Thoughts on the World Wars

Two things,

First, if you haven't, read, The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman, a Pulitzer prize winning history of the opening of WW1, which is almost one of my favourite books. It covers the run up to and openign moves of WW1, before everyone digs into trenches and writes poems.

Second, this blog ran through WW1 in real time 100 years later, pretty much, and concentrated on the reality not the mythos of Verdun etc built up after. http://poppycockww1.com/ -here is the 'intro':

THERE’S MORE TO THIS THAN POPPIES…
There are two ways to remember the First World War.

One approach – let’s call it the heritage version – is hard to miss and is essentially the story of Britain’s First Big War Against Germany. It tells of poems and poppies, slaughter in the trenches and lions led by donkeys, of a gigantic exercise in stupidity and futility that opened the door to Hitler’s war. It describes struggles on the home front, chronicles the ghastly the horrors of the Western Front and merely touches upon a more or less familiar series of events in the wider world. It takes in plenty of truths, helps us identify the past in terms of personal experience, serves as a warning beacon to the future and is a fitting memorial to the suffering of millions. It’s important, and it’s all over Britain’s press, radio and TV… but it’s only one thread in a much bigger tapestry.

The other approach tells the full historical story of a true world war, an astonishing cataclysm that transformed the planet and laid clear foundations for the complicated mess we currently inhabit. It ranges across continents and peoples, sweeping military campaigns and revolutionary social changes, seismic shifts in the nature and balance of power around the globe. It’s amazing stuff, an action-packed snapshot of the modern world’s test-tube birth, but it’s not part of the heritage package and most people don’t know much about it.

Who knew, for instance, that a Japanese naval squadron fought (and learned) alongside the Allies in the Mediterranean? Or that Europe’s preoccupations elsewhere opened the door for Washington’s economic and political dominance of South America? As Britain mourns a lost generation, how many of us are aware that Austria-Hungary and France lost almost twice as many dead, Russia and Germany many more? And when we dismiss the First World War as futile, what about the empires it brought down, the dozens of new nations it spawned or its role in the vast shift of global wealth to the USA? What about new world orders that emerged in the Soviet Union, Central Europe, the Middle East and Britain’s white dominions, or the momentous changes seeded in India and China?

The list of seismic geopolitical changes goes on and on, as does any catalogue of the War’s social, technological and cultural impacts on humanity as a whole. I’m not sure you can get a three-dimensional take on modern life without knowing something about them, and it seems wrong to let the centenary pass without at least trying to bring the real First World War to a wider audience – so that’s what Poppycock aims to do.

This won’t be another complete history of the War, it isn’t intended to be controversial or unorthodox, and it will be written for the interested layperson rather than for informed historians. I plan to shadow the War’s progress, a hundred years on, with stories, snippets or analyses designed to cast light on the wider picture, and to write occasional, longer pieces for the Big Guns category that will, I hope, provide dispassionate and accurate overviews of issues, events, people and places central to understanding. In between, in the Sniping category, I’ll put any rants and raves that spring to mind about differences between the real War and the all-media heritage version. Comments, suggestions and any other kind of feedback are very welcome… now I’ll shut up and get on with it.

I feel like our cultural memory of these events his been eroded over time. We have these impressions of what we think it was like, but not an overarching understanding of the complex series of events throughout the 20th century.

Of course.

How much do you know about the Thirty Years War? It's described by Wikipedia as "one of the longest and most destructive conflicts in human history" and "the deadliest European religious war". According to some estimates, more people died in that war than in World War I. Over the course of the Thirty Years War, just about every country and power in Europe was involved. Its main legacy is the Westphalian state system, which is based on the principle that a state has sole sovereignty over its territory. It created the concept of international diplomacy. The United Nations is based on this principle.

But I'm guessing you don't have "an overarching understanding of the complex series of events throughout the 17th century" - which is perfectly fine. Things get blurry with distance. As the participants in a war die out, it becomes just another piece of history. And, as times move on and more events occur, it becomes old history. Eventually, it becomes ancient history (what can you tell me about the classical Roman wars of conquest?).

I would feel it safe to say that the attention span of current society has been eroded to the point that nothing of great importance is cemented into our cultural memory.

I served in the Marine Corps, and have been on numerous combat deployments. I mention this because when I do read biographies, autobiographies, and other non-fiction, right or wrong, I find myself drawing parallels to my own experiences.

That blue arrow on the map has a deep meaning to me because I was on the left-hand side of its tip, that red arrow a place I sometimes would like to forget. My grandfather served in the Navy during WWII aboard a destroyer and could likewise point to a map and tell you a story from different places he'd been. My mother could talk about life at home during the Vietnam war and seeing my uncles being sent away to fight. My ex-wife has stories about watching the news constantly during the Iraq invasion, hoping to get a glance of me but also terrified of what she might see.

It has meaning because it happened directly to us, or to someone we care about. To those who did not experience hardship nor emotional turmoil perhaps there is only the desire to say a few solemn words, and then to get on living their lives, placing this unpleasantness firmly behind them.

What has most often held my interest in the study of WWII is the treatment and perception of troops following the end of the war. Why could a regular German soldier or Japanese soldier not be proud of their service? Putting everything else you know about the war aside, these were troops that served when their country needed them.

To me it is something of a paradox, serving your country and yet not being able to be proud of that service because of the way things turned out. All too often I see people saying that the German soldier should be ashamed because they must have known about the concentration camps. Making the comparison to my own life, it would be like not taking pride in my service because the United States operated Guantanamo Bay. I do not know what goes on there, nor do I have any involvement with the place, so should I feel ashamed about my own service?

so far, very few things have come close to painting a cohesive picture.

History has to be rewritten in every generation, because although the past does not change, the present does; each generation asks new questions of the past and finds new areas of sympathy as it re-lives different aspects of the experiences of its predecessors.

Christopher Hill

I feel like our cultural memory of these events has been eroded over time.

The basic idea that he explicates in the article is that we can track the evolution of myths and folktales with the same techniques that we use to establish evolutionary relationships and evolutionary history.

By Julien d'Huy, Steve Mirsky on November 15, 2016

What are your experiences with studying this time period? How do you feel about the quality of your understanding?

While incomplete, sometimes inaccurate, confusing, and biased, I find that first hand accounts are the most tangible. Studying fractals out from each individual experience. The concept that a particular event "means" one thing or another is always processed through at least two ideas of self: the person/people with first hand experience and your own understanding as the receiver.

It's something you eventually have to decide yourself, imo.

I haven't studied the wars as a whole in great detail, but I have invested a lot of time into studying the development of the atomic bomb and the decision to use it against Japan in World War II. Today, it's an event that, understandably so, most everyone looks back on with great contempt, but the discussions and circumstances that led to the decision are really quite complex and thought-provoking. The bomb was an occurrence like no other in the history of the world, so for anyone who would like to read more about its creation and the aftermath of its use I can recommend a couple books:

• The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes - A long-winded history of the creation of the bomb, including the physics behind it
• Hiroshima in History and Memory by Michael J. Hogan - A collection of essays detailing the decision to drop the bomb, and the effects it had on Japan and American afterward