The Cultural Impact And Legacy Of World War Two

I used to find it amusing that amongst the Einsatzgruppen's UK Black Book list for executions was a Labour MP called Seymour Cocks. But I have grown up a lot since then.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Book

speaking of Churchill, Galipoli taught alot of folks that amphibious landings are HARD AS HELL to pull off so you had to be really comfortable in your ability to do it before you even make an attempt

was reading David Edgerton's Britain's War Machine earlier. He makes some persuasive arguments that in terms of having the most experts a UK gov has ever had, loads of brilliant engineers, an unparalleled weapons manufacturing industry of its era, superior tech, a hugely superior navy and a global trade network with shitloads of important war resources, the advantages of being vastly more GDP wealthy than Germany with half the domestic population to feed. That basically contrary to that popular Dunkirk/darkest hour narrative, that any lip service to Nazi peril was propagandist, and behind the scenes the UK war cabinet was actually supremely confident of victory. Even after some of the early defeats in the East and N Africa. Maybe bollocks and he does get a bit carried away at times, but he does successfully paint a picture of the mind boggling scale of the BE and its resources, and how it really was very much at odds with the plucky little underdog island nation holding out for dear life type claptrap that Nolan and The Mail and lots of shit politicians seem to find so stimulating.

Also he lays into the "Blairites" Cameron and Miliband for coming out with historically ignorant ww2 cliches!

The empire was mostly far, far from Europe. Britain was very near to Europe. Europe was largely in the hands of the Nazis, who were very well-equipped and operating at high efficiency. The empire did not mobilize for war until very late in the game and was slow to organize when war came. It is true the British government could have removed to Canada and continued the war at a safe remove, but that would have been extremely difficult. If the British government was supremely confident, it was as much a reflection of their consistent underestimation of the Axis as it was on their high estimate of the empire's war-making capacity.

btw, the "plucky little underdog island nation holding out for dear life" storyline was basically cooked up for contemporary US consumption, to counteract a fairly strong distaste for the British empire among Americans, initially to justify the lend-lease program, and after 1941 it blended seamlessly into the general war propaganda. Selling the US on the hardy, resourceful communists under Uncle Joe Stalin as admirable allies was a much harder storyline to put across.

Edgerton is a bit of a Dibnah and his appreciation and love of Engineering (he gets very excited about 30's innovations like Bristol sleeve valves!) is probably much keener than his understanding of social and military history. But I very much appreciate his attempts at cutting through the propagandist cliches with convincing amounts of data and stats. Not sure some of his assertions hold up, but he certainly isn't full of shit!

he also posits that the Luftwaffe were quite haphazard, improvisatory and individualistic (type of traits often attributed to British fighters) whereas the RAF were much better organised and run with what could be described as a cold Teutonic style of efficiency once they found their feet. And Bomber Command started bombing the shit out of German cities well before the Blitz or the Battle of Britain, while Hitler didn't lift the ban on the Luftwaffe operating anywhere but the front line till months later. Although it wasn't like he'd been shy of annihilating civilian populations from the air in Warsaw, Rotterdam, Guernica etc.. up to then tbf.

So...the erasure of Russia and the Eastern front from American accounts of the war is the source of no great mystery...it's obviously a relic of the Cold War and just general jingoism...however, I'd be curious if at any point this was a planned or systematic thing. Were textbooks edited, etc? Was there an actual propaganda campaign to claim the US "won the war against fascism" more or less on its own (with, of course, the help of the plucky British, whose ass we proverbially saved)?

America has to convince itself it's won at least one war since 1898

1898! When the USA stood up to the diseased remnant of the Spanish Empire and stole their lunch money!

But really now, don't you recall how we just crushed it in Grenada in 1983? Those poor bastards never stood a chance!

Doesn't the US have a better claim at deciding WWI than WWII?

I think the saddest lasting cultural impact of WW2, at least at this moment in history, is that baby boomers think they won it.

the gratest generation

I recall an All in the Family episode from the early 1970s in which Mike Stivic points out the decisive role of the Soviets on the Eastern front, I guess to counter some jingoistic bluster from Archie Bunker, which would suggest this matter was not quite settled in the American mythos at that time. Of course the Stivic character was the so-called "pinko" of the show, but he was also a baby boomer representative.

So...the erasure of Russia and the Eastern front from American accounts of the war is the source of no great mystery...it's obviously a relic of the Cold War and just general jingoism...however, I'd be curious if at any point this was a planned or systematic thing. Were textbooks edited, etc? Was there an actual propaganda campaign to claim the US "won the war against fascism" more or less on its own (with, of course, the help of the plucky British, whose ass we proverbially saved)?

― ryan

so it's not sourced but the wikipedia article on wwii historiography re: the eastern front mentions lack of access to documentation, which i think is a pretty good point - we didn't know what the soviet union did in the great patriotic war because, to a significant extent, they didn't tell us! the article also says that post-soviet union western historiography about the eastern front significantly changed as a result of access to soviet archives.

It seems like it's common to imagine D-Day as the pivotal event in the Allied victory, given how strongly it features in our collective memory.

iirc, the last book I read on this (Bloodlands) said that the war was basically unwinnable for Germany after the stalling of the USSR invasion in 1941.

they didn't have any winter gear for starters (which was possibly why Soso never believed the invasion was imminent - despite multiple Soviet agents within the Nazis reporting it was happening) so anything other than a rapid Autumn victory was going to be very costly whatever the final outcome. Goebbels seemed to think his winter coat donations campaign was good propaganda to rally the nation, rather than them looking like amateurs!

I feel like the US's greatest victory in WW2 is taking its sweet ass time to enter and let the combatants destroy each other so they could dictate the peace at the end. Didn't hurt that the British had to hand over most of its gold reserves during the war and dismantle the empire in the aftermath.

Every FDR, Churchill, and general knowledge WWII bio and history I've read in the last forty years not published by a conservative house has mentioned the Eastern Front: Stalin pressing FDR about opening it and joining him, the staggering number of Soviet soldiers lost between 1942-1944, and so on. Is the omission in textbooks?

textbooks, and maybe also movies/TV fiction/TV docs/political rhetoric? since we're talking about cultural impact and legacy. less scholarship, more storytelling.

It’s always interesting to me, WW2 in the American consciousness is pretty easy to romanticize since it was never on our doorstep, and so much of what we think of when we think of the war is through this nostalgia haze, and also there’s something very specifically momentous about the Normandy invasion in terms of being a battle to point to for Americans as this great glorious all-in valorous endeavor (this is less a comment on the personnel on the ground more a comment on those who are looking back at it from the other side of the ocean!)

The Soviet Union didn’t really get much of the gauzy vague elsewhereness part, losing 10 million plus soldiers and another 15 million civilians and getting a good bit of the holocaust as well. Which isn’t to say they haven’t traded in on the glory of the victory, but the cost and the more personal and brutal nature of the war makes it different and harder to be nostalgic for in the same way to put it mildly.

There's also something really striking and terrifying about the Normandy images which I don't think you get in much other war photography: the flat expanse of the beach, huge dark cliffs in the distance, soldiers wading through the breakers without any cover. No wonder it's impressed itself on our imagination.

since it was never on our doorstep

hawaii = not part of the US?

I feel like there is easily just as much lazy stereotyping and glossing going on in this thread as in any oiled-lens USA! USA! remembrances of the conflict

The Japanese shelled the west coast of the U.S.

Tomboto otm

as someone who grew up having school assemblies on pearl harbor day, field tripping to the arizona etc., and was kinda bemused in college to discover that dec 7 means literally nothing to most mainlanders, i would nevertheless like to raise an eyebrow at the suggestion that it's analogous to, like, stalingrad

however the pacific war in general was just unbelievably unpleasant and i can't imagine enduring a single sweating malarial xenophobically terrified second of it whereas tbh i think i could have handled europe with a little luck. that's where america put in its serious trauma time imo even tho i agree that people do talk as if we were the ones to defeat the nazis.

whereas tbh i think i could have handled europe with a little luck.

didn't Spielberg make a movie about just such a lad

funny, in school we learned twas irish volunteers that won ww2 is that not the accepted version

that's what i'm told but i've only seen the landing part xp

I was surprised to learn recently that the majority of US combat deaths were in the European theater...I had always assumed the Pacific was "worse."

This video kinda breaks everything down: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwKPFT-RioU&t=557s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwKPFT-RioU&t=557s

hmmm. well it's called "The Fallen of World War II"

since it was never on our doorstep

hawaii = not part of the US?

― El Tomboto, Tuesday, June 4, 2019 5:00 PM (thirty-six minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The Japanese shelled the west coast of the U.S.

― Οὖτις, Tuesday, June 4, 2019 5:12 PM (twenty-four minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

U-boats attacking shipping lines on the east coast and gulf of mexico too!

xps

Lord Haw-Haw was an exemplary Irish volunteer who might not have been mentioned at school :p

400k combat deaths for US feels like an astronomical number when abstracted from what other countrese experienced...and it's also worth pointing out that this was more (according to that video) than the UK.

I didn’t forget Pearl Harbor, but it’s not exactly the same as what the Soviet Union went through in terms of violence being visited upon the civilian population.

I’m not saying we didn’t get our hair mussed

I was surprised to learn recently that the majority of US combat deaths were in the European theater...I had always assumed the Pacific was "worse."

stand corrected and realize i'm being glib but it's just the vibe i dread lol

obv something like d-day is an actual nightmare

the russian sieges, tho-- the marching and raping back and forth across the civilian pops of eastern europe-- the camps and systematic massacres-- the millions dead-- hardly untrue to say that (non-native) (non-black) america has never experienced anything like that

xps

there is a decentish book called Savage Continent which gives accounts of the lawlessness and genocide occurring in "peace-time" mainland Europe including deadly pograms in Poland, mass genocide of the Ustache in Serbia, British backed genocide in Greece, the partisans all getting liquidated by Uncle Joe. It's no Band of Brothers!

yeah. it’s not diminishing the US experience of the war to note that the Eastern front was a world historical grand guginol. arguably the worst “thing” that ever happened.

A whole lotta Grand Guignol though

dec 7 means literally nothing to most mainlanders

erick erickson won't eat asian food that day

well that's certainly not how we observe it here

The Japanese shelled the west coast of the U.S.

tbf, in the context of WWII, this one brief, hit-and-run attack amounted to less than nothing

something like half of the civilian dead at PH were japanese-american; what an asshole obv

(again tho that's half of a v low number)

just in case dlh was referring to my post (an outside chance, but there you go), I was referring to a negligible Japanese attack in 1942, not Pearl Harbor.