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Tag Archives: World War Two

They Weren’t Warriors

20 Tuesday Sep 2016

Posted by jrbenjamin in War

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Brave Men, Bravery, Ernie Pyle, history, Soldiers, War, World War Two

US Soldiers in WW2

“They weren’t warriors. They were American boys who by mere chance of fate had wound up with guns in their hands, sneaking up a death-laden street in a strange and shattered city in a faraway country in a driving rain. They were afraid, but it was beyond their power to quit. They had no choice. They were good boys. I talked with them all afternoon as we sneaked slowly forward along the mysterious and rubbled street, and I know they were good boys. And even though they weren’t warriors born to kill, they won their battles. That’s the point.

[…]

Even the dizziest of us knew that before long many of us stood an excellent chance of being in this world no more. I don’t believe one of us was afraid of the physical part of dying. That isn’t the way it is. The emotion is rather one of almost desperate reluctance to give up the future. I suppose that’s splitting hairs and that it really comes under the heading of fear. Yet somehow there is a difference.

These gravely-yearned-for futures of men going into battle include so many things — things such as seeing the ‘old lady’ again, of going to college, of staying in the Navy for a career, of holding on your knee just once your own kid whom you’ve never seen, of again becoming champion salesman of your territory, of driving a coal truck around the streets of Kansas City once more and, yes, even of just sitting in the sun once more on the south side of a house in New Mexico. When we huddled around together on the dark decks, it was these little hopes and ambitions that made up the sum total of our worry… rather than any visualization of physical agony to come.”

__________

Pulled from two sections of Brave Men, Ernie Pyle’s eyewitness account of World War II.

Photo cred: History.com

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They Were Men

27 Monday Jun 2016

Posted by jrbenjamin in History, Sports, War

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army, Army Rangers, Athletics, Boxing, D-Day, Football, Military, Randolph Milholland, Sports, Training, World War Two

Robert Kennedy

“Every American boy should be made to play football and box and participate in all kinds of athletics, and above all the American should be taught discipline and decent living. Then he should be given a year of the toughest kind of military training, not the kind that we know, but the kind I gave my Rangers.

God, but I wish I had those boys now; we would tear the Germans stringy. I hear of those boys now and then and although they are almost all gone now, they have done unbelievable things and are spoken of almost in a tone of reverence by officers and men alike who have fought with them.

They were men.”

__________

The closing of Major Randolph Millholland’s letter to his daughter, Ginnie Schry, on December 22, 1944. Millholland trained the 29th Rangers for the D-Day invasion, leading them in a five-week course in amphibious landing, cliff scaling, and hand-to-hand combat. The group was ultimately disbanded and never saw combat as a unit, though Millholland’s men were later deployed separately throughout Europe.

I found this excerpt in chapter four of John Robert Slaughter’s book Omaha Beach and Beyond. The picture is of Bobby Kennedy, taken by Jacques Lowe, and available at 1stDibs.

Move on:

  • The story of the photographer who stormed Omaha Beach
  • “Who wants it more?”
  • How the Spartans scared the Greek army with one word

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Squaring off against Japanese Soldiers

09 Monday May 2016

Posted by jrbenjamin in War

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army, Black Sand: Fighting Alongside John Basilone from Boot Camp to Iwo Jima, Chuck Tatum, combat, Emperor Hirohito, Fighting, George Lutchkus, Guadalcanal, history, Japan, marines, memoir, Pearl Harbar, Red Blood, War, World War Two

Japanese Soldiers

“Unleashing unrestricted mayhem against fellow humans was contrary to everything I had been taught by my parents and Sunday school teachers, but I was forced to justify the decision to be a Marine and learn to kill Japs.

My rationale… was simple. I felt it was my first duty to protect my country and family from Japanese aggression. I would trust God to deal with the religious part of my internal conflicts… I also adopted a fatalistic approach. If the training we endured didn’t kill us, the enemy would.

During a marching break one hot afternoon, a Marine remarked, ‘Screw all the training. I’m sick and tired of all this pussy-footing around. I want to get overseas and slap me a Jap!’

This remark was made in the presence of Sergeant George Lutchkus, who immediately cut him off, saying: ‘Hold on, Sonny! Let me tell all of you a thing or two about the Japanese soldier! Number one, he is not the caricature you see in newspapers with bombsight glasses and buckteeth. The average Japanese soldier has five or more years of combat experience. Their Army doesn’t have a ‘boot division’ like ours. Don’t forget, the Japs have already conquered half the nations in Asia. Remember Pearl Harbor? Not only are they better trained than you are right now, many are old hands at combat fighting and have a strict military code they live and die by called Bushido. Literally translated it means ‘way of the warrior.’ With their code, combined with their pledge to die for Emperor Hirohito, who they consider God, they will die before surrendering.

‘Jap soldiers are well equipped and are experts with their weapons. They are trained to endure hardships, which would have most of you guys writing your congressman. I don’t like Japs, but I respect them as fellow soldiers. I learned my respect the hard way on Guadalcanal.

‘Japs are the world’s best snipers, experts at the art of camouflage, and get by on a diet of fish heads and rice. They will never surrender and will commit hari-kari rather than be taken prisoner.

‘Heck, they don’t have corpsmen; if they are wounded, they are considered damaged goods. So, sonny, mull that over, and don’t ever let me hear you complain about your training again. There will be a time when your life will depend on what you learn in the days ahead.’”

__________

Pulled from the section “Know Your Enemy” in Chuck Tatum’s memoir Red Blood, Black Sand: Fighting Alongside John Basilone from Boot Camp to Iwo Jima.

Remember this excerpt the next time someone debates the ethics of The Bomb. There will be a time when your life will depend on what you learn.

Read on:

  • When the rich fought on the front lines
  • How Washington led in battle
  • Glory’s moonshine

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Dick Winters on Staying Disciplined under Pressure

12 Tuesday Apr 2016

Posted by jrbenjamin in War

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Band of Brothers, Beyond Band of Brothers: The War Memoirs of Major Dick Winters, combat, D-Day, Dick Winters, Discipline, Exercise, history, War, World War Two

Dick Winters

“In an attempt to escape the tension that combat caused, I developed a heavier than usual exercise regimen and I attended church on a regular basis. There were only a few days that I didn’t run two to three miles, do eighty push-ups, sixty sit ups on a foot locker, a couple of splits, and some leg and trunk exercises after the day’s work was over. As a result I kept in pretty good shape — not what I’d call wrestling shape, but good enough for army work. Physical activity kept me mentally alert, built up my endurance, and kept me supple.

Another thing I noted about being overseas and away from home was that I found myself not giving a damn about trivial things. Maybe I was spoiled. If I received mail, good, but it didn’t bother me one way or another if I didn’t. The only value about receiving mail is that it temporarily took my mind off my work and back to the land I dreamed of all the time… On Sundays, I prepared for church, buttons shined, boots polished, and ribbons in neat rows on my tunic. I considered it a very special privilege to be able to go to church and I didn’t want to miss the chance. If combat had taught me anything, it taught me what was essential in life and what wasn’t. In my prayers before D-Day, I had always thanked God for what He had done for the world in general and asked that others would be given a break in the future. I had also thanked Him for a lot of things that I now found to be insignificant. The only thing I asked for now was to be alive tomorrow morning and to survive another day. That was all that mattered — that was the only thing as far as wanting anything for myself. All other things had become extra, nonessential, and I could not be bothered or burdened with nonessentials. Not when battle was the payoff. […]

Evening allowed a few minutes of quiet reflection… The Germans were evidently not as tired as we were because they fired their machine guns all night and hollered like a bunch of drunken kids having a party. Before I dozed off, I did not forget to get on my knees and thank God for helping me to live through this day and ask His help on D+1. I would live this war one day at a time, and I promised myself that if I survived, I would find a small farm somewhere in the Pennsylvania countryside and spend the remainder of my life in quiet and peace.”

__________

Pulled from Dick Winters’s war memoirs Beyond Band of Brothers. Winters parachuted into Normandy on D-Day as the commander of Easy Company, as shown in the HBO series Band of Brothers.

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Our Next Series of Demands

03 Tuesday Nov 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in History

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American History, Averell Harriman, Capitalism, Communism, Diplomacy, Government, history, Joseph Stalin, Maxim Litvinov, Paul Johnson, peace, politics, Reflections on a Ravaged Century, Robert Conquest, Russia, Soviet Union, War, World War Two, Yalta Conference

World Leaders at the Yalta Conference, 1945

“In November 1945 Maxim Litvinov, at that time Deputy Foreign Minister of the USSR (who, as his wife told me, had become not merely tactically but even ideologically disenchanted), was asked by the American envoy Averell Harriman what the West could do to satisfy Stalin. He answered: ‘Nothing.’ In June 1946, still in that post, he warned a Western journalist that the ‘root cause’ of the confrontation was ‘the ideological conception prevailing here that conflict between the Communist and capitalist worlds is inevitable’ — that is, no more than the doctrine long since announced by Lenin that ‘a series of frightful clashes’ were bound to occur between the two systems, leading finally to the world victory of communism. When the correspondent asked Litvinov, ‘Suppose the West would suddenly give in and grant all Moscow’s demands?… would that lead to goodwill and the easing of the present tension?’ Litvinov answered, ‘It would lead to you being faced, after a more or less short time, with our next series of demands.'”

__________

Excerpted from Robert Conquest’s Reflections on a Ravaged Century. In the book, Conquest, who Paul Johnson calls “our greatest living historian,” offers a blistering critique of not just Marx and his acolytes, but of the more general tendency for human beings to believe too strongly in the redemptive power of radical ideas and institutions.

On another level, in reading Litvinov’s ominous response, I was struck not by its application to today’s Russia (though some may argue that), but by how it reflects the unspoken approaches of so many groups and movements, both internal and external.

The photograph was taken at the 1945 Yalta Conference. Harriman is in the background, second from the right.

There’s more:

  • Why Stalin hated Trotsky
  • How today’s Britain, Germany, and France have reconciled their roles in World War II
  • The Nightmarish Child: Vladimir Lenin’s last days

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How the Great War Created the Modern State

26 Monday Oct 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in History, Politics, War

≈ 1 Comment

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A. J. P. Taylor, Britain, British History, Conservativism, England, English History, European History, Government, history, Liberalism, Paul Cambon, politics, The New Cambridge Modern History: 1898-1945, War, Winston Churchill, World War One, World War Two

A.J.P. Taylor

“Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman.

He could live where he liked and as he liked. He had no official number or identity card. He could travel abroad or leave his country for ever without a passport or any sort of official permission. He could exchange his money for any other currency without restriction or limit. He could buy goods from any country in the world on the same terms as he bought goods at home. For that matter, a foreigner could spend his life in this country without permit and without informing the police. Unlike the countries of the European continent, the state did not require its citizens to perform military service. An Englishman could enlist, if he chose, in the regular army, the navy, or the territorials. He could also ignore, if he chose, the demands of national defence. Substantial householders were occasionally called on for jury service. Otherwise, only those helped the state who wished to do so. The Englishman paid taxes on a modest scale: nearly £200 million in 1913-14, or rather less than 8 percent of the national income… [B]roadly speaking, the state acted only to help those who could not help themselves. It left the adult citizen alone.

All this was changed by the impact of the Great War. The mass of the people became, for the first time, active citizens. Their lives were shaped by orders from above; they were required to serve the state instead of pursuing exclusively their own affairs. Five million men entered the armed forces, many of them (though a minority) under compulsion. The Englishman’s food was limited, and its quality changed, by government order. His freedom of movement was restricted; his conditions of work prescribed. Some industries were reduced or closed, others artificially fostered. The publication of news was fettered. Street lights were dimmed. The sacred freedom of drinking was tampered with: licensed hours were cut down, and the beer watered by order. The very time on the clocks was changed. From 1916 onwards, every Englishman got up an hour earlier in summer than he would otherwise have done, thanks to an act of parliament. The state established a hold over it citizens which, though relaxed in peacetime, was never to be removed and which the second World war was again to increase.”

__________

Pulled from the opening chapter “The Effects and Origins of the Great War” in A. J. P. Taylor’s English History, 1914-1945.

In The New Cambridge Modern History: 1898-1945, there’s a substantial discussion of this link between the First and Second World Wars and the rise of the modern administrative state. A summary paragraph:

Until after 1847 direct income tax had been a device almost peculiar to Great Britain… During the 1890s, pari passu with the great expansion of governmental expenditures on armaments as well as on social services, Germany and her component states, as well as Italy, Austria, Norway, and Spain, all introduced or steepened systems of income tax. French governments repeatedly shied away from it, though they resorted to progressive death duties in 1901, and it was 1917 before a not very satisfactory system of income tax was introduced. The great fiscal burdens of war accustomed people to heavier taxation.

In 1920, Paul Cambon, France’s ambassador to Britain, told Winston Churchill, “In the twenty years I have been here I have witnessed an English Revolution more profound and searching than the French Revolution itself.” He continued, “The governing class have been almost entirely deprived of political power and to a very large extent of their property and estates; and this has been accomplished almost imperceptibly and without the loss of a single life.” Cambridge summarizes this: “If M. Cambon was exaggerating in 1920, he was perceptively prophetic, for his description became substantially true after the second world war.”

Read on:

  • What’s the point of reading history if you’ll just forget it later?
  • How Wittgenstein found god (and wrote a masterpiece) in the trenches of World War One
  • David McCullough provides an unbeatable answer to the question why history matters

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What Is Mein Kampf about?

12 Saturday Sep 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in History

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Adolf Hitler, Anti-Semitism, biology, Bloodlands, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin, Capitalism, Communism, Darwinism, evolution, Graduate Institute of Geneva, history, Hitler's World, Ideology, Jews, Judaism, Leon Trotsky, Mein Kampf, Nazis, Nazism, new York Review of Books, Race Theory, racism, Saint Paul, speech, World War Two

Adolf Hitler in Color

“Mein Kampf is fundamentally a text about nature. About what belongs in nature and what doesn’t belong in nature.

It describes nature as a conflict of races; everything else is incidental. The only things which truly exists in the human world are races, and the only thing they’re supposed to be doing is competing for land and resources.

In this text, the Jews figure not as a race — not as an inferior race, not as a superior race — but as something totally supernatural which has somehow come into the world and introduced evil.

The Jews have an ability which is, in effect, superhuman. They can do one thing that no one else can do, and that’s bring ways of thinking into the world.

So from Hitler’s point of view, the Jews are not actually subhuman. They’re more like superhuman, though that’s not quite right either. From Hitler’s point of view, and from the point of view of several leading Nazis, the Jews are not really human at all. They’re para-human: they only appear to be human, but are actually something else.

The evil that the Jews have introduced into the world — and this strikes me as very important — is ethical thinking. What the Jews have done which is so wrong, is to confuse our minds by introducing ideas which are not about racial struggle. They’ve introduced ethical life to the world.

So Hitler presents capitalism as Jewish; he presents communism as Jewish; he presents Christianity as Jewish.

Why? Because all of these ideas, different though they might seem, have the common feature that they allow people to see each other in non-racial terms. Whether I’m signing a contract with you, making a revolution with you, attending mass with you, it’s not race that matters. It’s some kind of other reciprocity.

Therefore Hitler could say, as he did say, that Saint Paul was basically the same person as Leon Trotsky…

Nature can only be pure if the Jews are gone, because Jews are the special, supernatural beings who make us something that we’re not.”

__________

Timothy Snyder, speaking in Krakow at the “Unimaginable” conference earlier this year. (He also touches on these themes around minute 20 in this 2013 talk at the Graduate Institute of Geneva.)

Snyder, who teaches history at Yale, has a new book out, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Writing. I can highly recommend not only his talks like the one above, but his written work, which is dynamic and crisp, and shows a true mastering of the broad political, cultural, and military forces of the early 20th century. His last effort, the highly acclaimed, subversive history of the second world war Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin, has a place at the top of my shelf.

To get a condensed version of Snyder’s take on the ideology of the Reich, you can check out his article soon to be published in the New York Review of Books, “Hitler’s World”. In it, he gives depth to some of the concepts detailed above (Snyder has clearly been fixated on the project of clearing up Hitlerite ideology for some time). The following slice is among the most informative of the piece, and it lays bare the claims of those on both sides of the religious-atheist debate who try to claim the Führer as their opponents’ ally:

Hitler’s presentation of the Jewish threat revealed his particular amalgamation of religious and zoological ideas. If the Jew triumphs, Hitler wrote, “then his crown of victory will be the funeral wreath of the human species.” On the one hand, Hitler’s image of a universe without human beings accepted science’s verdict of an ancient planet on which humanity had evolved. After the Jewish victory, he wrote, “earth will once again wing its way through the universe entirely without humans, as was the case millions of years ago.” At the same time, as he made clear in the very same passage of My Struggle, this ancient earth of races and extermination was the Creation of God. “Therefore I believe myself to be acting according to the wishes of the Creator. Insofar as I restrain the Jew, I am defending the work of the Lord.”

Continue on topic:

  • The astounding truth that Hitler was a champion couch potato
  • How Britain, Germany, and France have reconciled their roles in WW2
  • Viktor Frankl’s inspiring take on how love survived the camps

Timothy Snyder

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The Nazis’ Astonishing Conquest of France

07 Friday Aug 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in History, War

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A Short History of World War II, Adolf Hitler, Ardennes, Charles de Gaulle, Erich von Manstein, European History, Fedor von Bock, Ferdinand Foch, French History, Gerd von Rundstedt, Heinz Guderian, James L. Stokesbury, Luftwaffe, Maginot Line, Maurice Gamelin, Military, military history, Monsieur Jerôme Barzetti, Napoleon Bonaparte, Nazis, Nazism, Schlieffen Plan, The Fall of France, The Weeping Frenchman, Third Reich, Vichy France, War, warfare, Winston Churchill, World War Two

Hitler in Paris

“[T]he French based their operational plan [for repelling a Nazi invasion] on four assumptions…

These assumptions were, first, that the Maginot Line was indeed impregnable; second, that the Ardennes Forest north of it was impassable; third, that the Germans were therefore left with no option but a wheel through the Low Countries [Belgium and Holland], a replay of the Schlieffen Plan of 1914; and fourth, that to meet and defeat this, the French would advance into Belgium and Holland and come to their aid as soon as the war started. The Anglo-French were sure, correctly, that the minute the first German stepped over the frontier, the Dutch and Belgians would hastily abandon their neutrality and start yelling for help.

Materially, though they were unaware of it, the Allies were more than ready for the Germans. Figures vary so widely — wildly even — that one can choose any set to make any argument desired. In 1940, the French high command was speaking of 7,000 German tanks, deliberately overestimating them to cover themselves in the event of a disaster. What this did for French morale can readily be imagined. Figures now available give a comparison something like this:

German Men: 2,000,000
Divisions: 136
Tanks: 2,439
Aircraft: 3,200

Allied Men: 4,000,000
Divisions: 135
Tanks: 2,689
Aircraft: 2,400

Nazi Germany Invasion of France

The original [Nazi] plan called for a drive north of Liège [Blue ‘X’ on the map above]; Hitler now changed it to straddle Liège, that is, he moved the axis of the attack farther south. Finally, he was convinced by von Rundstedt’s chief of staff, General Erich von Manstein, that the plan ought to be reversed. Instead of making the main effort in the north, the Germans would go through the Ardennes; instead of Schlieffen, there would be ‘Sichelschnitt,’ a ‘sickle cut’ that would slice through the French line at its weak point and envelop the northern armies as they rushed to the defense of the Belgians and Dutch. Manstein was an infantryman and was uncertain about the Ardennes; he approached General Heinz Guderian, the recognized German tank authority, who said it could be done. Hitler jumped at it immediately, and the plan was turned around. The assumptions on which the French had planned their campaign were now totally invalidated. […]

In the early dawn of May 10 the Germans struck.

There were the usual Luftwaffe attacks at Allied airfields and communications centers, and by full day the Germans were rolling forward all along the Dutch and Belgian frontiers. The whole plan depended upon making the Allies think it was 1914 all over again. Therefore, the initial weight of the attack was taken by General von Bock’s Army Group B advancing into Holland. Strong infantry and armor attacks were carried out, along with heavy aerial bombardment, and paratroop and airborne landings on key airfields at The Hague and Rotterdam, and bridges across the major rivers. The Dutch hastened to their advanced positions, some of which they managed to hold for two or three days, others of which they were levered off almost immediately.

The whole campaign of Holland took a mere four days.

Nazis in Paris

The mass of French armor was in Belgium and Holland and busy with its own battle. The French tried; they threw an armored division, newly organized under General de Gaulle, at the southern German flank. This attack later became one of the pillars of de Gaulle’s reputation — he at least had fought — yet it achieved nothing more than the destruction of his division. The few gains the French tanks made could not be held against the Germans sweeping by, and they hardly noticed that there was anything special about this attack.

As the Germans went on toward Cambrai, toward the sea, the new British Prime Minister, Churchill, came over to see what on earth was going on. He visited [French Commander-in-chief Maurice] Gamelin and looked at the maps. Surely, he said, if the head of the German column was far to the west, and the tail was far to the east, they must be thin somewhere. Why did the French not attack with their reserves? In his terrible French he asked Gamelin where the French reserves were. Gamelin replied with an infuriating Gallic shrug: there were no reserves. Churchill went home appalled.

Hitler was determined to rub it in. The armistice talks were held at Rethondes, in the railway carriage where the Germans had surrendered to [former Head Allied] Marshal [Ferdinand] Foch in 1918. The Germans occupied northern France and a strip along the Atlantic coast down to the Spanish frontier. They retained the French prisoners of war, more than a million of them, and used them in effect as hostages for the good behavior of the new French government, set up at the small health resort of Vichy. They wanted the French fleet demobilized in French ports, but under German control. The French agreed to essentially everything; there was little else they could do but accept the humiliation of defeat. After their delegation signed the surrender terms, Hitler danced his little victory jig outside the railway carriage and ordered that it be hauled off to Germany. He left the statue of Foch, but the plaque commemorating Germany’s surrender twenty-two years ago was blown up.

Parisian during Nazi invasion

On the morning of the 25th, the sun rose over a silent France. The cease-fire had come into effect during the hours of darkness. The refugees could now go home or continue their flight unharassed by the dive-bombers. Long silent columns of prisoners shuffled east. The French generals and politicians began composing their excuses, the Germans paraded through Paris, visited the tourist sites, and began counting their booty. It had indeed been one of the great campaigns of all time, better than 1870, probably unequaled since Napoleon’s veterans had swarmed over Prussia in 1806; Jena and Auerstadt were at last avenged, and there would be no more victories over Germany while the thousand-year Reich endured.

The casualties reflected the inequality of the campaign. The Germans had suffered about 27,000 killed, 18,000 missing, and just over 100,000 wounded. The Dutch and Belgian armies were utterly destroyed; the British lost about 68,000 men and all their heavy equipment: tanks, trucks, guns — everything. The French lost track of their figures in the collapse at the end, but the best estimates gave them about 125,000 killed and missing, about 200,000 wounded. The Germans claimed that they had taken one and a half million prisoners, which they probably had. Except for defenseless England, the war appeared all but over.”

__________

Selections from the eighth chapter (“The Fall of France”) in James L. Stokesbury’s A Short History of World War II. Though I’m not if it’s considered AAA historiography by experts in the field, Stokesbury’s book is a highly informative, tight read, divided into episodes that make for good twenty minute immersions in specific topics. I recommend it.

The above photo, often called “The Weeping Frenchman,” was taken several months after the invasion and published in the March 3rd, 1941 edition of Life Magazine. It depicts Monsieur Jerôme Barzetti, a resident of Marseilles who wept as the flags of his country’s last regiments were exiled to Africa. You can read more about it here.

Below: soldiers from the Wehrmacht march down a Parisian boulevard.

Stay on topic:

  • Why the French still seem to deny their role in the war, but the Germans now own theirs
  • The charming Hungarian immigrant who stormed Omaha Beach with a camera
  • Hitler’s ridiculous laziness
  • Churchill’s superhuman energy
  • “Your leaders are crazy”: the leaflet we dropped on Nazi Germany

Nazis in Paris 2

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Who Wants It More?

18 Wednesday Mar 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in History, War

≈ Comments Off on Who Wants It More?

Tags

Alon Peled, Bravery, combat, David Ben-Gurion, Friedrich Nietzsche, George Patton, IDF, Israel, Israeli Army, Israeli History, Meir Amit, Mossad, Napoelon Bonaparte, Vietnam War, War, warfare, World War Two

Soldier at Wailing Wall

“The willingness to fight and die, to sacrifice for a cause, has often been vital in changing history. Napoleon Bonaparte remarked that in war the mental is to the physical as 3:1. George Patton demurred that the mental to the physical is closer to 5:1. In many revolutions (English, American, Russian, Chinese, Vietnamese and Iranian), the side weaker in weapons and numbers but superior in will to fight triumphed. This will to power, as Friedrich Nietzsche asserted, was critical to success. Alon Peled observed that, in modern armies, the most important factors for success are internal cohesion and the dedication of soldiers. Mossad chief Meir Amit asserted that, ‘the human factor is the biggest and most crucial for our society and our security services.’

A weak will to fight has repeatedly led to disaster. In 1940, the French, despite equal numbers of tanks and manpower to the Germans, lacked a will to fight and were defeated in a six-week campaign. In 1975 the South Vietnamese army, despite massive qualitative and quantitative advantage, was rapidly routed by an inferior North Vietnamese army which lacked airplanes, tanks, or sophisticated equipment — but had a greater will to fight…

After millennia of persecution, the Holocaust and Arab terrorism, the Jews had a very strong will to fight. They were well aware that they had nowhere to go. They saw the struggle as a life-and-death one determining the fate of the Jewish people. David Ben Gurion told his commanders that ‘We will not win by military might alone. Even if we could field a larger army, we could not stand. The most important thing is moral and intellectual strength.’ Yigael Yadin, Israel’s first chief of staff, assessed the will to victory as the most important factor in the victory in 1948, for:

If we are to condense all the various factors, and there are many, which brought about victory, I would not hesitate to credit the extraordinary qualities of Israel’s youth, during the War of Independence with that victory. It appears as if that youth has absorbed into itself the full measure of Israel’s yearning, during thousands of years of exile, to return to its soil and to live in liberty and independence, and like a giant spring which had been compressed and held down for a long time to the utmost measure of its compressibility, when suddenly released — it liberated.

During the 1945-48 period they fought against the British Mandatory government and then the Arabs. The British had almost 100,000 soldiers and police, first-class equipment, international legitimacy, Arab support and the halo of their great successes in World War II. The far fewer Jews, unable to mobilize openly, with little military experience, without uniforms or heavy equipment, fought off first the British and then the numericaly superior Arabs to achieve independence in May 1948.”

__________

Pulled from the twelfth chapter of Jonathan Edelman’s The Rise of Israel: A History of a Revolutionary State. The picture: an IDF soldier after recapturing the Wailing Wall in 1967, 18 years after Israel’s independence.

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The Girl Who Wasn’t Anne Frank

28 Saturday Feb 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in History, Interview

≈ Comments Off on The Girl Who Wasn’t Anne Frank

Tags

Bill Moyers, Clive James, Nazism, Sophie Scholl, White Rose Resistance Group, World War Two

Sophie Scholl

Bill Moyers: You dedicate your book [Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts] to four women. Why?

Clive James: Well, it’s a feminist book really. It’s because many of my generation who grew up during World War II, when the men were away at war — some of whom didn’t come back including my father — and the women were all around us, we got the idea it would be a better world if they were running it. And I still think that.

It’s actually dedicated to women who, in my view, are heroines. Two of them are Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Aung San Suu Kyi of Burma. But also Sophie Scholl, who was a German. She was a kid, really. A Roman Catholic, she was 21 years old when she was executed by the the Nazis.

Bill Moyers: Why did you choose her?

Clive James: Well, the White Rose resistance group was a fascinating little bunch of kids. There wasn’t much they could do. They could print a few pamphlets. This was late 1942; Stalingrad hadn’t even happened yet. And all they could do was print a bunch of pamphlets and spread them around protesting the Nazi regime and its treatment of the Jews.

They knew what would happen if they got caught. And they got caught, and it did happen. And Sophie actually could have walked away, because the Nazis realized that it would be better PR if she did. But she wouldn’t; she took the hit along with her brother. It’s a great, great story that’s well known in Germany by now but wasn’t during World War II because the Nazis sat on it. Word has since spread, and by now she’s a heroine and should be all over the world.

Bill Moyers: Because?

Clive James: Because she wasn’t Anne Frank. See, Anne Frank, great as she was — Anne Frank was a victim. She was going to die anyway. Sophie didn’t even have to. Sophie did it because of her solidarity with people like Anne Frank. She was saying there’s a basic human bottom line which you can’t cross. You have to stand up and be counted.

The truth is most of us don’t stand up to be counted. It takes heroism to do it. She was just a natural heroine. And the story has endless implications. Would you have done this, for example? Do you know anyone who has this kind of courage? Wouldn’t you prefer to get on with your life and let those things happen to other people?

__________

The opening exchange in Moyers’s interview with James on Bill Moyers Journal in 2007.

You can pick up a copy of James’s brilliant, expansive survey of civilization Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts or check out more posts and interviews with the Aussie polymath.

Scholl died 72 years ago this week.

More from The War:

  • “Your leaders are crazy”: The ominous leaflet we dropped on Nazi Germany
  • Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s reflective, poetic letter (“Who Am I?”) sent from a Nazi prison
  • Viktor Frankl searches for dignity in the depths of Auschwitz

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Winston Churchill: The Simple, Complex Man

27 Thursday Nov 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in History

≈ Comments Off on Winston Churchill: The Simple, Complex Man

Tags

Adolf Hitler, Aristotle, Arthur Schopenhauer, Britain, Charles Darwin, Fascism, history, Jock Colville, Labour Party, Maurice Maeterlinck, Nazism, Origin of Species, Paul Reid, Plato, Socialism, The Last Lion: Defender of the Realm, The Life of the White Ant, Thomas Malthus, Tory Party, William Manchester, William Shakespeare, World War Two

winston-churchill31

“All who were with him then agree that the Old Man had more important matters on his mind than the sensitive feelings of subordinates. In any event, in time they came to adore him. Jock Colville later recalled, ‘Churchill had a natural sympathy for simple people, because he himself took a simple view of what was required; and he hated casuistry. That was no doubt why the man-in-the-street loved him and the intellectuals did not.’ Churchill, for his part, considered those on the left who anointed themselves the arbiters of right and wrong to be arrogant, ‘a fault,’ Colville recalled, Churchill ‘detested in others, particularly in its intellectual form.’ For that reason, Churchill ‘had dislike and contempt, of a kind which transcended politics, of the intellectual wing of the Labour party,’ which in turn despised Churchill. In 1940 the intellectualism of the left was inimical to Churchill and to Britain’s cause, which was simplicity itself: defeat Hitler.

Churchill cared little for obtuse political or social theories; he was a man of action: state the problem, find a solution, and solve the problem. For a man of action, however, he was exceptionally thoughtful and well read. When serving as a young subaltern in India, he amassed a private library that included Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics, Plato’s Republic, Schopenhauer on pessimism, Malthus on population, and Darwin’s Origin of Species. Reading, for Churchill, was a form of action. After a lifetime of reading — from the sea-adventuring Hornblower novels to the complete Shakespeare and Macaulay — he possessed the acumen to reduce complex intellectual systems and constructs and theories to their most basic essences. He once brought a wartime dinner conversation on socialism to an abrupt end by recommending that those present read Maurice Maeterlinck’s entomological study, The Life of the White Ant. ‘Socialism,’ Churchill declared, ‘would make our society comparable to that of the white ant.’ Case closed. Almost a decade later, when the Labour Party, then in power, nationalized British industries one by one, and when paper, meat, gasoline, and even wood for furniture were still rationed, Churchill commented: ‘The Socialist dream is no longer Utopia but Queuetopia.'”

__________

Excerpted from The Last Lion: Winston Churchill, Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965 by William Manchester and Paul Reid.

More of the Old Man:

  • Manchester and Reid describe Churchill’s almost unbelievable level of energy as prime minister
  • Then the authors look at his herculean daily intake of booze
  • A quick anecdote of Winston in the restroom

Winston Churchill

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