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‘‘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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

A good article. Thanks for posting.

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.

This is a lot of revisionist codswallop in this posing as mature and informed historical judgment.

(1) For America, WW II began in 1941 with Pearl Harbor, not in 1939 when Germany invaded Poland. To insist that we cannot date our experience of WW II based on when we were attacked is absurd.

(2) Japanese troops were resolutely determined not to surrender. That is why they died in great numbers rather than surrendering, not because of any supposed unwillingness of US Marines to take prisoners. Indeed, the Marines took prisoners when they could -- prisoners can yield valuable intelligence -- but the Marines often found that prisoners were not Japanese but other Asians who had been conscripted into labor battalions.

(3) The Philippines did in fact belong to the US in 1941. We acquired them from Spain as a result of the Spanish-American war. US administration of the Philippines in the years before WW II, which included an elected Philippine government, was widely regarded as tolerant and enlightened. We explicitly promised the Philippines their independence during the war -- and we delivered soon after their liberation from the Japanese.

(4) The bombing of Hiroshima can be seen as morally justified by Pearl Harbor, but the sounder basis for analysis is to look to the military utility. We bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki because they contained military targets and to try to force the Japanese to surrender without an invasion. We were thereby spared horrific casualties, and Japan was spared far worse material destruction and loss of life than a couple of cities nuked.

And by the way, through a little-known spy operation, the Emperor and Japanese government long knew that we had A-bombs and were going to use them. Hirohito and his immediate advisers long knew the war was lost but hoped to secure favorable terms by making the costs of an invasion so daunting. They seem to have anticipated that US use of A-bombs would provide an opportune moment for surrender -- if the survival of the Emperor was assured. In other words, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were nuked because Hirohito wanted to stay in power.

Similar reasoning applies to the US and British bombing of German cities. They were not undefended, and many thousands of Allied airmen died in the effort. One can wish that more precise targeting was possible at the time so as to spare German civilians, but it was not. And more than a few British died in the German air raids that helped to spur the Allied bombing campaign.

(5) The-Soviets-won-the-war-because-they-bled-the-most line is silly. The Soviets started the war and invaded Poland as an ally of Hitler, which detracts from the supposed credit due them. If there had been no Hitler-Stalin pact, there might not have been a WW II, or it would probably have been far less destructive.

Moreover, the US and British war effort and material support for the Soviets was essential to their survival. A large slice of Germany's military production was also diverted from the Eastern front, thus relieving pressure on the Soviets. The material wealth and technological competence of allowed the US and Britain to reduce their casualties, and it is absurd to regard their war effort as thereby diminished because they bled less than the Russians did.

By the way, are Soviet casualties from their attacks on Poland and the Baltic countries seen as part of their overall total in beating Hitler -- without regard to those casualties having been incurred as Hitler's ally? And how about the 14,000 Polish prisoners that the Soviets killed after Hitler attacked in 1941? Do the Soviets credit them as Allied battle casualties?

What a pile of stinking crap. He uses some truths to couch his lies about the war.

The Japanese Bushido did not allow for surrender. The Bushido code also dictated that an enemy who surrendered was dishonorable and not worthy of consideration. The Japanese were wholly unlike the Germans. The Japanese would shoot medics, they killed the injured, they were not at all humane. They even cannibalized captured Americans. They killed millions of Chinese in a horrid holocaust of death and rape and slavery that makes the works of the Nazis pale in comparison.

And we nuked them twice. Too freaking bad.

During the war the Germans quite often demonstrated mercy and civilized behaviors that were wholly absent the Japanese. They did not shoot medics and there were many incidents in which US & German medical units worked together to save people.

And while the Germans were great soldiers, they were defeated in many operations by Allied units that were less than the equal of the Germans in supplies and numbers. The Japanese-American 442nd regiment routinely took on German positions of greater strength.

And it is not a "fairy tale" that the Russians went on an orgy of rape and pillage in Germany. They raped and pillaged their way though the Baltic states, Poland, Prussia, and then Germany and Austria. And let us not forget that the damnable stinking French declared a three day 'plundering right' in the French sector of Germany where they raped, murdered, and pillaged with the same ferocity as the Russians. The French in Mannheim ranged afield and tried to enter Heidelberg to continue their atrocities and Patton put an end to that.

But the Japanese? They got no mercy during the war because they GAVE no mercy. Japan deserved far more retaliation than they received and post-war Japanese knew this. It is the latter-day generations who were taught that the USA started the war and bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki without provokation who are confused about the facts of the war.

And the moron who wrote this article.

Still, the Marines scarcely pretended to take prisoners (even when the Japanese wanted to surrender)...

You mean the Marines killed all five of them?

Who is this idiot who conveniently forgets how the Japanese fought to the last man and then committed suicide?

In his attempt to "explode myths" he creates a myth that that such "myths" ever existed to begin with. Even a cursory read of a basic book on WW2 points out all the events in the war that he uses to engage in myopic postmodern nitpicking, for example, implying the only reason England went to war with Hitler was their concern with Poland, as if they thought Hitler would never threaten them too. (Well, Chamberlain thought it would end with Czechoslovakia, but he got canned over that, remember Mr. Wheatcroft?)

He then points out that it was Germany that declared war on America (Gee, thanks, Captain Obvious), his point being that America would otherwise not have entered the war in Europe. Never mind that Roosevelt was itching to get involved via Lend Lease/Arsenal of Democracy and the cat and mouse games between American destroyers in convoys to England and U-boats long before Pearl Harbor, including the torpedoing of the USS Reuben James on Halloween 1941.

And of course, no self-respecting deconstructionist discourse on WW2 would be complete without then Clintonizing the idea of a "good war", i.e., depends on what the meaning of "good war" is.

His only moment of sanity is when he closes by saying the war was "necessary", which he doesn't seem to understand single-handedly invalidates pretty much everything he wrote up to that point.

Kindly include the requisite "BARF Alert" on this post.

Towards the halfway part of the article I started feeling queasy as the bitter bile built up in my gut. Luckily I managed to stop there and thus avoided having to clean out chunks of projectile vomit from between the keys on my keyboard. Others might not be so lucky and as such, the "Barf Alert" is needed.

Thank You very much for you kind attention.

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