All K-12, me and every school child did not know the real history of WWII. The Soviet's participation was white washed. As a catholic school grunt, we always had to pray for "the conversion of Russia". Plus we boomers who had fathers and relatives fight in that war, when we played " war" as kids you were either a Nazi, Japanese, or American.
Thinking back as a history major in the 70's, I don't believe I ever really studied the Soviet contribution.
Only in grad school and taking a mid 20th century history class did I learn of the true sacrifice.
The thought past, present (still) and future of all sacrifices from our current enemies was "white washed".
The usual quote: After the US entry into the war, it was essentially over.
Again, that fucking American exceptionalisim lie is repeated again and again and again.
When we entered the European theater, we really did play a role and that was controlling the west and south. There was a reason that being sent to the " eastern front" was such a threat to Sgt. Schultz in Hogan's Heroes. Imagine a stupid sit com contained more truth than and American history book.
America's entry was incredibly important and the right thing to do. Thinking back, Americans at home made victory gardens, war bonds, rationed gas, meatless Tuesday's, collecting tin, and yes, even cooking lard was taken back to the butcher, women entering the workforce by the millions, working in defense plants ( my mother was a Rosie the Riveter), and doing every kind of work. Black Americans wanted in also ( fuck if I can ever figure that the fuck out) both in the military and at home. Everyone pitched in.
Now we can't get a fucking Amerikkkan to wear a goddamned face mask during a pandemic that murdered millions.
I forgot to mention that had Stalin not kept the promise he made in November 1943 at the Tehran Conference to unleash his major 1944 offensive the week after the western Allies invaded France, the Germans would have defeated the invasion in the bocage of Normandy. As it was, that first month in France was a close-run thing with the US, UK, Canadian and Polish armies hanging on by their fingernails (Yes, folks, "defeated" Poland was the #4 western ally in terms of manpower committed during the war) - until the effect of the Russian front-wide offensive started to be felt and the Germans suddenly had no more reinforcements to send to France while the US and its Allies could continue feeding in troops.
Being a "War, what is it good for..." type of person, I would never voluntarily seek to find the truth about any country's participation in any war effort. So my gratitude to you, TC, for doggedly capturing our attention with your excellent accounting, leading this reader to finally reckon with the truths embedded in this essay, warts and all.
This was informative and instructive. Revisionist history is occurring at this very moment in Florida and Texas. Woe be to us.
When I read about the awful truth of the USSR and Russia and the many, many millions who were murdered by their own "leaders," I wonder why anyone would love that "Motherland." I'd be packing my bags and fleeing along with those young Russians!
Nazi hubris cost USSR dearly. Stalin received many warnings as you say but believed them to be British disinformation to open an Eastern front. Stalin was looking for evidence that Germany was preparing for the Russian winter and saw no evidence of use of light oil or increase in wool prices for winter uniforms. The Germans managed to convince themselves that they could drive the Red Army behind the Urals in four months and launched Barbosa.
You have it, yes indeed. Perhaps if Hitler hadn't had to pull Mussolini's chestnuts out of the fire in the Balkans and had invaded in late May as originally planned, they might have gotten to Moscow in time. I don't think that even if Moscow had been taken, that the USSR would have surrendered.
What I do NOT understand is why Stalin would not allow the Red Army which was concentrated near the Polish border to go on the defensive. It virtually guaranteed the loss of millions of soldiers, many of whom simply starved in German compounds. The USSR (Russia) seems almost proud of their 27 million deaths so many of which were Ukrainians (see Bloodlands). They should be ashamed as it was a result of Stalin's intransigence and Russian tactics which seemed to be mainly headlong charges.
After they attacked, it was "Ni shagu nazad!" ("Not one step back!") enforced by NKVD units ordered to summarily execute anyone trying to retreat, which meant units didn't have ability to act in a situation, which led to disaster. Hitler had the same policy after the Russian counter-offensives began, with similar disastrous results for the Wehrmacht.
On reading We Were There, by Basil Liddell Hart on German generals about WW II, I got the impression that Hitler "revenged" his generals for, as a corporal in WW I, receiving orders to stay on taken ground "to the last drop of blood". The generals meant they could have won the war if they had been allowed to arrange for orderly defence battles with a retreat on time.
Allen, I'm back on TAFM as you can see. Have you read today's piece 'NI SHAGU NAZAD??' It's a summary of how the Russian military is still stumbling. I am eager to know at least some of what you know. I hope Tanya has had a good Mother's Day or a good day, period, and that goes for you, too.
Thank you for this elaborate extension of my history knowledge. Acknowledging what was, is a powerful tool to healing wounds of the past. History correctly told and ever corrected for the better, is basic to have a future.
Somewhere I read that more US bombs were thrown over North Korea, than US bombs used during the entire WW II. Do you know if that is correct? It made sense to me when the Swedish former Swedish prime minister came back from a visit to North Korea and said: "It is not only an autocracy, it is a nekrocracy"; with the worship of a dead leader.
Yes, the US dropped more bombs on Korea than Europe. To no success. As Admiral Clark, commanding 7th fleet at the time said, "The interdiction campaign didn't interdict." If you want to get educated on Korea, my three books go a long way to chipping away at the fossilized coprolite of "fact-like substance."
And North Korea is as bad as everyone says and always has been.
I was thinking of the national trauma arising out of that massive bombing. It has been possible to maintain control of the population also with retraumatization.
As with all autocracies, where one man is representing the whole people, it does not matter how many gets lost, as long as the autocrat is alive. When he dies he represents all people that died.
I have learned more history from TC than from my high school or college history classes. There was never enough time to cover things properly. If history had been told in narrative form accompanied by a timeline, I think students would have had a better understanding of our country’s history even with all the whitewashing and failure to disclose things such as the Wilmington, NC coup in 1898. I only learned such atrocious, appalling history as an adult. I grew up 100 miles from Wilmington.
TC, I thank you for your cogent writing that educates so many of us. Keep the facts coming.
When I'm writing, I like to play music of the period, you can learn a lot by what people were listening to and when. This collection below has a lot of English "music hall" songs from World War II. You can go from the enthusiasm of the early period before the attack in the west in May 1940, with the rousing "We're going to hang our laundry on the Sigfried Line" (the German equivalent of the Maginot Line) and Gracie Fields' "Wish Me Luck," to the bitter feeling of a soldier with George Formby's "Bless 'Em All," the fortitude of the Battle of Britain in "There'll Always Be An England," the wistfulness of Very Lynn's "You'll Never Know" or her classic, the most popular song of the war, "We'll Meet Again." The American songs are different: the sad wistfulness of Irving Berlin's "The Last Time I Saw Paris," which he wrote after seeing the newsreel of German troops marching under the Arch de Triumph in 1940, or the home front with Fats Waller's "Cash for your trash," the in-your-face of Spike Jones' "Der Fuhrer's Face,"
That you would write while listening to music of the period you are writing about makes perfect sense to me, music 🎶, like all art forms reflects the time in which it was created. Art history is just the study of history looking through a different lens, all of those lenses sharpen our focus on what has happened in days passed.
a quick correction: "The Last Time I Saw Paris" was Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II (the "Showboat" team), and you're entirely correct about the occasion. for myself, I'd thought it was Cole Porter.
there's "topical music" in our time? I mean, aside from Hip-Hop, which I don't consider to quite be music in any conventional sense. I actually find myself liking some of it, but to me, it exists in some kind of "music-adjacent" space. but, as somebody who really likes melodies, I can't quite think of it as "music," except in the most meaninglessly generic sense. I'm perfectly prepared to have my mind changed, but....
As I said, non-existent or drech; one of the motivating strengths of previous movements has always been the music that expressed the themes and issues of the day. Nothing now matches any of the protest songs written before the turn of the current century.
The tragedy is that we needed the Russians to defeat the Germans it was one of those “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” kind of things, the bastards never were our allies, as has been obvious ever since. They should have listened to Patton and allowed him to push the Russians back into Russia, he got it and so do I, I have Russian iron in my leg and a broken back to go with it, I have had it for over 50 years. I am very clear about Russia, as a social order they have been unspeakably evil and have been so for over a century. Putin is just the latest manifestation of how inhumane they continue to be. Monday should be interesting, the bastard is loosing and he knows it, as do more and more Russians.
Someone told me the reason the US was forcing the war on Japan in the end, was that Stalin was ready to revenge Russia for the defeat in the Russian - Japanese war, and take over Japan. Don't know if there is, or would have been, any truth to that; but in case, the US did it right in the East anyway.
The Soviet entry into the Pacific War was another of the promises Stalin made during the war that he kept - he had promised at Yalta that the USSR would engage in Manchuria 90 days after the end of the war in Europe - which was August 9. Japan did not surrender due to the A-bombs. On August 9, the day the Nagasaki bomb was dropped, there was no mention of that fact in the records of the Supreme War Council. They spent the entire day talking about the Soviet invasion of Manchuria that happened that day. The Soviets went 130 miles the first day, because the vaunted "Kwantung Army" was a shell of itself, with all the best units having been transferred to Kyushu for deployment to meet the expected American invasion. Outside of Kyushu, there were no defenses anywhere in the rest of Japan, most notably in the north. The Soviets planned to have Sakhalin Isand retaken by the end of August and the invasion of Hokkaido was planned for mid-September, with the invasion of northern Honshu by the first week in October. By the time the Americans would have invaded Kyushu in November, the Soviets would probably have controlled all of Honshu.
I have spoken to Marines who were to have invaded Kyushu. In early September, after the surrender, the officers of the Sixth Marine Division - commander down to platoon leaders - visited the beach they were to have landed on, and spoke to the Japanese Army leaders who were still there, and looked at the defenses. It was their considered opinion that they would never have gotten off the beach.
The Japanese surrendered to us because they knew what the Russians had done in Germany following the surrender. They have used the A-bombs to cast themselves as victims ever since. The "official" Japanese history of the Pacific War is they went to war to liberate Asia from the white man, that they won every battle but were forced to make "strategic retreats," and then - A-bombs! This is a country whose government still refuses to apologize for the Rape of Nanking and the Korean Comfort Women. And whose national war memorial at Yasukuni Shrine contains the ashes of convicted and executed war criminals, which were brought in covertly - and which is has been secretly visited by every Japanese prime minister. The "Liberal Democratic Party" was founded by the leadership of the war (the prime minister before the current one was the son of one of the planners of the Pacific War) - it was as if the Nazis were allowed to re-enter the government after 1945. All done by the Great Reformer, General MacArthur, because "the alternative is the socialists and communists."
but Tom, isn't it the case that, in fact, plenty of Nazis did in fact enter the postwar German government? it obviously wasn't public knowledge and wasn't talked about for a long time, but they were there. or at least that's my understanding. of course, this is aside from the fact that thousands of Nazi war criminals were allowed HERE via Operation Paper Clip, along with other varieties of onerous postwar phenomena (McCarthy, etc.).
But not as a matter of government policy, and when they were discovered, they were dealt with. Not so with Japan. The Nazis didn't stay in the government at the same level they had been when they were running things.
The Soviet contribution was very well known during the war, not only through newspapers and radio accounts, but in the popular arts. Movies like “The North Star” and “Mission
To Moscow” and even American-centered pictures like “Action in the North Atlantic” stressed the importance of the Soviet contribution. But the onset of the Cold War and the Red Scare led to the suppression of the films and in some cases blacklisting or other repudiation of the work. With the fading of the blacklist, books like Alexander Werth’s “Russia at War” and Harrison Salisbury’s “The 900 Days” began to bring the Soviets back into American memories of WWII. But of course, far more people knew Dana Andrews and Anne Baxter (and Bogart) than read those books. And they were not made into movies like “The Longest Day.”
I can remember watching all of those movies in the later '50's, when tv was full of old movies. I definitely remember "Action in the North Atlantic" on the Million Dollar Movie, where you could watch the same movie sixteen times in the same week if you were so inclined. what's funny is that four days ago I watched "The North Star" (or actually as much of it as we could stand) with my friend, who's a Russian scholar. the personnel on that movie is sort of unreal...about as Popular Front and blue ribbon as things got: Milestone, Hellman (who was--let's face it--a hack), Copland, Ira Gershwin (for his lyrics to the silly songs), Stanley Cortez...a regular rogues' gallery....IF you were some kind of HUAC fan. for the record, I'm being facetious.
The screenwriter of Action in the North Atlantic - John Howard Lawson - was the head of the Hollywood chapter of the CPUSA. There is all kinds of really obvious "left propaganda" in the screenplay dialogue. None of which ever changed anyone's mind.
I'd totally forgotten that Lawson wrote that screenplay. a friend of mine was a neighbor of Ron Radosh, who's spent his entire career as an historian writing about how the Hollywood blacklist was probably a good thing because of all the REAL commies who smuggled their politics into their movies. but when he gives examples of this "dangerous" dialogue, it's pretty fucking anodyne (an example he cites is Trumbo's line ending a Ginger Rogers movie (I forget which one): "I guess that's the American way...share and share alike!" I don't think that line accounts for any significant uptick in party applications. almost needless to say, Radosh started life as a red diaper baby and they're mean as fuck when they "turn."
Lawson wrote the book, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo. Dalton Trumbo wrote the screenplay. I once met Radosh - "fucking moron" is a good two-word review there.
I resisted meeting him because I have a chronic incivility issue (this made my professional life, such as it was, something of a nightmare), but I think (or thought, if he's no longer among us) you pretty much hit the nail on the head. Radosh also loved to make a lot of public noise about not being able to get tenure because of the "hard left" orientation of most local History departments and my take on that was that his work was hardly worthy of tenure. whenever I see anything about "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo," I have to smile about my father's take on it, which was based on his loathing of Doolittle. you doubtless know all this, but Izzie (my dad, whose 19th memorial candle is burning a few feet away) couldn't forgive him for arriving at the Eighth and, just when everyone had finished their 25 missions, slapped on an additional 7, greatly increasing every flier's chance of not getting home...the phrase everyone used was "Twenty-five for America, Seven for Doolittle." I THINK I got that right. and btw, has that bombing campaign ALSO been found to have been of very limited effectiveness in shortening the war? if anyone knows, it'd certainly be you.
Since I have just written a history of the Eighth, I hate to be the one to tell you that Dad was wrong. When Doolittle "slapped on" the additional missions, that was the summer of 1944, when the Eighth Air Force fighters had knocked the Luftwaffe for a loop. By then the average losses on a mission were under 2 percent, way below the loss rate of January 1944, before the "Battle of Germany." And at the same time, the 15th Air Force flying out of Italy had a crew tour of 50 missions. Yes, nobody liked getting additional missions, but every other air force unit around the planet looked on the Eighth as prima donnas. The tour in Italy for the B-25s really was like what Heller did in Catch-22, though it wasn't just because of arbitrariness on the part of the group leaders (which was commonly thought so by the guys on the line), but rather the fact they weren't getting replacements since Italy was a "secondary" front. The tour for guys flying B-25 strafers in the Southwest Pacific, where some missions had 35% losses, was 75 missions. And yes, I know many guys who were in the Eighth who could prove all their missions were tough. But by the summer of 1944, guys were cycling through with a tour of 35 missions and were gone in 4 months, home. The whole history of the Eighth is "before the Berlin missions" (March 1944) and "after D-Day". By the fall, after the oil campaign, the Luftwaffe only came up against 14 missions over September-December, which was about 25% of the missions flown. Of course, flak was always deadlier and responsible for 60% of losses throughout the campaign.
yep...these are getting better and better. in my honors American History class in 1963, I actually don't remember if we learned ANYTHING about the Russian effort in WWII. many years later, when I worked in a high school, I'd stand in the hallway with a friend and we'd be so appalled at how badly history seemed to be taught that we'd ask random kids things like "what important event happened in the US from 1861-1865" and "who did the US fight against in WWII?" the answer to the latter was, almost universally, "the Russians."
Excellent piece, Tom.
All K-12, me and every school child did not know the real history of WWII. The Soviet's participation was white washed. As a catholic school grunt, we always had to pray for "the conversion of Russia". Plus we boomers who had fathers and relatives fight in that war, when we played " war" as kids you were either a Nazi, Japanese, or American.
Thinking back as a history major in the 70's, I don't believe I ever really studied the Soviet contribution.
Only in grad school and taking a mid 20th century history class did I learn of the true sacrifice.
The thought past, present (still) and future of all sacrifices from our current enemies was "white washed".
The usual quote: After the US entry into the war, it was essentially over.
Again, that fucking American exceptionalisim lie is repeated again and again and again.
When we entered the European theater, we really did play a role and that was controlling the west and south. There was a reason that being sent to the " eastern front" was such a threat to Sgt. Schultz in Hogan's Heroes. Imagine a stupid sit com contained more truth than and American history book.
America's entry was incredibly important and the right thing to do. Thinking back, Americans at home made victory gardens, war bonds, rationed gas, meatless Tuesday's, collecting tin, and yes, even cooking lard was taken back to the butcher, women entering the workforce by the millions, working in defense plants ( my mother was a Rosie the Riveter), and doing every kind of work. Black Americans wanted in also ( fuck if I can ever figure that the fuck out) both in the military and at home. Everyone pitched in.
Now we can't get a fucking Amerikkkan to wear a goddamned face mask during a pandemic that murdered millions.
We sure have come a long way, baby.
Next up, the Pacific theater...........
I forgot to mention that had Stalin not kept the promise he made in November 1943 at the Tehran Conference to unleash his major 1944 offensive the week after the western Allies invaded France, the Germans would have defeated the invasion in the bocage of Normandy. As it was, that first month in France was a close-run thing with the US, UK, Canadian and Polish armies hanging on by their fingernails (Yes, folks, "defeated" Poland was the #4 western ally in terms of manpower committed during the war) - until the effect of the Russian front-wide offensive started to be felt and the Germans suddenly had no more reinforcements to send to France while the US and its Allies could continue feeding in troops.
Being a "War, what is it good for..." type of person, I would never voluntarily seek to find the truth about any country's participation in any war effort. So my gratitude to you, TC, for doggedly capturing our attention with your excellent accounting, leading this reader to finally reckon with the truths embedded in this essay, warts and all.
At'cher service, ma'am! :-)
This was informative and instructive. Revisionist history is occurring at this very moment in Florida and Texas. Woe be to us.
When I read about the awful truth of the USSR and Russia and the many, many millions who were murdered by their own "leaders," I wonder why anyone would love that "Motherland." I'd be packing my bags and fleeing along with those young Russians!
Nazi hubris cost USSR dearly. Stalin received many warnings as you say but believed them to be British disinformation to open an Eastern front. Stalin was looking for evidence that Germany was preparing for the Russian winter and saw no evidence of use of light oil or increase in wool prices for winter uniforms. The Germans managed to convince themselves that they could drive the Red Army behind the Urals in four months and launched Barbosa.
You have it, yes indeed. Perhaps if Hitler hadn't had to pull Mussolini's chestnuts out of the fire in the Balkans and had invaded in late May as originally planned, they might have gotten to Moscow in time. I don't think that even if Moscow had been taken, that the USSR would have surrendered.
What I do NOT understand is why Stalin would not allow the Red Army which was concentrated near the Polish border to go on the defensive. It virtually guaranteed the loss of millions of soldiers, many of whom simply starved in German compounds. The USSR (Russia) seems almost proud of their 27 million deaths so many of which were Ukrainians (see Bloodlands). They should be ashamed as it was a result of Stalin's intransigence and Russian tactics which seemed to be mainly headlong charges.
Because he was convinced the Germans were not going to attack and he did not want to be seen as "threatening."
I meant after they attacked
After they attacked, it was "Ni shagu nazad!" ("Not one step back!") enforced by NKVD units ordered to summarily execute anyone trying to retreat, which meant units didn't have ability to act in a situation, which led to disaster. Hitler had the same policy after the Russian counter-offensives began, with similar disastrous results for the Wehrmacht.
On reading We Were There, by Basil Liddell Hart on German generals about WW II, I got the impression that Hitler "revenged" his generals for, as a corporal in WW I, receiving orders to stay on taken ground "to the last drop of blood". The generals meant they could have won the war if they had been allowed to arrange for orderly defence battles with a retreat on time.
Allen, I'm back on TAFM as you can see. Have you read today's piece 'NI SHAGU NAZAD??' It's a summary of how the Russian military is still stumbling. I am eager to know at least some of what you know. I hope Tanya has had a good Mother's Day or a good day, period, and that goes for you, too.
We had a good day. Tomorrow Tanya starts English class
…and then there is you. I wonder if it will be anything like when the husband teaches the wife how to drive...nah! Have fun and be well. Cheers!
wasn't Stalin sort of AWOL for the first few weeks of the German invasion? I mean emotionally.
Thank you for this elaborate extension of my history knowledge. Acknowledging what was, is a powerful tool to healing wounds of the past. History correctly told and ever corrected for the better, is basic to have a future.
Somewhere I read that more US bombs were thrown over North Korea, than US bombs used during the entire WW II. Do you know if that is correct? It made sense to me when the Swedish former Swedish prime minister came back from a visit to North Korea and said: "It is not only an autocracy, it is a nekrocracy"; with the worship of a dead leader.
Yes, the US dropped more bombs on Korea than Europe. To no success. As Admiral Clark, commanding 7th fleet at the time said, "The interdiction campaign didn't interdict." If you want to get educated on Korea, my three books go a long way to chipping away at the fossilized coprolite of "fact-like substance."
And North Korea is as bad as everyone says and always has been.
I was thinking of the national trauma arising out of that massive bombing. It has been possible to maintain control of the population also with retraumatization.
As with all autocracies, where one man is representing the whole people, it does not matter how many gets lost, as long as the autocrat is alive. When he dies he represents all people that died.
What is the name of your books?
Oh yeah, and it gets used. If you go to a North Korean war museum, the items from the other side are all shot-down/shot-up wrecks.
Really well written TC. Your books and comments here, consolidated, would make a fascinating history of the US. Might even be a textbook.
I have learned more history from TC than from my high school or college history classes. There was never enough time to cover things properly. If history had been told in narrative form accompanied by a timeline, I think students would have had a better understanding of our country’s history even with all the whitewashing and failure to disclose things such as the Wilmington, NC coup in 1898. I only learned such atrocious, appalling history as an adult. I grew up 100 miles from Wilmington.
TC, I thank you for your cogent writing that educates so many of us. Keep the facts coming.
When I'm writing, I like to play music of the period, you can learn a lot by what people were listening to and when. This collection below has a lot of English "music hall" songs from World War II. You can go from the enthusiasm of the early period before the attack in the west in May 1940, with the rousing "We're going to hang our laundry on the Sigfried Line" (the German equivalent of the Maginot Line) and Gracie Fields' "Wish Me Luck," to the bitter feeling of a soldier with George Formby's "Bless 'Em All," the fortitude of the Battle of Britain in "There'll Always Be An England," the wistfulness of Very Lynn's "You'll Never Know" or her classic, the most popular song of the war, "We'll Meet Again." The American songs are different: the sad wistfulness of Irving Berlin's "The Last Time I Saw Paris," which he wrote after seeing the newsreel of German troops marching under the Arch de Triumph in 1940, or the home front with Fats Waller's "Cash for your trash," the in-your-face of Spike Jones' "Der Fuhrer's Face,"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4b6DgeTf1BE
Priceless!
That you would write while listening to music of the period you are writing about makes perfect sense to me, music 🎶, like all art forms reflects the time in which it was created. Art history is just the study of history looking through a different lens, all of those lenses sharpen our focus on what has happened in days passed.
a quick correction: "The Last Time I Saw Paris" was Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II (the "Showboat" team), and you're entirely correct about the occasion. for myself, I'd thought it was Cole Porter.
Yes - you're right. They saw the newsreeel and left the theater, went to their office in the Brill Building and wrote it.
It is interesting that, by comparison, the topical music of our time is either non-existent or drech.
True dat!
there's "topical music" in our time? I mean, aside from Hip-Hop, which I don't consider to quite be music in any conventional sense. I actually find myself liking some of it, but to me, it exists in some kind of "music-adjacent" space. but, as somebody who really likes melodies, I can't quite think of it as "music," except in the most meaninglessly generic sense. I'm perfectly prepared to have my mind changed, but....
As I said, non-existent or drech; one of the motivating strengths of previous movements has always been the music that expressed the themes and issues of the day. Nothing now matches any of the protest songs written before the turn of the current century.
So true!
You're not alone in that.
The tragedy is that we needed the Russians to defeat the Germans it was one of those “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” kind of things, the bastards never were our allies, as has been obvious ever since. They should have listened to Patton and allowed him to push the Russians back into Russia, he got it and so do I, I have Russian iron in my leg and a broken back to go with it, I have had it for over 50 years. I am very clear about Russia, as a social order they have been unspeakably evil and have been so for over a century. Putin is just the latest manifestation of how inhumane they continue to be. Monday should be interesting, the bastard is loosing and he knows it, as do more and more Russians.
Someone told me the reason the US was forcing the war on Japan in the end, was that Stalin was ready to revenge Russia for the defeat in the Russian - Japanese war, and take over Japan. Don't know if there is, or would have been, any truth to that; but in case, the US did it right in the East anyway.
The Soviet entry into the Pacific War was another of the promises Stalin made during the war that he kept - he had promised at Yalta that the USSR would engage in Manchuria 90 days after the end of the war in Europe - which was August 9. Japan did not surrender due to the A-bombs. On August 9, the day the Nagasaki bomb was dropped, there was no mention of that fact in the records of the Supreme War Council. They spent the entire day talking about the Soviet invasion of Manchuria that happened that day. The Soviets went 130 miles the first day, because the vaunted "Kwantung Army" was a shell of itself, with all the best units having been transferred to Kyushu for deployment to meet the expected American invasion. Outside of Kyushu, there were no defenses anywhere in the rest of Japan, most notably in the north. The Soviets planned to have Sakhalin Isand retaken by the end of August and the invasion of Hokkaido was planned for mid-September, with the invasion of northern Honshu by the first week in October. By the time the Americans would have invaded Kyushu in November, the Soviets would probably have controlled all of Honshu.
I have spoken to Marines who were to have invaded Kyushu. In early September, after the surrender, the officers of the Sixth Marine Division - commander down to platoon leaders - visited the beach they were to have landed on, and spoke to the Japanese Army leaders who were still there, and looked at the defenses. It was their considered opinion that they would never have gotten off the beach.
The Japanese surrendered to us because they knew what the Russians had done in Germany following the surrender. They have used the A-bombs to cast themselves as victims ever since. The "official" Japanese history of the Pacific War is they went to war to liberate Asia from the white man, that they won every battle but were forced to make "strategic retreats," and then - A-bombs! This is a country whose government still refuses to apologize for the Rape of Nanking and the Korean Comfort Women. And whose national war memorial at Yasukuni Shrine contains the ashes of convicted and executed war criminals, which were brought in covertly - and which is has been secretly visited by every Japanese prime minister. The "Liberal Democratic Party" was founded by the leadership of the war (the prime minister before the current one was the son of one of the planners of the Pacific War) - it was as if the Nazis were allowed to re-enter the government after 1945. All done by the Great Reformer, General MacArthur, because "the alternative is the socialists and communists."
but Tom, isn't it the case that, in fact, plenty of Nazis did in fact enter the postwar German government? it obviously wasn't public knowledge and wasn't talked about for a long time, but they were there. or at least that's my understanding. of course, this is aside from the fact that thousands of Nazi war criminals were allowed HERE via Operation Paper Clip, along with other varieties of onerous postwar phenomena (McCarthy, etc.).
But not as a matter of government policy, and when they were discovered, they were dealt with. Not so with Japan. The Nazis didn't stay in the government at the same level they had been when they were running things.
right.
The Soviet contribution was very well known during the war, not only through newspapers and radio accounts, but in the popular arts. Movies like “The North Star” and “Mission
To Moscow” and even American-centered pictures like “Action in the North Atlantic” stressed the importance of the Soviet contribution. But the onset of the Cold War and the Red Scare led to the suppression of the films and in some cases blacklisting or other repudiation of the work. With the fading of the blacklist, books like Alexander Werth’s “Russia at War” and Harrison Salisbury’s “The 900 Days” began to bring the Soviets back into American memories of WWII. But of course, far more people knew Dana Andrews and Anne Baxter (and Bogart) than read those books. And they were not made into movies like “The Longest Day.”
I can remember watching all of those movies in the later '50's, when tv was full of old movies. I definitely remember "Action in the North Atlantic" on the Million Dollar Movie, where you could watch the same movie sixteen times in the same week if you were so inclined. what's funny is that four days ago I watched "The North Star" (or actually as much of it as we could stand) with my friend, who's a Russian scholar. the personnel on that movie is sort of unreal...about as Popular Front and blue ribbon as things got: Milestone, Hellman (who was--let's face it--a hack), Copland, Ira Gershwin (for his lyrics to the silly songs), Stanley Cortez...a regular rogues' gallery....IF you were some kind of HUAC fan. for the record, I'm being facetious.
The screenwriter of Action in the North Atlantic - John Howard Lawson - was the head of the Hollywood chapter of the CPUSA. There is all kinds of really obvious "left propaganda" in the screenplay dialogue. None of which ever changed anyone's mind.
I'd totally forgotten that Lawson wrote that screenplay. a friend of mine was a neighbor of Ron Radosh, who's spent his entire career as an historian writing about how the Hollywood blacklist was probably a good thing because of all the REAL commies who smuggled their politics into their movies. but when he gives examples of this "dangerous" dialogue, it's pretty fucking anodyne (an example he cites is Trumbo's line ending a Ginger Rogers movie (I forget which one): "I guess that's the American way...share and share alike!" I don't think that line accounts for any significant uptick in party applications. almost needless to say, Radosh started life as a red diaper baby and they're mean as fuck when they "turn."
Lawson wrote the book, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo. Dalton Trumbo wrote the screenplay. I once met Radosh - "fucking moron" is a good two-word review there.
I resisted meeting him because I have a chronic incivility issue (this made my professional life, such as it was, something of a nightmare), but I think (or thought, if he's no longer among us) you pretty much hit the nail on the head. Radosh also loved to make a lot of public noise about not being able to get tenure because of the "hard left" orientation of most local History departments and my take on that was that his work was hardly worthy of tenure. whenever I see anything about "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo," I have to smile about my father's take on it, which was based on his loathing of Doolittle. you doubtless know all this, but Izzie (my dad, whose 19th memorial candle is burning a few feet away) couldn't forgive him for arriving at the Eighth and, just when everyone had finished their 25 missions, slapped on an additional 7, greatly increasing every flier's chance of not getting home...the phrase everyone used was "Twenty-five for America, Seven for Doolittle." I THINK I got that right. and btw, has that bombing campaign ALSO been found to have been of very limited effectiveness in shortening the war? if anyone knows, it'd certainly be you.
Since I have just written a history of the Eighth, I hate to be the one to tell you that Dad was wrong. When Doolittle "slapped on" the additional missions, that was the summer of 1944, when the Eighth Air Force fighters had knocked the Luftwaffe for a loop. By then the average losses on a mission were under 2 percent, way below the loss rate of January 1944, before the "Battle of Germany." And at the same time, the 15th Air Force flying out of Italy had a crew tour of 50 missions. Yes, nobody liked getting additional missions, but every other air force unit around the planet looked on the Eighth as prima donnas. The tour in Italy for the B-25s really was like what Heller did in Catch-22, though it wasn't just because of arbitrariness on the part of the group leaders (which was commonly thought so by the guys on the line), but rather the fact they weren't getting replacements since Italy was a "secondary" front. The tour for guys flying B-25 strafers in the Southwest Pacific, where some missions had 35% losses, was 75 missions. And yes, I know many guys who were in the Eighth who could prove all their missions were tough. But by the summer of 1944, guys were cycling through with a tour of 35 missions and were gone in 4 months, home. The whole history of the Eighth is "before the Berlin missions" (March 1944) and "after D-Day". By the fall, after the oil campaign, the Luftwaffe only came up against 14 missions over September-December, which was about 25% of the missions flown. Of course, flak was always deadlier and responsible for 60% of losses throughout the campaign.
Fascinating, incisive; thanks for this revelation of historical distortions. What a reckoning you have laid out for us.
yep...these are getting better and better. in my honors American History class in 1963, I actually don't remember if we learned ANYTHING about the Russian effort in WWII. many years later, when I worked in a high school, I'd stand in the hallway with a friend and we'd be so appalled at how badly history seemed to be taught that we'd ask random kids things like "what important event happened in the US from 1861-1865" and "who did the US fight against in WWII?" the answer to the latter was, almost universally, "the Russians."