Any WW2 fanatics out there

[dancinpants]

Ah the beauty of history!!!. At the end of the day lads no matter what you think about the course of history, there will always be a quotable retort to prove you wrong.

[Lim till i die]

What annoys me most about WW2 is that the Soviet Union basically saved the world from Nazism (While the Yanks played politics on the domestic front, the Brits stayed firmly in Britain licking their post Dunkirk wounds and the French, resistance excepted, ran for their lives) but was of couse treated like a leper after the war so as to justify the massive defence budgets that the western military industrial complex had now become so merrily accustomed to spending. It's the incredibly brave soldiers of the Red Army that "won" WW2 not Tom Hanks or Steve McQueen or any of the utter $hite which you read in most contemporary history school texts. The decision of the British/Yanks to avoid creating a Western Front until late 1944 was a desplicable attempt to let Nazism and Communism cancel each other out and kill two birds with the one stone for the imperialist, capatilist West. It cost millions of innocent lives and should never be forgotten or forgiven

Like dcfcsteve I'm far more interested in aspects of history like ww1, Irish history, the growth of the political left and right, American foreign policy etc. I think its the utter drivel we are regularly fed about ww2 which makes it go down on my list of interests

[Lionel Ritchie]

Sounds very interesting. I've found it on imdb.com (Internet Movie Database) : http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091251/ . Click on the readers postings at the end for details on where to get a copy. I might get my hands on a copy as well.
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Steve thank you so much for this.

The Battle of Britain was won primarily by a significant tactical change on Hitler's part. In the early days of the 'battle' the Germans clearly had the upper-hand. The British air-bases in the south of the country were decimated (airplanes were having to take off and land in fields), anti-aircraft facilities and listening posts had been almost erased, the towns on the southern coast had been 'softened-up' in advance of the land invasion that was assembling on the French coast, and the Germans were clearly in the ascendancy.

However - on one particular German bombing raid at night (they started night raids to prevent the British form conducting repairs to machines and facilities under the cover of darkness), the Germans accidentally bombed a series of civilian targets in London. Hitler had actually forbidden attacks on civilian targets, as he didn't want to boost the Brits resolve. Anyhoo - in response, the British retaliated by bombing Berlin, which enraged Hitler. He then ordered the Luftwaffe to switch their strategy from military to civilian targets - thinking that he was failing to break them militarily, and that he might be able to break their will. This was a huge mistake, as it gave the decimated RAF the opportunity to get back on its feet and fix/replace its planes, air-fields, defences and surveillance facilities without interference. If the Germans had kept their focus and continued assaulting solely military targets day and night, there is little doubt that they would've impacted the RAF sufficiently to enable a land assault.

Yeah I didn't actually go into anything tactical yesterday in truth. I referred just briefly to the fact the Luftwaffe were sorely lacking a real heavy bomber, which in any event they wouldn't have been able to adequately escort, as the only effective fighter they had at the time -the ME109-E only had 10-15 minutes of loiter time in the target vacinity.

That said -they were making a real dent on the RAFs ability and if their Intelligence had been better -that is if they'd known that the southern command had less than a fortnights spares and were virtually on their knees they'd near certainly have absorbed the losses and kept hitting them. Plans were being made, had been made in fact, to withdraw Churchill and his government to York in anticipation of an actual dry land Battle of Britain.

The only thing I'd really question in what you said Steve is who hit a city first. Was it not a raid by RAF Whitleys on Bremmerhaven or somewhere that went wrong and hit a residential area that led Hitler to demand a vengeance counter strike?

I think the Berlin raid -which brought the message home to the Germans, possibly for the first time, that they'd a real fight on their hands -only came after that.

Hitler certainly had no specific interest in attacking British cities as it would certainly only drag out a war with Britain he'd no desire to be involved in. The British for their part were understandably hungry for revenge once the blitz started but never seemed to grasp -not even late in the war - that they were hardening the resolve of Germans to keep on going too.

When the USA entered the war their Army Air Force found the practice horrifically wasteful of ones own men and machines -they had a much different tack summed up in the question "where does Fritz get his ball-bearings?" which rightly identified that without ball-bearings you can't make coffee -much less tanks and aircraft.

I'm not sure this is broadly correct Lionel. There may well have been instances of horse-drawn armour, but to suggest that it was anything other than the exception would be totally incorrect. Blitzkreig relied upon light tanks, air support, and large number of troops moving quickly in half-track vehicles. It would simply have not worked as a tactic if it had been based largely or even significantly on horse-drawn power. Also - Germany was the most advanced industrial nation in Europe at the time. The Nazis had even set-up their own mass-production vehicle factories years previously (Volkswagen), and were creating more advanced vehicles at a lower cost than manufacturers elsewhere on the continent. They therefore had the means to not need to rely on horse-drawn 'armour' (how armoured is a horse...??). They would also have come nowhere near the results they did gain if they relied on more than a smattering of non-mechanised transport. The only cases of horse-powered fighting involved in the Blitzkreig period of WW2 that I have encountered was the Polish Cavalry. For the record, Poland effectively lasted a whopping 17 days against the Germans....
.

Having trouble finding figures for western Europe -but according to this site Barbarossa involved about 4 million men with approximately 3,000 tanks, 250 assault guns and 7,000 pieces of artillery supported by 625,000 horses and 600,000 various motor vehicles

Blitzkrieg worked because it co-ordinated highly concentrated tank attacks with air support and heavy shelling and the the troops (many of whom were on foot!!) just cleared up the remnants of the opposition who's communications had long since collapsed.

I know from my own reading about aircraft that the Germans were still using open cockpit Bi-planes -the Henchel 123 -as a frontline fighter when they attacked Poland. They weren't so daft as to try them against the French or British but rolled them out again for Barbarossa.

[Metrostars]

Clint Eastwood is currently directing two movies about Iwo Jima, one from the the Japanese pov and one from the US pov.

[SaucyJack]

Clint Eastwood is currently directing two movies about Iwo Jima, one from the the Japanese pov and one from the US pov.

http://www.comingsoon.net/news/topnews.php?id=11581



Next fall, Clint Eastwood will simultaneously release two movies telling the story of the battle of Iwo Jima – one will be from the American perspective, and the other told from the Japanese perspective, TIME's Richard Schickel reports in TIME's What's Next special issue (on newsstands Monday, Oct. 17).

Beginning next February, Clint Eastwood will start shooting the companion movie to Flags of Our Fathers, tentatively called Lamps Before the Wind. Typically, Eastwood is not able to articulate fully his rationale for this ambitious enterprise: "I don't know—sometimes you get a feeling about something. You have a premonition that you can get something decent out of it," he says. "You just have to trust your gut."

He asked Paul Haggis, who wrote "Flags," if he would like to write the Japanese version as well. The writer of Million Dollar Baby and director of Crash, Haggis was overbooked but thought an aspiring young Japanese-American screenwriter, Iris Yama****a, who had helped him research "Flags," might be able to do it. She met with Eastwood, and once again his gut spoke; he gave her the job and liked her first draft so much that he bought it. It was she who insisted on giving him a few rewrites she thought her script still needed, TIME reports.

Taken together, the two screenplays show that the battle of Iwo Jima—and by implication, the whole war in the Pacific—was not just a clash of arms but a clash of cultures. The Japanese officer class, imbued with the quasi-religious fervor of their Bushido code, believed that surrender was dishonor, that they were all obliged to die in defense of their small island. That, of course, was not true of the attacking Americans. As Eastwood puts it, "They knew they were going into harm's way, but you can't tell an American he's absolutely fated to die. He will work hard to get the job done, but he'll also work hard to stay alive." And to protect his comrades-in-arms. As Haggis' script puts it, the Americans "may have fought for their country, but they died for their friends, for the man in front, for the man beside 'em."

[SaucyJack]

kind of related, interesting type of story



Body Found in Glacier Thought to Be WWII Airman (post #1)
FRESNO, Calif. (Oct. 19) - Two climbers on a Sierra Nevada glacier discovered an ice-encased body believed to be that of an airman whose plane crashed in 1942.

The man was wearing a World War II-era Army-issued parachute when his frozen head, shoulder and arm were spotted Sunday on 13,710-foot Mount Mendel in Kings Canyon National Park, park spokeswoman Alex Picavet said.

Park rangers and specialists camped on the remote mountainside in freezing weather for an excavation expected to take several days. The body was 80 percent encased in ice, Picavet said Wednesday.

"We're not going to go fast," she said. "We want to preserve him as much as possible. He's pretty intact."

The excavation crew included an expert from the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, a military unit that identifies and recovers personnel who have been missing for decades.

Park officials believe the serviceman may have been part of the crew of an AT-7 navigational training plane that crashed on Nov. 18, 1942. The wreckage and four bodies were found in 1947 by a climber.

Some 88,000 Americans are missing in action from past wars, military officers said. Most of them - 78,000 - are from World War II.

The Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command works on hundreds of cases a year, averaging two identifications a week, said spokeswoman Rumi Nielson-Green.

Finding bodies preserved in a glacier is unusual but not unheard of, command officials said. Two years ago, the unit recovered the body of a Cold War-era officer who died in Greenland.

[WeAreRovers]

OwlsFan - I bought The Forgotten Soldier on your recommendation and I can't put it down, brilliant stuff.

I googled Guy Sajer and came up with this fascinating row between historians about whether he's for real or not.

http://members.shaw.ca/grossdeutschland/sajer.htm

KOH

[the 12 th man]

I've been to the D Day landing beaches in Normandy-all bar Sword Beach.
.The adjacent US Cemetary in Colleville (featured at the start and finish of Saving Private Ryan)is a grim but spectacular memory to those who perished.


Very interesting war museums in Bayeaux & St Mere Eglise (Paratrooper hanging off spire of Church).

[Lionel Ritchie]

I've been to the D Day landing beaches in Normandy-all bar Sword Beach.
.The adjacent US Cemetary in Colleville (featured at the start and finish of Saving Private Ryan)is a grim but spectacular memory to those who perished.


Very interesting war museums in Bayeaux & St Mere Eglise (Paratrooper hanging off spire of Church).

Went to the Huisnes-sur-Mer German cemetery too -in the same area as Coleville I think. Beautifully maintained but barely even signposted and you'd miss it if you weren't specifically looking for it.

A very sad place indeed. Looking at the ages of these poor bast@rds and half them were teenagers or little more. There aren't headstones as such -more like wall plaques as they're interned in what is like a giant mound with a garden at it's centre that you can walk around. (Not trying to be funny but if you can imagine a huge version of the blast ditches they used pile around aircraft or guns -that's what it's like). But lots of the the plaques read no more than "Ein Deutcher Soldat".

[the 12 th man]

Went to the German graveyard too -in the same area as Coleville I think. Beautifully maintained but barely even signposted and you'd miss it if you weren't specifically looking for it.

A very sad place indeed. Looking at the ages of these poor bast@rds and half them were teenagers or little more. There aren't headstones as such -more like wall plaques as they're interned in what is like a giant mound with a garden at it's centre that you can walk around. (Not trying to be funny but if you can imagine a huge version of the blast ditches they used pile around aircraft or guns -that's what it's like). But lots of the the plaques read no more than "Ein Deutcher Soldat".

I'm afraid they (The German Soldiers) ended up getting buried in a less than satisfactory (rememberance wise) way because of the way they were percieved at the time ..invaders of the French Territory and the fact that the German empire was in melt down at the time of D Day.

btw,you're dead right about the German cemetaries as they are all over France but you wouldn't notice many of them.

[OwlsFan]

You're dead right about the German cemetaries as they are all over France but you wouldn't notice many of them.

The German cemetries are far more sombre with big overhanging trees and dark gravestones. The Allied cemetries have white crosses all neatly aligned - the difference between the victor and the vanquished. One died for something - the other died for nothing serving one of the most evil regimes in history.

As for the Soviet Union saving the world from Nazism as someone said, they only did because they were attacked and had no choice but to defend themselves and had before that made a pact with the Nazis and split up Poland between them.

UK went to war to prevent one country dominating Europe as it always had before but perversely, although they won, a different country ending up dominating Europe (the SOviet Union).

ANother excellent book on Stalingrad is ENEMY AT THE GATES if it's still in print. The Germans were amazing soldiers: tough, cruel but so resilliant despite one defeat after another.

[lopez]

I'm a great history fan myself but I'm not too hot on WW2. I done an MA on Modern European Studies but found the far-right far more interesting while they thought that the World was theirs. For instance, I've read Kershaw's two volumes of Hitler but come Barbarossa I found it all just too much where one battle blends into another, even though Kershaw's description of mental decline of Hitler was fascinating. Same with the Spanish civil war. Interested more in the politics either side of that drama than the carnage itself. One exception amongst this was 'The Fall of Berlin 1945' by Antony Beevor. Really good read and it will change anyone's mind about having Soviet troops anywhere near their female relatives.

[dcfcsteve]

UK went to war to prevent one country dominating Europe as it always had before but perversely, although they won, a different country ending up dominating Europe (the SOviet Union).

I'm not sure I would describe legging it from France at the first sign of the enemy, then hiding on the other side of the English Channel for 2 years until the Americans joined-in, as 'going to war' !

The English were happy to watch Europe being chewed up by a superior German army and do nothing themselves, so long as their little patch of the continent didn't get invaded. If the Yanks hadn't joined the war, they'd probably still be conducting nightly watches from the White Cliffs of Dover, waiting for the inevitable German land invasion....

[OwlsFan]

I'm not sure I would describe legging it from France at the first sign of the enemy, then hiding on the other side of the English Channel for 2 years until the Americans joined-in, as 'going to war' !

The English were happy to watch Europe being chewed up by a superior German army and do nothing themselves, so long as their little patch of the continent didn't get invaded. If the Yanks hadn't joined the war, they'd probably still be conducting nightly watches from the White Cliffs of Dover, waiting for the inevitable German land invasion....

Chased out of Europe rather than legging it - there is a subtle distinction.

As for being happy watching Europe being dominated by the German army, not much they could do about that other than send over bombers to remind the Germans they were still around, send convoys to the Soviet Union and fight the Axis in Africa.