'll sometimes absent-mindedly relate some story from her childhood. They are all kid stories, but the perspective in them can be hair raising. (She was a child in an occupied country during WWII in the pacific; then immediately as the war ended the country became a different war zone, so she only knew living in that kind of environment until she left the country to go to university).
Recently I've been thinking of this because of the Ukraine war. I have seen at close range the impact of a generation of kids (like my mother in law, and others in her village) who grew up in postwar Germany with essentially no adult men around. That whole generation is pretty screwed up, and their kids (my generation) also reflect that impact. While my personal opinion is that Germany is not doing anywhere near enough to help Ukraine, I think they should be preparing a for a huge postwar assistance, not just money for rebuilding, but psychological / therapy based on their experience to try to reduce the effects of wartime trauma on Ukraine.
Re: The Real War 1939-1945 (1989)
#30I think Fussel had a point in 1989, but after that there's been plenty of depictions of war that have been less sanitized. "The Pacific" comes to mind in TV, and "Fury" in movies, even if it's very formulaic. Memoirs can be raw too: - https://gerikson.com/blog/books/read/Helmet-For-My-Pillow.ht... - https://gerikson.com/blog/books/read/With-the-Old-Breed.html And even before 1989 novels like Waugh's "Sword of Honour"…
After skimming the article, I can't shake the feeling that the author fell for Wehrmacht propaganda when it comes to equipment. The Wehrmacht lacked auto and semi automatic infantry weapons, the main rifle was bolt action . SMGs were not half as widespread as propaganda reel made it look and having the first true general purpose MG is not a war winner in itself. The only German tank from 42/43 onwards, when the US started to see combat angainst the Nazis, that could outgun Western allied tanks was the Tiger (great gun, but no longer up to date on armor), Panther (mostly used on the Eastern Front, inreliable and with weak side armor) and the Tiger II (available in homeopathic doses). The occassions where Tigers were encountered in France are far less numerous than believed, also because a barely on-par Panzer 4 kind of looks like a Tiger I. The bulk of the Wehrmacht was on foot, horse drawn, barely above WW1 infantey force. The highly mechanized army fielding invincible super tanks and vehicles is a propaganda myth.
And everything beyond heavy weapons, like boots, load bearing equipment, trucks, rubber, food, sweets, you name it, the Western allies were lightyears aheaf of the Nazis. And since those things hint at highly effecient supply chains, the Allies also out performed the Nazis on spare parts and medical supplies.
EDIT: That the author was a WW2 vet doesn't mean he couldn't fall for some scewed view of the enmies capabilities, because of course you can. Not war related, but the things that go well are taken for granted while the things not going well, in reality or just perception, stand out.