How good was the Good War?

The Boston Glob ^ | 5/8/05 | By Geoffrey Wheatcroft

[metesky]

How good was the Good War?

On May 8, 1945, the war against Hitler’s Third Reich was won — and some of the victors’ most cherished myths were born

By Geoffrey Wheatcroft  |  May 8, 2005

‘‘NO ENGLISH SOLDIER who rode with the tanks into liberated Belgium or saw the German murder camps at Dachau or Buchenwald could doubt that the war had been a noble crusade.’’ Forty years ago the historian A.J.P. Taylor eloquently expressed what has become a universal belief. Other wars are looked back on with horror for their futile slaughter, but the conflict that ended in Europe in May 1945 is today seen as what Studs Terkel called his famous oral history of it: ‘‘The Good War.’’

In one way it will always remain so. A revisionist case, that defeating Hitler was a mistake, would be not only perverse and offensive, but simply absurd. And yet we have all been sustained since V-E Day, 60 years ago today, by what Giovanni Giolitti, the Italian prime minister of a century ago, once called ‘‘beautiful national legends.’’ By ‘‘we’’ I mean the countries that ended the war on the winning side (the Germans and Japanese have some national legends of their own).

Some of these legends are more obvious than others. The French suffered a catastrophic defeat in 1940, and the compromises many Frenchmen made with their conquerors thereafter ranged from the pitiful to the wicked. More Frenchmen collaborated than resisted, and during the course of the war more Frenchmen bore arms on the Axis than on the Allied side. Against those grim truths, Charles de Gaulle consciously and brilliantly constructed a nourishing myth of Free France and Resistance that helped heal wounds and rebuild the country.

[DTogo]

‘‘NO ENGLISH SOLDIER who rode with the tanks into liberated Belgium or saw the German murder camps at Dachau or Buchenwald could doubt that the war had been a noble crusade.’’

The same could be said of Coalition soldiers who road into Iraq and saw the mass graves and tortuer chambers of Saddam Hussien. Yet there are plenty of Leftist, anti-Bush media types and college punks who've never served (nor would they ever dare serve) in uniform who would disagree.

[Route101]

WWII changed the world over for sure...it did nothing for the poor guy who just bought it running as hard as he could up the beach at _____________, just fill in the blank. Our guys were everywhere saving our asses.

[Mr.Clark]

Not a bad article actually. Points out some of the lesser known facts about WWII. Pick up the Hasting's book, it is a great read.

[metesky]

This is the type of article that would get more traction if we didn't have to excerpt. Rules is rules, though.

[ClearCase_guy]

I think this article buys into the whole "good war" bit too much. If WWII was not a Good War, then no war can be a good war. That's the thinking of a pacifist and I reject that view. I further think that the author engages in too much moral equivalence. "They did this to millions, we did it to thousands, so I guess we're all equally to blame..." I also reject that view.

Still, the Marines scarcely pretended to take prisoners (even when the Japanese wanted to surrender), while the score for Pearl Harbor was more than settled at Hiroshima.

A nation that converts its air force into a Kamikaze outfit is sending a clear message: “We will not surrender. We will die fighting.” And Hiroshima was not about “settling a score”. It was about winning a war. Let’s be clear: A Japanese city was vaporized out of a clear blue sky. No one saw it coming. No one had ever envisioned such a thing. AND THEY STILL WOULDN’T SURRENDER! We had to destroy Nagasaki before they changed their mind.

it is not now easy to look back with pride on the scores of thousands of women and children incinerated in Hamburg in July 1943 or Dresden in February 1945.

On the contrary, I find it quite easy. The Nazis bombed Rotterdam. The Nazi waged a blitz against London and killed 40,000 civilians. The Nazis rounded up 6 million Jewish civilians and killed them in cold blood. You think I’ll weep for “scores of thousands of women and children”?

Sherman said it: “War is hell.”
Americans know how to win and I’m proud of it.

[don'tbedenied]

ClearCase_guy:

A most excellent post.

[cripplecreek]

I know my grandfather was in no rush to return to war after spending some time in the Ardennes.

My grandmother says that the war changed him for the better in a lot of ways. When he left he was a 19 year old kid who smoked and drank and ran around. When he returned he immediately found a church, became a deacon and only missed 2 or 3 sundays for the rest of his life.

[DYR]

Has some good points and some lousy.

The old monster said that England provided the time, America provided the money, and Russia provided the blood.

Yup, he was good at catchy phrases. Nice one, I've never heard this one before.

Great Britain and the United States were democracies. Their soldiers were not brutalized peasants, or even an ‘‘army of mercenaries,’’ as A.E. Housman called the 1914 British regular army. As the British military historian Max Hastings puts it in his excellent recent book ‘‘Armageddon: The Battle for Germany, 1944-45’’ (Pan), they were citizens in uniform, and they could not be treated as German or Russian soldiers were.

Sad (for the Russians and Germans) but true.

the other hand, the Russians relaxed at the end of the war, with Stalin’s encouragement, by indulging in the greatest act of gang rape in history against millions of women in Hungary, Austria, and eastern Germany.

I wonder for how long I will have to hear this dirty fairytale.

[elbucko]

Well said.

[struwwelpeter]

Roads

Words L. Oshanina, Music A. Novikova

Oh, roads...
Dust thick like fog,
Cold, alarms,
High steppe grass.
You can't know
Your duty,
Perhaps, you lay down your wings 
Among the steppes.
Beneath our boots beats the dust -
	Steppes,
	Fields,
And flames rage all around
And bullets whistle.

Oh, roads...
Dust thick like fog,
Cold, alarms,
High steppe grass.
Shots ring out,
A crow circles.
Your friend
Lays dead in the tall weeds.

And the road runs farther,
	Dust rises,
	And curls,
While all around the land becomes hazy,
A foreign land!

Oh, roads...
Dust thick like fog,
Cold, alarms,
High steppe grass.
At the edge of the pines,
The sun comes up.
And at a home's porch
A mother awaits her son.
And endless paths,
	Steppes,
	Fields - 
Everyone watches us pass
The eyes of our loved ones.

Oh, roads...
Dust thick like fog,
Cold, alarms,
High steppe grass.
Snow or wind,
We'll remember, friends,
These roads
We'll never forget 

[baseballmom]

A good article. Thanks for posting.

[metesky]

I'm with you, CG_g. I still don't trust the bastards.
:O)
A lot of this is an attempt to portray the U.S. as just as powerful in 1942 as today.

Not only did it take the Western Allies nearly three years after the German attack on Russia seriously to engage the German army in Normandy, but even then most of the fighting was still on the other side of Europe. In the campaign from D-Day to V-E Day, something like 110,000 American soldiers were killed, as well as about half as many from the combined British-Canadian armies.

Three years to go from a sleepy peace time military to fighting war on two major fronts and supplying the Russians with staggering amounts of arms and equipment? Not too shabby, IMO.

North Africa got a derogatory passing mention in another paragraph and there's no mention of Sicily, Italy or Southern France.

[cpdiii]

Was it ‘‘a noble crusade’’? For the liberation of western Europe, maybe so. Was it a just war? That tricky theological concept has to be weighed against very many injustices. Was it a good war? The phrase itself is dubious. No, there are no good wars, but there are necessary wars, and this was surely one.

The author has his history correct. His analysis of history leads me to believe that he is trying to say that World War II and the present war in Iraq are not justified. What the author has missed is quite simple. In World War II the UK, the United States, Russia and our other allies did not have a choice in debating the finer points of the justification for the war. We were in a fight for our survival.

In so far as him glossing over the actions of the Japanese troops actions and comparing them to the actions of the United States troops in battle he shows a clear and abundant prejudice against the USA. The Japanese pillaged the country of China, with their high point the rape of Nanjing. Civilians were killed by the tens of thousands, women raped and killed for sport, babies were used as objects of play as they were tossed between soldiers on the tips of bayonets. Vivisection was performed on live prisoners without anesthesia, some were Brits and Americans and Aussies, in experiments to determine the immediate effects of chemical and biological agents as used in war. Prisoners were routinely executed (beheading was their favorite method) for the smallest infraction or perceived infraction such as not bowing properly to a Japanese soldier. The author has a picture of Dresden that the Brits fire bombed. The lose of life was horrific. The lose of life on our side would have been even more horrific without these fire bombings. It was essential in breaking the back of the Axis. The crucial difference between the Axis and the Allies (Russian troops excepted) is the Axis treated the civilian population as spoils of war to be used and disposed of in any manner their soldiers pleased. The allies with rare exceptions saved and feed the civilian population. The author seems to glorify Stalin because of the millions of troops he lost in the war. They lost millions because of they did not prepare for war because until Hitler attacked Russia, Stalin was an active partner with Hitler. He basically was giver hegemony over Eastern Europe and in exchange he would not join the war against Hitler. Hitler was an evil racist megalomaniac and Socialist which most people do not know because that is not politically correct today to know this. When it comes to evil Hitler was an amateur as compared to Stalin.

This author is not stupid. This author is simply a revisionist of history and attempts to mold it to his present prejudices against the allies and in particular the United States. I do not know his political beliefs but suspect they are hard left.

[metesky]

For that fighting spirit of the Germans had another side to it. Hitler ruled by glamour and terror; his soldiers were driven by fear as well as zeal. In a war during which no British soldier, and only one GI, was shot for cowardice, at least 15,000 German servicemen were executed for dereliction of duty.

We now know that in the first winter of the war on the Eastern Front in 1941-42, more than 8,000 Russian soldiers died not in action but shot by their own army for cowardice or desertion. During the battle of Stalingrad alone, another 12,000 men of the Red Army were put to death pour encourager les autres. This was a regime fighting a desperate war that could nevertheless put to death well over a full infantry division of its own men. On the other hand, the Russians relaxed at the end of the war, with Stalin’s encouragement, by indulging in the greatest act of gang rape in history against millions of women in Hungary, Austria, and eastern Germany.

On one hand these numbers speak for themselves, on the other hand, given the conditions and the numbers involved on the Eastern Front, I'm a little bit surprised that the numbers aren't higher.

I know nothing factual about the rapes (or not) in Eastern Europe.

[metesky]

Good post.

[Captain Rhino]

the other hand, the Russians relaxed at the end of the war, with Stalin’s encouragement, by indulging in the greatest act of gang rape in history against millions of women in Hungary, Austria, and eastern Germany.

I wonder for how long I will have to hear this dirty fairytale.

"The dirty fairytale," as you refer to it, is sort of standard fare in the documentaries currently being played on the History Channel and other cable stations here in the US.

Since you were born and partly raised in the old USSR and have a grandfather that fought the Germans from the steepes to Berlin, what is his/your version of the behavior of Soviet troops in Eastern Europe?

Since I'm a US Vietnam War veteran and didnot do any of the terrible things that US troops are generally slurred with in that war, I can understand there might be another, more realistic account of what happened. In saying this, I do not say that ALL US soldiers in Vietnam conducted themselves honorably because the evidence is there that some did commit crimes against Vietnamese civilans and against captured NVA and VC prisoners.

BTW, those who have really studied the history of WWII have absolutely no doubt about the tremendous contribution that Russia made in defeating Germany and also the tremendous cost in suffering the Russian people paid to secure that victory.

[naturalized]

Behind this lies an awkward truth, one we didn’t learn in the cheerful war comics and books of my boyhood in the 1950s, but on which all serious military historians are now agreed. From the beginning to the end of that war, whenever the British Army met the Wehrmacht on anything like equal terms, the Germans always prevailed. And that pretty much goes for the US Army too, from their first disastrous encounter with the Germans, at Kasserine Pass in North Africa, in early 1943. American and British commanders always took good care thereafter that they had an overwhelming superiority in men and especially in weaponry before engaging the enemy.

That the Germans had superior technology is no mystery to this child of the 60s. My brothers and I would build Revell and other plastic models of Allied and Axis weapons. When we weren't blowing them up with firecrackers, we would zoom around the house in mock combat.

I played Allied, and loved the P-40, which my brothers would always shoot down with their ME-262s or their German AA guns. And I remember seeing Patton in the theatres and coming away with more respect for Allied soldiers that had to fight superior weapons with guts and numbers and not much else.

[jonascord]

Whenever the moral equivalence BS of liberals is frontloaded into any discussion of the treatment of Japanese POWs by the Marine Corps during WWII, what never fails to annoy me is the highly selective ability to ignore the root cause.

Anyone here ever hear of the Goettge Patrol?

Lt. Col. Goettge was the intelligence officer of the 1st Marine Division on Guadalcanal. In August 1942, a few weeks after the Marines landed, a Japanese warrant officer informed them that there was a large group of Japanese seeking to surrender.

Goettge, hoping for a debriefing of the prisoners, took a reinforced platoon to bring in the Japanese. The patrol was caught in a trap and annihilated; only two men survived.

The ability to trust the Japanese Army to fight per the rules of war was obliterated by that one action. Once the Marines realized that any offer of survival to a member of the IJA would result in an attempt to murder the offerer, asking for ANYONE to surrender was considered to be a particularly stupid way to get killed.

It may be unfair, but since mind-reading is not a skill taught in boot camp, to assume that a Japanese with his hands up is still trying to kill you helped many Marines come home.

[steve-b]

the Russians relaxed at the end of the war, with Stalin’s encouragement, by indulging in the greatest act of gang rape in history against millions of women in Hungary, Austria, and eastern Germany.
I wonder for how long I will have to hear this dirty fairytale.

This attempt at historical revisionism is as intellectually bankrupt, and as morally reprehensible, as Holocaust denial.