World War II Interest

[Scott]

I am developing an interest in World War II. Does anyone else have that interest?

I recently completed an excellent series of lectures on WWII by the teaching company, World War II: A Military and Social History. It is a great general overview.

I also read good non-fiction book about one of the greatest naval battles of WWII, [ame="http://www.amazon.com/Last-Stand-Tin-Sailors-Extraordinary/dp/0553381482/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/103-6435612-5783804?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1188336495&sr=8-1"]The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors: The Extraordinary World War II Story of the U.S. Navy's Finest Hour[/ame]. It is a great book that really frames the heroism and sacrifice of our sailors.

I have also read a couple of good historical fiction books, such as [ame="http://www.amazon.com/Rising-Tide-Novel-World-War/dp/034546138X/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/103-6435612-5783804?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1188336590&sr=1-1"]The Rising Tide[/ame], which is about the African campaigns, and [ame="http://www.amazon.com/Last-Citadel-Novel-Battle-Kursk/dp/0553801775/ref=pd_bbs_2/103-6435612-5783804?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1188336644&sr=1-2"]Last Citadel: A Novel of the Battle of Kursk[/ame], which is about WWII's largest tank battle.

I have watched a few movies, such as The Battle of Britain and Patton.

Anyone have any WWII favorites in the way of books, movies, or the like?

I have also been playing a few WWII themed boardgames, such as Memoir '44 and Tide of Iron (which I recently obtained but have yet to play actually). M44 is fun to play with the kids. TOI is a bit harder and probably ok for older kids. Anyone else play?

 

[Herald]

I like "The Longest Day." It has an all-star cast and was state-of-the-art for its day. "Saving Private Ryan" had and almost realistic feel to it during the battle scenes.

I've heard that WW II re-enacting is getting popular.

 

[JohnV]

There are a few for me. The book The Wooden Horse, or something like that. There's the one about the bombing raid over Tokyo by, who was that, Doolittle? It's been a few years since I've read them.

I just read a brief history of WWII, which was full of photographs.

But my favourite movie was "One of Our Planes is Missing", I think it was. It only showed once and then completely disappeared. I haven't been able to find it since then. It's about the Dutch underground, a British flyer escaping his downed plane in Germany and following him all the way back to England. There's a scene in the movie almost right out of Hogan's Heros, but my Mom and Dad say that it really was like that in Holland during the war.

 

[Scott]

This looks like what you are talking about: [ame="http://www.amazon.com/One-Aircraft-Missing-Hector-Abbas/dp/B00000IGZG"]One of Our Aircraft Is Missing [/ame]. Unfortunately, not available on Netflix.

 

[NaphtaliPress]

My dad was in the Pacific in WWII, and his favorite movie was Mr. Roberts; said that was the kind of ship he served on; dunno about any Ensign Pulvers, etc. He had some funny and not so funny stories but didn't say a lot about it otherwise. We do have an audio file of him talking about it though; something my brother did in 1973 and found in 2000. He made a copy and sent it to me and then the master fell apart. I was able to digitize the copy which had some backward snips (age and tape sticking together?) and I reversed it digitally and restored it. Kinda cool. My dad keep a lot of his papers and I compiled some stuff for a family history in 2000. He passed away in 1990.

 

[jbergsing]

My wife would out me here so I'll admit it: I'm a WWII fanatic (IF such a fanaticism can exist). Especially when it comes to the naval battles fought in the Pacific.

JohnV, yes Doolittle led the Tokyo raid in April '42.

 

[JohnV]

This looks like what you are talking about: One of Our Aircraft Is Missing . Unfortunately, not available on Netflix.

I read the reviews. Sure looks like the one. I didn't know that it was made during the war. My parents were awed by it, stating over and over again how real it was. It's called a "propaganda" movie, but even though I saw it only once a long time ago, I can't forget my parents' reaction to it. It was the only WWII movie they would see, willingly. They didn't mind us watching Hogan's Heros, but they didn't like "Combat" with Vic Morrow, or John Wayne's WWII movies. They just weren't real to them, and didn't depict the war like it really was for them. My parents, like so many of their generation, didn't want to remember those years, or at least didn't want to be reminded over and over again. They were horrible years, and they didn't appreciate the glamorization of them. This movie, though was just real, and told us, their children, what they went through, the fear, the threat, the hunger and deprivation, the long nights, the bombings, the constant news of people they knew who were taken or shot, the Jews' deadly plight, and the call or visit from Jan Smit. All part of the war.

My dad worked in the underground in Germany. He managed to get on the wrong train, and got away with that because the Germans desperately needed herdsmen on the farms. He was hired on very near the border inside Germany. From there he managed to help downed flyers back across into Holland, to be secreted through the maze of hideouts back to England.

The farmers he worked for kept trying to use their farm and their needs to get their sons out of the German army, to keep the farm at home instead. So Dad was always expendible to them. So on several occasions he had to seek other farms to work on. He always managed to do so somehow.

At the time we didn't know it, but we had an actual decorated war hero living in our community. He was one of the head underground people. The Queen herself had decorated him for heroism, for his leadership. We didn't find this out until he was old. We made fun of him and his funny habits one day, even though we all loved him, and my parents suddenly got more upset about that than usual. So we boys pressed our parents about it, and finally found out that he was very highly regarded, secretly, by those in our community who knew. We were told never to let anyone else know, because he could not face the things he had had to do in the war for the sake of the work he did and the people he was protecting. We were told some stories, and I don't think I ought to repeat them here. But it sure was enough for us; ever after that he got our respect and admiration. And I've never met a kinder, gentler man. He became to some of us a greater hero than the movies tried to portray.

Then we began to understand why Mom and Dad didn't have much use for the way the war was depicted in movies. War was horrible, but yet it was better than the atrocities they endured under occupation. So you can imagine from that what it was like.

 

[jfschultz]

I also read good non-fiction book about one of the greatest naval battles of WWII, The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors: The Extraordinary World War II Story of the U.S. Navy's Finest Hour. It is a great book that really frames the heroism and sacrifice of our sailors.

As a Tin Can Sailor, this looks interesting.

 

[kvanlaan]

I have always loved that era because my grandfather was in the NBS (Nederlandse Binnenland Strijdkracht) - the Underground - and told me stories about it when I was a kid. They would raid distribution centers for ration cards and then redistribute to hiding Jews and others. He has a hand written thank you letter from Prince Bernard that was given to me when my grandfather died and it is one of my most cherished possessions.

We also read "Het Achterhuis" (Diary of Anne Frank) and Corrie Ten Boom as well as "Journey Through the Night" over and over when we were young. But it was my grandfather's stories that brought things to life more than anything, as they were so similar to what we were reading in the books. A very interesting period of time indeed.

 

[kvanlaan]

Wow, John, I've never even heard of that - Dutchmen living in Germany working for the Underground; that's something else.

The man your parents got upset about, did he live in the Grimsby area? Just curious.

 

[JohnV]

Wow, John, I've never even heard of that - Dutchmen living in Germany working for the Underground; that's something else.

The man your parents got upset about, did he live in the Grimsby area? Just curious.

No, he didn't live in Grimsby. He lived in our area, Dunnville.

 

[kvanlaan]

I think there are more in S. Ontario, then (which makes sense, as Ontario was flooded with the Dutch after the war). There was another man who lived in Grimsby who, when he died, had his funeral attended by a number of sunglasses-and-trenchcoat government types and had his obituary written up as a full story in papers back in Holland. Sad story, though. He would drive his wife to church every Sunday and wait for her in the car but never entered a church again after the war. A good man; I met him once, but he said that God had abandoned so many of His most ardent servants during the war to the Nazis that he simply could not worship any more.

 

[JohnV]

That sounds so familiar. Different people had different reactions. It was really hard, very hard.

Some ex-soldiers from the various wars since that time have had problems readjusting after what they had experienced. But WWII was brutal. Savage doesn't go far enough. The Germans had a separate class of "subhuman" for those who weren't Aryan, and they included more than just Jews. They had no problem (like in the movie "Schindler's List") of simply executing people, even for the fun of it. In Paris one commandant executed around a hundred civilians for every German that was killed by the resistance. In Holland similar things happened. Of the 55 million who died, nearly 30 million of those were civilians. And more than a third of those were simple executions, or starvation or disease through mistreatment. The Japanese were brutal too, bayoneting whole groups of PoWs simply because they had so great a disgust of surrender.

These men like the one in Grimsby and the one in Dunnville were but a few of the heros who survived. There's a whole lot more who didn't come home after the war.

People like to make fun of the British idea of grit and duty, but we owe a great deal to men who held to that ideal.

 

[kvanlaan]

People like to make fun of the British idea of grit and duty, but we owe a great deal to men who held to that ideal.

The sad truth of it is, I don't know that the Nethlands would react in the same way at all today if the same thing were to happen. From what I've seen there lately, there would be a large part of the population that would simply rationalize the Nazi mentality and they'd go out with a whimper, if that (especially proponents of the Margaret Sanger ideology, which was right in line with Hitler's).

 

[JohnV]

A number of years ago there was a movement, even among a few veterans, that the Remembrance Day slogan of "Never Again" be changed to mean that we would never sacrifice ourselves like that again. If another Hitler came along they would just let him go, they seemed to be saying. A few were disgusted with that, and it thankfully changed back once these things came out into the open.

 

[kvanlaan]

That's terrible. Vets or no, that sort of attitude should get the "Je Maintiendrai" ripped off their military insignia in short order. Of course, when the army is unionized and soldiers are allowed long hair and beards, etc., what do you expect...

My father went in for the Royal Dutch Marines in the late 60's; 140 began, 17 finished (he was one of the 17! ) But the attitude was just different (though in its last gasps, I think) back then.

 

[No Longer A Libertine]

Has any one seen these fascinating war time propaganda cartoons done by Disney and Warner brothers.?

Fascinating stuff.

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LO03pd6X-4&NR=1"]YouTube - Hitler's Children Education For Death[/ame]

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiLdilsi4Qo&mode=related&search=[/ame]

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGzyszUW5Gk&mode=related&search=[/ame]

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pe3hdBkmPuM&mode=related&search=[/ame]

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XMijRPD87U&mode=related&search="]YouTube - Blitz Wolf 1942 Banned Cartoon[/ame]

 

[kvanlaan]

Propoganda?!? Brother, I saw some very informative videos but nothing that I would classify as propoganda...

 

[No Longer A Libertine]

Propoganda?!? Brother, I saw some very informative videos but nothing that I would classify as propoganda...

A term friend, it can be truthful propaganda, it certainly possessed satire to the ninth degree.

 

[jawyman]

I was an exchange student in Germany years ago and it was fascinating to learn WW II history from their perspective. I have read everything Ambrose has ever written and if you get the chance to watch "Band of Brother" I would highly recommend it. I would also read all you could on Rommel and Patton. Two brilliant minds that were at the end of the day soldiers, not politicians.