The Cultural Impact And Legacy Of World War Two

Also: massive evacuation of urban children to rural areas ending, forever, isolation and innoculation of rural communities, massive geographical barriers within childhood culture broken down (as dissected in "Green and Pleasant Land" currently being repeated overnight on C4).

But, of course, Britain virtually bankrupted itself in fighting the war hence massive rebuilding job necessary, decay in public services, impossible difficulties for Attlee government (people had expected too much too soon ... as with Blair but to a far far greater extent) hence Tory revival in early 50s and decline of Labour not reversed until 1963/64. To an extent massive public desire to build more egalitarian society in immediate post-war years also dissipated in early 50s: hence huge interest in the 1953 Coronation etc.

Mark S: any of this coming up in the special issue of Crafts re. the Festival of Britain?

All hot stuff nevertheless.

Slaughter of millions on Somme, etc over what seems to me to be a gentleman's club dispute (oh you've invaded Austria , in that case we'll have to go and invade Greece etc) must have destroyed what faith 'the working classes' had in their leaders.

Plus October revolution (and womens suffrage) must have given people if not the will, then the idea that there could be an alternative to what in many cases was a feudal system which hadn't changed much in a few hundred years.

Mark: I was thinking more in terms of the Herbivore / Carnivore thing re. the Festival of Britain / Attlee losing / Churchill getting back, as put forward by Michael Frayn in *that* essay back in 1963 (reprinted in the Guardian just a few weeks ago). The thing that stood out most in my mind about the FoB was Peter Hennessy commenting in the 1994 C4 series "What Has Become Of Us?" that a new steam locomotive took pride of place: Britain had lost / was losing the race in technical innovation and this was, looking back, intensely symbolic, it being only 17 years before steam was abolished on BR.

(other great memory of that series: fantastic five-years-pre- Parr "Walking Back To Happiness" / M1 juxtaposition)

Not Dad's Army, no: that exchange was from the last series, I think, supposedly towards the end of the war, and says a lot about the new attitudes that came through in the 1945 election. I can *just about* imagine someone like Mainwaring swallowing his pride about voting Labour in '45, though that would have been the only time.

I suspect that their decline is in part for the fact that they were Govt which took us into WWI and in part disputes between Asquith and Lloyd George. I can’t believe that it was purely because Labour was more progressive as they’d done some good stuff pre-war e.g. Universal state pension.

Billy: I've always thought it baffling how slow and sluggish real change was after WW1. By the 30s, Stanley Baldwin seemed able to RECAPTURE the support many of those you'd have tht wd NEVER TRUST THE RULING CLASS AGAIN. But perspective is surely different depending on family history ahd background. My nearby family were not quite unTOUCHED by WW1 (my mother's two uncles were both gassed, to survived and became doctors), but let off strangely — I think unusually — lightly. Both my grandfathers were preferred occupations in WW2 (engineer, something in the admiralty), so saw no fighting. My mother's mother (13 when WW1 broke out) was a FIERCELY ANTI-WAR CONSERVATIVE, a position which I could really never fathom (she cried when the Gulf War broke out). My dad went all the way to London in 1965 to stand in the crowd as Churchill's funeral cortege went by (tho actually had flu and had to stay in bed). I watched it on a neighbour's TV, and painted a picture of St Pauls. I was given a Churchill Crown by an uncle, but didn't like the ugly scowling face on the coin, and grew up with a strange dislike of him (unrelated to politics or the war obviously), which erupted into an argument when I was 12, and I announced that I hated him. I had been told countless times that Hitler was a bad man, but when quite small I thought it unfair that the Germans lost the war AND got to be so disliked, and felt secretly sorry for them. I didn't root for them, but I was certainly very leery of the triumphalism of "We Won". In a funny way, I don't think this did any harm when punk came along and was just SO contemptuous of the sentimentality of community still being touted (Jubilee Street Parties as descendent of Spirit of the Blitz, etc etc), even though by then I'd read all abt the Death Camps and everything, and watched The World at War avidly. I think I kind of felt that not being taught about the Death Camps at school was part of the sentimentality (tho it was probably more accident than not: I hardly studied ANY history, becaue I wasn't in the history stream).

My mum says she LOVED the war: it was like a giant adventure playground (she was four when it began).

Not a complete explanation by any sense, but I do think this was a strong element. After seeing images of Auschwitz and Hiroshima, how could literature go on producing sensibly modernist novels? And note that the theory's upheld by the fact that postmodernism's initial twinklings can largely be traced back to central and eastern Europe -- particularly among Jews -- during the pre-war tension-development period. Which is to say: it explains Kafka and Schulz.

Of course you then have to work out where Airey Neave stood ...

http://fc64.deviantart.com/fs22/f/2008/002/0/1/World_War_Two__Simple_Version_by_AngusMcLeod.jpg

wild, never knew this!

http://ricks.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/02/18/a_pro_nazi_us_army_unit_in_wwii

Young Maple spoke many languages. But his favorite, alas, was German. At Harvard he got kicked out of ROTC for being vocally pro-German when that just wasn't cool, according to a separate article on him that I just read. Stymied in his hopes to do post-graduate work in Berlin, which was busy with other things at the time, he enlisted in the Army in 1942. The Army had just the place for him: the 620th Engineer General Service Company, which despite its innocuous name was actually a holding unit for about 200 GIs of suspect loyalty, many of them German-born. The unit, which was not given weapons, was located in Camp Hale, Colorado, which is far from any port, but happened to next to an detachment of German PoWs on a work party.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dale_Maple

However, he was pressured into resigning from the university German Club for singing the "Horst-Wessel-Lied" and other Nazi songs.[1][5] When he told The Crimson student newspaper that "even a bad dictatorship is better than a good democracy",[1] he was also dismissed from the campus Reserve Officers' Training Corps.[2][5]

70th anniversary of the Dresden bombing was yesterday and ended up getting sucked into a quagmire of moral relativism. Atrocities are atrocities...

sigh

they are but there are a lot of german people on the liberal spectrum and the nazi spectrum who remain heaviliy invested in the suffering of dresden

It is pointless to deny the horrific brutality of that bombardment, but foolish to rationalize it as equivalent to the crimes of Nazism. You will never hear the older citizens of European countries occupied by the Nazis saying the Germans suffered unjustly or the Allies were too brutal or inhumane.

if some country lucked into the exact # of ppl killed + buildings destroyed needed to accomplish war objectives, and didn't go over that calculation by even one, how would we even know? or does it not matter and all war is horrific brutality whether justified or not?

http://i.imgur.com/39570lm.jpg

Here we learn that a government that put some of its citizens in concentration camps shockingly committed the terrible injustice of depriving some soldiers of publicity.

I guess this is the general purpose WW2 thread?

im about halfway through Shirer's "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" and it has re-kindled my boyhood fascination for WW2. it's difficult, however, to wade through the dross (soooo many bad documentaries) and find the quality stuff. I picked up Max Hasting's "Inferno: The World at War," and it looks pretty good but I'm interested in something perhaps more...academic? Or at least something that remains comprehensive while having a point of view. a friend also recommended Timothy Snyder's "Bloodlands" which looks like the kind of thing I'm interested in.

Shirer book is a great read but tainted by prejudice and partisanship in the end i think

Bloodlands isn't really about WW2, it is purely concerned with the combined civilian genocide of Stalin/Hitler in the east. I just started The Maisky Diaries yesterday and have the Klemperer Diaries queued up. Max Hastings is a military fanboy wanker and completely untrustworthy imo.

The three volumes of Richard Evans' Third Reich trilogy is excellent, and heavily sourced in a way that's of the academy though these are not intended chiefly for an academic audience. I'm nearing the end of the third volume, focused on the war (the first two are on the rise of the Third Reich and its rule before the war, respectively).

I get the prejudice with Shirer (right or wrong I find it easy to ignore his obvious homophobia) and his slight digs at the nazis throughout (goering's "corpulence," hitler's tantrums) are really a relief in some ways. but maybe you mean something else with partisanship? too hard on chamberlain?

Max Hastings is a military fanboy wanker and completely untrustworthy imo.

shit. I liked the cover and it seemed like a decent refresher before tackling more in depth stuff.

Hastings does mention in the preface that gerhard weinberg's "the world at arms" is one of the best single volume histories of the war.

it's totally foolish to want to know what the single best literary/historical classic account of ww2 is, I know.

ignore me, it's probably best you come to your conclusions your own way. I got half way through his WW1 book and then ditched it for the way superior Christopher Clarke book and he decided MH definitely wasn't for me.

hethen

partisanship i was thinking specifically about crazy Hitler's tantrums tbh, they always read like he's unreflectively repeating Allied propaganda and become too cartoonified for me to take them seriously - i think in the context of a more rigorous historical approach i'd accept those stories more willingly

speaking of that sort of thing, Shirer is where the legendary "teppischfresser" thing originates, i believe.

quite possibly. even if all the details are true i think it undermines his credibility, but that's a personal foible probably.

Volker Ullrich's first volume of his Hitler biog is quite interesting. Although it seemed to be way too padded out with Goebbels diaries and I get the feeling way too many archives got reduced to ashes in the Nazi end days for there to be a flood of new information, like what came out of the Soviet archives in the 90's.

Bloodlands isn't really about WW2, it is purely concerned with the combined civilian genocide of Stalin/Hitler in the east.

this is true but still imo a tremendous work (and extraordinarily readable)

Absolutely. His account of the Babi Yar massacre is the probably the most harrowing depiction of real, pure evil I have ever read.

his more recent book, "Black Earth," also looks really good.

i think my problem is that im asking for two irreconcilable things at once: both a factual historical account (this happened, and then this happened), but also a kind of deep and sophisticated interpretive framework for *explaining* all this inexplicable carnage.

baba yar was one of the first events of the holocaust i learned about as a child (it was where my extended family who perished in the shoah were killed). i remember where i was when my parents told me about it - we were eating at a deli and i had just ordered a large dish of cole slaw for lunch (since that is all i wanted to eat at the time) and the restaurant made me a large dish of it despite it generally only being served as a side. i kept getting really confused because i thought they were talking about baba ganush.

Ordered both "Bloodlands" and "Black Earth" (the paperback, not out until September), very much looking forward to both of them. I'm particularly interested in the "lebensraum" stuff at the moment so I think Snyder is my guy for now.

The first half of Bloodlands is concerned with Stalin's collectivisation induced famine in Ukraine and his genocidal terror campaigns of the 30's, it is unremittingly bleak but hard to put down.

im sure this is a bit of a naive question but im here to learn...

so when i was a kid first learning about all this (late 80s) i distinctly remember that most of the books i read treated the holocaust as more or less ancillary to the military heroism of the allies while also quite de-emphasized--it was something certainly worth mentioning (in a chapter, say) and then passed over. the principle image of the destruction and chaos of the war was always "the bomb." I don't know if this is a correct impression of the "cultural status" of the war at that time but it's what i experienced.

thinking on it, i get the impression that the bomb carried much more symbolic weight as the central image of the war on through the 50s/60s/70s than the holocaust did. it seems to me that this has changed, and possibly right around 1989? and is the collapse of the USSR, and the subsequent greater understanding of exactly what happened in easter Europe, responsible for this cultural shift (if indeed i am perceiving it accurately).

it could simply be that my own (white, american, texan) consciousness of the holocaust has simply grown, and i certainly remember reading Anne Frank in school and all that--although quite strangely i dont remember the teachers being too explicit about the context for that book!

i think for decades after the true scope of the holocaust wasn't truly understood or disseminated properly in the greater culture, plus i think its nature as something that was only really even reported on after the war ended led to the primary narrative of WW2 remaining the conflict and the exclamation point that officially ended it.

at least for awhile, i mean it's not as if the holocaust was unknown or the scope wasn't understood to a degree, but i think WW2 in culture was about battles and air raids and sieges and u-boats or whatever for a very long time. and i think pearl harbor also played a part in the A-bomb having a more central role, bc that was obv the greatest generation's 9/11 and once the trauma from that event faded i think people started to get a better perspective on the whole war.

during the Cold War people were really terrified of being nuked so ppl were pretty obsessed with the bomb

for a long time the holocaust was culturally a little - i don't know if radioactive is the word but ppl didn't really know how to deal w/ it and a lot of post-war media that touched on it did so obliquely. i think the big change was first when Shoah came out (1985) and then the really big one was schindler's list (1993) which opened up a lot of dialogue and i think made ppl more comfortable w/ discussing it. i wish i had more specific examples of early 'oblique' references but for example Crossfire + Gentleman's Agreement both came out in 1947 and neither mentioned the holocaust at all which you'd think would be a big oversight in a film about antisemitism.

it would be interesting to find the first hollywood film that even mentions it.

I am struggling to recall the TV miniseries from the 80s (which was def prior to Shoah if memory serves) that addressed the Holocaust - it featured some scenes that really stuck in my mind like Jewish kids fighting as partisans/resistance fighters as well as a scene with a mother going to the showers with her daughter, assuring her that it was "just a shower". Was on PBS... shit what was the name of that thing...

might've been this?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust_(miniseries)

I don't think it's about "embracing the opposing national myth" at all! The conclusion to draw from the idea that WWII was won by the Soviets wouldn't be "turns out Stalin was a good guy", it would be "turns out feel good narratives about freedom always triumphing are bullshit and the conflict was actually just as much or more about two despotic maniacs going to battle at the cost of an incredible amount of human lives". Doesn't really help fly anyone's jingoistic flag.

Soviet Union definitely did more to defeat the Nazis than any other country who signed a pact with them

I don't think it's about "embracing the opposing national myth" at all! The conclusion to draw from the idea that WWII was won by the Soviets wouldn't be "turns out Stalin was a good guy", it would be "turns out feel good narratives about freedom always triumphing are bullshit and the conflict was actually just as much or more about two despotic maniacs going to battle at the cost of an incredible amount of human lives". Doesn't really help fly anyone's jingoistic flag.

― Daniel_Rf

Is that the conclusion Putin's drawing from the Soviet victory? (I genuinely don't know, I don't follow these things). I think it's very easy to glamorize the Soviet victory, to make it into a national myth (which can just as easily benefit the successor state). You can talk up the decisive role of maskirovka in Operation Bagration. You can talk about the determined resistance displayed by the "Hero City" of Stalingrad. You can - and this is the stuff Calzino is implying that is bothering me - try to make it into a game of numbers, to say that D-day was a sunday stroll in the park, that the Battle of Britain was a tea party. I find those sorts of comparisons trivializing to the actual suffering people went through on the Western front. Acknowleding the mind-boggling disaster that was the Eastern Front doesn't require one to put down the actions of people on the Western Front in comparison.

..(trivializing to the actual suffering people went through on the Western front.)

lol, there is no cure for what you have!

I mean it takes a bit of work to turn criticising the pitiful ahistorical guff that comes out of Western leaders mouths - and the media - about WW2 - Into me trivilaising the dead of any non-Eastern military theatres by saying they suffered less and did less damage to the Wehrmacht.

bump to keep “I hate to agree with Putin” calzino from having the last word

I also thought this was a good thread:

Russia really does deserve far more credit, thanks, and appreciation for its WWII sacrifices than it currently receives in the West. But quite frankly it will never get such respect if it ties its military exploits to the Great Patriotic War narrative.

— 101 144 141 155 040 105 154 153 165 163 (@Aelkus) June 6, 2019

Another American windbag who seems to think you can't criticise bullshit national narratives without becoming tethered to other bullshit ones.

The usual disingenuous bollocks about Molotov/Ribbtrop like it makes a difference to how much their citizens paid in blood ...tell your twitter man the Soviet Union didn't have a hitler-pact referendum you know!

Trying to remember if any other Allied nations signed pacts with Hitler

so much suffering in the double/triple occupied zones as well, and not just the soldiers - the poor citizens and from ss and nkvd. But I'm guessing at this point I'm a tankie so I just ignore any funny business from Soso!

their annoyance at the western d-day hyperbole is pretty legit

as far as I can tell, nobody is really debating this point with you; you seem more broadly upset that American and U.K. politicians keep talking about D-Day on the anniversary of D-Day. I don’t know what to tell you there buddy.

I just like a moan and find it fucking insufferable!

I'm remembering some doc I watched recently and some captured allied solder was saying: as we were getting liberated from the camps those Red Army folks that managed to survive against the odds were getting shipped off to Eastern gulags.

10 years (post Iraq) of Help For heroes type shit at football matches has turned me into a raving Tankie!

On this day remember that Operation Bagration, on the Eastern Front, starting 23 June 1944 was very much larger than D-Day and Normandy, and so were casualties. In UK and US we forget that victory came in May 1945, not June 1944, in Berlin, not Normandy.

— David Edgerton (@DEHEdgerton) June 5, 2019

joking, obv. I like this guy on British WW2 era history and he's otm here.

The other problem with Pence's comment: no sector of the American economy so closely resembles the socialist (or Soviet) as much as the military industrial complex, to this day. During WWII, the US effectively became a command economy, with the War Production Board becoming our version of Gosplan.

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

― El Tomboto, Tuesday, June 4, 2019 8:41 AM (one week ago)

https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/staggers/2019/06/today-s-75-year-olds-didn-t-fight-war-so-why-do-we-think-they-did

right on schedule

“WW2 was hell” say thousand yard stare dads born in 1946

these old UK bastards that weren't even a thought till after the Nuremberg trials might have experienced some austerity and rationing as children. But they still grew up in a relatively stable era in terms of the security of the NHS and the shiny new welfare state that hadn't been PFI'ed out of shape yet. I'd wager anyone growing up poor in the 70's had it maybe slightly better and without national service in their formative years, but much tougher afterwards - especially than these old bastards with property portfolios and substantial savings. aka the most selfish and deluded bunch of wankers generation.

I was born in 1954 and I will gladly tell you that "WWII was hell". So was WWI, for that matter. I won't pretend I fought in them. I even caught a break and missed being drafted to serve in the Vietnam War. I lead a charmed life.

My old mum, who was 5 or 6 when war broke out, used to tell me how much fun she'd had - kids being kids. Running about wild, getting the old gas mask on and spending the night at the bottom of the garden in the back court in the pathetically inadequate bomb shelter, cheering Uncle Joe Stalin in the newsreels at the pictures etc.

... I meant to leave out the word 'garden' there, she's didn't have a garden, of course, the very thought!

i guess this is a fair place to ask it: what are the non-shitty documentaries about WW2? i thought about watching the world at war a while back but doesn't seem to be streaming anywhere.

it's on You Tube innit?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0b4g4ZZNC1E

d'oh! yeah, should've looked there -- thanks! i assume that's one of the best ones? still seems to be highly regarded.

Have you seen the late 90's bbc series The Nazis A Warning From History? It's more about the holocaust and not the theaters of war and all that. but it is very powerful and the brahms requiem music in the title is appropriate. And someone who dobbed a gay neighbour to the gestapo get's ruthlessly shamed 40 years later.

yeah my mum also always said she enjoyed the war, she was 4 when it began

Unforgettable image courtesy the magisterial World at War. British soldier on the weather in Burma: "It was the only place I know, you'd open up a tin of corned beef, you could pour it out like liquid." Mmmm, gimme dat cawm beef smoothie! Kids these days are too damn picky...

— Ian Penman (@pawboy2) May 12, 2019

my favourite bit of World at War is always when it sets up the topic of the next ep, and sir larry's reading of the final line "Nemesis would come… from the SEA!"

i've posted this before, but I was working in a bookstore when the brokaw GREATEST GENERATION book was huge and we sold a lotta copies to people 21 and younger intending it for their parents. I guess the idea could have been that they figured their parents, as the kids of said generation, might dig it, but idk. Was that the final nail in the boomers' imagining themselves as rebels against the crusty old establishment generation that spawned them?

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)?

like the interviewer I was quite surprised by how largely backwards and poor the late 30's German economy was revealed to be in Wages of Destruction. They were miles behind Britain and France in GDP, electrification, motorisation and hamstrung with stagnant growth and a bigger population to feed. Despite having a huge army they were a bit of a basket case really and their expanding reich brought as many new problems as short term benefits.

i also the remember the book mentioning some of the social housing built by the nazis was barely just 19th century standard with no power supply circuits nor toilets.

Enjoying that Vichy book by Julian Jackson. On Jacques Doriot who went full fash after getting booted out of the communist party (might be a warning from history to Tommy Yack Yack!):

Doriot's image of heroic, working-class virility made him attractive to self-hating middle-class fascist intellectuals. Until he became rather fat, Doriot looked the part of the fascist leader (except for his glasses).

sorry rushomancy , didn't catch your post at the time: no, I don't think that's what Putin's take is, and am somewhat baffled as to what Putin has to do with anything I said?

my favourite bit of World at War is always when it sets up the topic of the next ep, and sir larry's reading of the final line "Nemesis would come… from the SEA!"

― mark s, Wednesday, 12 June 2019 21:45 (yesterday) Bookmark

lol! been re-watching this tonight and my fave portentous epilogue by lazza was " the sun had set on one imperial power... on another.. the sun was still rising". if only Redd Pepper's voice had broken in them days..

Dan Carlin did a like 70 hour series on the Eastern Front a few years back, and I imagine a lot of people heard it

I mean more than will read a 500 page book about it

Just reading this review of Alexiviech's book, collected oral testimonies of people who were children during WWII. Love the two books of hers that I've read, but they are tough (especially Chernobyl Prayer)

https://www.bookforum.com/print/2602/last-witnesses-an-oral-history-of-the-children-of-world-war-ii-by-svetlana-alexievich-22005

Yeah, the concentrated child misery means I think I will have to skip this one.

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/597751/stalingrad-by-vasily-grossman-translated-from-the-russian-by-robert-chandler-and-elizabeth-chandler/9781681373270/

this sounds interesting.

i think this is the first year that i haven't heard a single peep about pearl harbor from any person or news organization.

As we remember Japan’s aggression in the Pacific, we need to ask ourselves this question: is the remilitarization of Japan, which is presently underway, truly a good idea? We need to be careful that shortsighted, self-serving leaders do not end up bringing us again face-to-face…

— Tulsi Gabbard 🌺 (@TulsiGabbard) December 7, 2023

xp. Seems reasonable. Pearl Harbor was 82 years ago. The national trauma du jour is now Sept. 11, 2001. You'll be hearing about that one until the day you die.

my annual report: hawaii still knows it’s pearl harbor day

lol @ that tulsi tweet. god she's a kook