Tag Archives: World War II

Truth IS Stranger Than Fiction

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Truth IS Stranger Than Fiction

Reblogging an interesting item sent to me by a friend who may prefer to remain anonymous.  Straight from the annals of “truth is stranger than fiction,” ponder this satirical take on WWII, cleverly deriding pretentious post-modern views of “reality,”  particularly the modern refusal to acknowledge real evil — since “everyone knows”  that any notion of plots to obliterate the family by redefining marriage, to destroy western and Christian culture by secularization and/or by demographic and militaristic growth of Islamist philosophy, etc. are just too far-fetched for even a TV series, much less real life!  (NB: blog excerpts omit language which some readers might find offensive).

“….the worst offender here is the History Channel and all their programs on the so-called ‘World War II.’  Let’s start with the bad guys. Battalions of stormtroopers dressed in all black, check. Secret police, check. Determination to brutally kill everyone who doesn’t look like them, check. Leader with a tiny villain mustache and a tendency to go into apopleptic rage when he doesn’t get his way, check. All this from a country that was ordinary, believable, and dare I say it sometimes even sympathetic in previous seasons.

I wouldn’t even mind the lack of originality if they weren’t so heavy-handed about it. Apparently we’re supposed to believe that in the middle of the war the Germans attacked their allies the Russians, starting an unwinnable conflict on two fronts, just to show how sneaky and untrustworthy they could be? And that they diverted all their resources to use in making ever bigger and scarier death camps, even in the middle of a huge war? Real people just aren’t that evil. And that’s not even counting the part where as soon as the plot requires it, they instantly forget about all the racism nonsense and become best buddies with the definitely non-Aryan Japanese.

Not that the good guys are much better…. It’s pretty standard “shining amazing good guys who can do no wrong” versus “evil legions of darkness bent on torture and genocide” stuff, totally ignoring the nuances and realities of politics. The actual strategy of the war is barely any better…. one example: in the Battle of the Bulge, a vastly larger force of Germans surround a small Allied battalion and demand they surrender or be killed. The Allied general sends back a single-word reply: “Nuts!”. The Germans attack, and, miraculously, the tiny Allied force holds them off long enough for reinforcements to arrive and turn the tide of battle. Whoever wrote this episode obviously had never been within a thousand miles of an actual military.

Probably the worst part was the ending. The British/German story arc gets boring, so they tie it up quickly, have the villain kill himself (on Walpurgisnacht of all days, not exactly subtle) and then totally switch gears to a battle between the Americans and the Japanese in the Pacific. Pretty much the same dichotomy – the Japanese kill, torture, perform medical experiments on prisoners, … and the Americans are led by a kindly old man in a wheelchair.

Anyway, they spend the whole season building up how the Japanese home islands are a fortress, and the Japanese will never surrender, and there’s no way to take the Japanese home islands because they’re invincible…and then they realize they totally can’t have the Americans take the Japanese home islands so they have no way to wrap up the season.

So they invent a completely implausible superweapon that they’ve never mentioned until now. Apparently the Americans got some scientists together to invent it, only we never heard anything about it because it was “classified.”  In two years, the scientists manage to invent a weapon a thousand times more powerful than anything anyone’s ever seen before.  Then they use the superweapon, blow up several Japanese cities easily, and the Japanese surrender. Convenient, isn’t it?

…and then, in the entire rest of the show, over five or six different big wars, they never use the superweapon again. Seriously. They have this whole thing about a war in Vietnam that lasts decades and kills tens of thousands of people, and they never wonder if maybe they should consider using the unstoppable mystical superweapon that they won the last war with. At this point, you’re starting to wonder if any of the show’s writers have even watched the episodes the other writers made.

I’m not even going to get into the whole subplot about breaking a secret code (cleverly named “Enigma”, because the writers couldn’t spend more than two seconds thinking up a name for an enigmatic code), the giant superintelligent computer called Colossus (despite this being years before the transistor was even invented), the Soviet strongman whose name means “Man of Steel” in Russian (seriously, between calling the strongman “Man of Steel” and the Frenchman “de Gaulle”, whoever came up with the names for this thing ought to be shot).

So yeah. Stay away from the History Channel. Unlike most of the other networks, they don’t even try to make their stuff believable.”

Entire entry at http://squid314.livejournal.com/275614.html

Footnote 5 – An Army At Dawn

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Footnote 5 – Rick Atkinson, An Army At Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942-43 (New York: Henry Holt, 2001), pp. 33-34, 40-41, 413-415.

Perhaps it is appropriate to consider the battles waged across 1,000 miles of North African coastline 70 years ago in early 1943. Though the “timeline” is segmented by identifiable battles such as Kasserine Pass (28 February 1943) and el Guettar (23 March 1943), the genesis of the conflict occurred months before.  Perhaps modern Americans can only imagine how much went into the conflict, even in terms of sheer material goods, as described by Pulitzer Prize-winner Rick Atkinson:

“Dawn on October 24 revealed a forest of masts and fighting tops across Hampton Roads, where the greatest war fleet ever to sail from American waters made ready…..Young men, fated to survive and become old men dying abed half a century hence, would forever remember this hour, when an army at dawn made for the open sea in a cause none could yet comprehend.”

In addition to 33,843 soldiers, the holds of this flotilla carried “tanks and cannons, rubber boats and outboard motors, ammunition and machine guns, magnifying glasses and stepladders, alarm clocks and bicycles.  Into the holds went: tractors, cement, asphalt, and more than a million gallons of gasoline, mostly in five-gallon tins.  Into the holds went: thousands of miles of wire, well-digging machinery, railroad cars, 750,000 bottles of insect repellant, and 7,000 tons of coal in burlap bags.  Into the holds went: black basketball shoes, 3,000 vehicles, loudspeakers, 16,000 feet of cotton rope, and $100,000 in gold coins, entrusted to George Patton personally.  And into the holds went: a platoon of carrier pigeons, six flyswatters and and sixty rolls of flypaper for each 1,000 soldiers, plus five pounds of rat poison per company.

“A special crate, requisitioned in a frantic message to the War Department, held a thousand Purple Hearts… Phrase books with pronunciation keys, to be distributed at sea, perfectly captured Allied ambivalence, giving the French for both, ‘I am your friend’ and ‘I will shoot you if you resist.’  A propaganda radio station, cobbled together with a transmitter salvaged in Jersey City and a generator from a South Carolina cotton mill, was secretly installed in the U.S.S. Texas … Quartermasters had rounded up 10 million salt tablets and 67,000 American flag armbands, with 138,000 safety pins to secure them to uniform sleeves….Using a Michelin commercial road guide to Morocco, a government printing plant outside Washington had spent weeks reproducing sixty tons of maps, which were manhandled into the holds along with sealed bundles of Baedeckers, old issues of National Geographic, French tourist guidebooks, and volume ‘M’ of various encyclopedias….”

All this in addition to 72,000 troops and half a million tons of cargo previously shipped to England for the “shorter” sea journey to North Africa…. “In late January, Eisenhower had pleaded with Washington for more trucks.  Less than three weeks later, a special convoy of twenty ships sailed from Norfolk, New York, and Baltimore with 5,000 two-and-a-half-ton trucks, 2,000 cargo trailers, 400 dump trucks, 80 fighter planes, and, for ballast, 12,000 tons of coal, 16,000 tons of flour, 9,000 tons of sugar, 1,000 tons of soap, and 4,000 submachine guns, all of which arrived in Africa on March 6 ….”

“’The battle,’ Rommel famously observed, ‘is fought and decided by the quartermasters before the shooting begins.’  The shooting had begun months before in northwest Africa, but now the quartermasters truly came into their own.  The prodigies of American industrial muscle and organizational acumen began to tell.  In Oran, engineers built an assembly plant near the port and taught local workers in English, French, and Spanish how to put together a jeep from a box of parts in nine minutes. That plant turned out more than 20,000 vehicles.  Another factory nearby assembled 1,200 railcars, which were among 4,500 cars and 250 locomotives ultimately added to North African rolling stock.”

“In Africa, total supply requirements amounted to thirteen tons per soldier each month. …From late February to late March, 130 ships sailed from the United States for Africa with 84,000 soldiers, 24,000 vehicles, and a million tons of cargo….The Americans’ genius ‘lay in creating resources rather than using them economically,’ a British study observed astutely….’The American Army does not solve its problems,’ one general noted, ’it overwhelms them.‘   There was prodigal ineconomy – of time, of motion, of stuff – but beyond the extravagance lay a brisk ability to get the job done.  After Kasserine, American aviation engineers built five new airfields around Sbeitla – in seventy-two hours.  More than one hundred fields would be built during the Tunisian campaign.  The enemy would not be ‘solved’ in Tunisia.  He would be overwhelmed.”

And, above and beyond the material cost, at the expense  of more than 70,000 Allied casualties, “a continent has been redeemed,” to use Churchill’s memorable phrase.