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What i find even more remarkable is how every town, village, school and institution have memorials for those who lost their lives in the Great War. Usually the
by FridayoLeary 1y ago
What i find even more remarkable is how every town, village, school and institution have memorials for those who lost their lives in the Great War. Usually there is another plaque attached in memory of WW2. It's hard to imagine the scale of deaths.
The tragedy is how little was accomplished by the sacrifices of ww1. It had none of the moral clarity of ww2 nor did most of the deaths achieve any strategic purpose.
On the other hand i knew an old scientist who had quite a few interesting and amusing stories to share about his efforts in WW2. One of them was about his attempts to perfect a formala. Several factories exploded before they succeeded.
- sorcerer-mar 1y agoIt's worth pointing out explicitly that WW2 didn't have the moral clarity that it does today either. The vast majority of the western world was perfectly content to let Hitler run Europe and Japan to run Asia.
- MattPalmer1086 1y agoWhat do you define as the vast majority of the western world? Just the US?
- sorcerer-mar 1y agoLiterally not one country initiated combat against Nazi Germany before being attacked itself. Churchill stands virtually alone as one with moral clarity on the Nazis. USSR allied with them. France was fine seeing everyone else get rolled. Poland signed a nonaggression pact. The British parliament were generally happy to let Hitler have his way. How about instead, you tell me who you think went out of their way to combat Nazism?
- beachy 1y ago> Literally not one country initiated combat against Nazi Germany before being attacked itself. Apart from many of the Commonwealth countries?
- lipowitz 1y agoThe UK could have declared war on Mars and the Commonwealth would follow, so you are only talking about Churchill.
- ta1243 1y agoChurchill became PM in May 1940, 8 months after the UK declared war on Germany.
- sorcerer-mar 1y agoThe interim period being known as "The Phoney War" for being... well... phoney. A technical satisfaction of their obligations to Poland and no more.
- yread 1y agoBritish government even signed a british german naval friendship on the eve of Munich agreement. Moral clarity haha
- lostlogin 1y agoHow else were they going to get peace in our time?
- arethuza 1y agoNitpick: It was "peace for our time" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_for_our_time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_for_our_time
- flir 1y agoMeanwhile, back home... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_rearmament_before_World_War_II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_rearmament_before_Worl...
- ta1243 1y ago> Literally not one country initiated combat against Nazi Germany before being attacked itself. The UK and France both declared war at the same time after Germany invaded Poland. I think the UK fired the first bullets -- or rather depth charges, on Sep 3rd. That resulted in damage and no deaths. A few hours later Germany attacked a UK passenger liner and killed over 100 civilians - not just Brits but also Canadians and Americans. The day later the RAF bombed a German naval port, causing little damage, but again attacks. France had the Saar offensive within days, so France fired the first shots between France and Germany. Nazi invasion of the Benelux and France was inevitable, but technically France attacked Germany before Germany attacked France. > The British parliament were generally happy to let Hitler have his way. Britain was mobilising throughout the late 30s. Declaring war at Munich could well have resulted in a British loss - the RAF wasn't really capable of running the Battle of Britain, it barely survived even with the extra year of preparation. On the other hand Nazis were less prepared too. Who knows what that would have done - perhaps a coup against Hitler would have succeeded. On the other hand perhaps there would have been no support for war - leading to a resignation of Chamberlain, Halifax becoming PM who was even more stronger into appeasement, and a swift truce hammered out, with no the UK abandoning Poland. Churchill was of course more wary of Hitler, but Chamberlain is the one who declared war.
- sorcerer-mar 1y agoThis is pretty much a complete and comprehensive description of what's now called the Phoney War for being pretty much nonexistent beyond the bare minimum required to "check the box" for England and France's "defense" of Poland (which, to be clear, waiting for your ally to be directly attacked == not doing anything until you are attacked) Not that I think any of this is indefensible, to be clear, but it is obvious in the moral clarity of today that offensive action against Nazi Germany would have been justified. The reason no one engaged in it was because it wasn't morally clear at the time.
- ta1243 1y agoI don't understand when you consider the first attack by Germany on the UK? The invasion of Poland? Even if you ignore early engagements in September 1939, from April the UK was involved in fighting in Norway - losing over 4000 troops in the process. The war wasn't waged particularly well by France or the UK in 39/40, being too late to be involved in Finland and failing to successfully defend Norway, but it was certainly waged in Norway. The failures led to the fall of both Daladier and Chamberlain, but thousands of British troops had been killed before Churchill became Prime Minister.
- FridayoLeary 1y agoTo an extent you are right. ww1 made much more sense at the time then it does today. And it wasn't as clear during ww2 that it was in fact the greatest conflict of good vs evil ever. The extent of the German and Japanese atrocities only became clear after the war and they were so great that even the Soviet Union were on the side of the angels. I wouldn't say they were perfectly content. It was more that they were cowardly and apathetic.
- kjellsbells 1y agoWWI makes no sense (or perhaps, we understand it better) because over a hundred years have passed, and the highly emotive propaganda of the time no longer persuades us. If you were listening to your pastor thundering in the village church about (say) nurses in Belgium in 1914 you might not have had the emotional distance, or education in cold politics, to recognise that what was really going on was the death throes of the Austro-Hungarian empire and the fight for hegemony in the empires that remained. (Not to diminish the crimes in Belgium, btw, but they were part of a bigger picture that would have been hard to read in 1914.)
- jltsiren 1y agoThere was moral clarity in West and South Europe. But if you happened to be in East Europe, WW2 was primarily a war between nazism and communism. Everyone else was trying to find the least bad option, which usually meant choosing a side and switching it at least once.
- FridayoLeary 1y agoI don't know if the eastern european countries besides maybe ussr count. Many many polish, ukrainian and lithuanians enthusiastically helped the germans in carrying out the holocaust.
- oddmiral 1y agoMany jews were communists. Communists killed millions in those countries.
- rrr_oh_man 1y agoI think you got your causalities wrong there
- oddmiral 1y agoOn 02.04.2008, Russian State Duma confirmed that 7 million (adults and unknown number of children) died because of artificial starvation in 1932-1934 (Holodomor). Majority of them are Ukrainians. However, Russian Federation refuses to confirm the starvation and FSB agents jail or kill everybody who spreads information about Holodomor. If you are from RF - beware.
- rrr_oh_man 1y agoCausalities, not casualties. :)
- FridayoLeary 1y agoNot even close so don't try. There were some powerful positions in the ussr occupied by jews. I'm not sure what role they had in the purges etc. Stalin was definitely not a great lover of jews. On the other hand in the countries i mentioned above many locals participated in a genocide and murdered their neighbors with their bare hands.