Bizarre to write something called "the real war" that is focused on American forces, who were, by any measure, enjoying vast advantages and resources unavailable to other combatants (including being able to choose the time and place of engagement). Below is a table of WWII military casualties by nation:
World War II casualties - Wikipedia
Soviet Union 8,668,000 to 11,400,000
Germany 4,440,000 to 5,318,000
China (1937–1945) 3,000,000 to 3,750,000+
Japan 2,100,000 to 2,300,000
United States 407,300
United Kingdom including Crown Colonies 383,700
Italy (in postwar 1947 borders) 319,200[68] to 341,000
The purpose of the article was to detail the ways that the true visceral horror of world war two was sanitized or censored for public consumption. The contributions of individual nations in the Allied victory was immaterial for the purpose of that article. The title, "The Real War" is drawing a contrast with an imagined "fake" war, where men die with dignity, in important, courageous and heroic circumstances, for high minded ideals, without terrifying disfigurements and mutilations. The title is not saying "the real war was fought and won mostly by Americans for democracy", it's saying "the real war had people piss their pants in fear and die before seeing any combat in a B-29 that was unfit to fly". I do not believe that you saw the title and did not understand this distinction.
> it's saying "the real war had people piss their pants in fear and die before seeing any combat in a B-29 that was unfit to fly".
Using this as an example of the horrors of combat in ww2 just further underlines my point because it’s so incredibly mild compared to the combat on the Eastern Front or against the Japanese in China. Most US service members, as grateful as I am to them, were far luckier than almost all other soldiers in ww2 — better equipped, coming in stronger numbers, and with much better odds of survival. The story the author wants to tell is fundamentally not an American forces story (but talking about Soviet suffering wouldn’t sell in 1989 or even today).
There's a story [1] about russian soldiers at some points of war being assigned one rifle per two infantrymen. The idea was that one guy would get the rifle and the other one would be a "spare", waiting for the first one to die. He was also free to pick up a rifle from one of other people already dead on the ground.
BTW I suspect that the widely portrayed in media horror of being in the attack boat on D-Day was something of a common occurence for Soviet soldiers. They were routinely ordered to perform near-suicidal attacks, as Stalin's strategy was "strength in numbers". That's how he "achievied" the record number of casualities across all countries in the war.
[1] Can't find it right now, so I can't say how accurate it was, or how widespread.
Russian blood, British intel and sheer stubborness and US industry won WW2. A fact that both sides of the Iron Curtain down played and ignored throughout the Cold War.
The author's American addressing, more or less, an American audience, and does make some mention of the others—Britain is covered extensively; the German perspective a bit, plus American perspectives on the terrible things they were doing to the Germans; the horror visited upon civilians in France and Belgium by the allies, and more.
Besides, is there any requirement that such a piece be utterly comprehensive before it can be so-titled?
I think it's near impossible to tell the story of "The Real X" -- that's a pretty sensational/trollish way to title something -- but if one is going to make such a rhetorical gesture there should be a lot more to back it up than what is given here.
It's a complete American fantasy that our forces played a major role in the downfall of Germany, or that our blood sacrifice was particularly crucial to the outcome of any aspect of the war as a whole. Certainly U.S. resources like oil and materiel were critical to Allied success, not to mention the atom bomb in the defeat of Japan, and the (severely delayed) opening of a western front in France 1944 helped contain Soviet victories (in other words, impacted the Cold War), but it is pretty insulting to the 20X more USSR trooops who died and the nearly 10x more Chinese forces who perished to say that an account of the "Real War" could possibly exclude them like this.
Has it occurred to you that Soviet and Chinese primary sources are less readily available? Far less, almost to the point of impossibility. It's not like those governments were forthcoming about anything for decades afterward. Also what, exactly, would adding those change about his essential point regarding the horrors of war and how they're portrayed? Did Chinese or Soviet bodies blow up differently? Immediacy and authenticity were essential to the themes he was addressing, so he used the most suitable sources available to him. What's wrong with that? Turning this into an argument about "credit" for who "won" the war seems more than a bit distasteful (especially while war is being fought over the very ground you're so quick to treat as a game board), and also beside the point.
I know (and can see from this thread) that emotions run high around anything touching on the ex USSR but I don’t think the current war in Ukraine is at all germane to this article from 1989 about ww2 (or to the content of my posts on HN about it).
It's just as germane as turning a story about the (almost universal) horrors of war into some kind of scorekeeping exercise, and nobody's showing more emotion than you. Why don't you try addressing my main point about accessibility and incremental value of primary sources, instead of picking one literally parenthetical comment to quibble about? It's the same thing you did with OP: sniping instead of engaging. Contrary to guidelines BTW. Please try to do better.
Hmm. I didn't address the point about primary sources because it didn't seem like the main point. Right after you brought that issue up, the next sentence seemed to cast aside the importance of the issue: "Also what, exactly, would adding those [sources] change about his essential point..."
I wasn't sure the key point, and the last sentence seemed to be the most likely crux of what you were saying, but maybe I misread.
Maybe you're right about the sources, I can't claim to have looked for books or papers by ex Soviet soldiers. Although given how many Soviet soldiers there were, and given the USSR's incentives to highlight German brutality, are you sure on this score that there are not raw recollections of brutal war in USSR in ww2?
Anyway, I think a piece by the same author without such a sweeping and judgmental title ("real" is a very loaded word in this context that, as I've said, I don't think is earned here) would work just as well.
> It's a complete American fantasy that our forces played a major role in the downfall of Germany, or that our blood sacrifice was particularly crucial to the outcome of any aspect of the war as a whole. Certainly U.S. resources like oil and materiel were critical to Allied success, not to mention the atom bomb in the defeat of Japan, and the (severely delayed) opening of a western front in France 1944 helped contain Soviet victories (in other words, impacted the Cold War), but it is pretty insulting to the 20X more USSR trooops who died and the many many Chinese forces who perished to say that an account of the "Real War" could possibly exclude them like this.
Please indicate which part of the article is claiming this.
> I think it's near impossible to tell the story of "The Real X" -- that's a pretty sensational/trollish way to title something
I think most people find such a title for a piece like this is appropriate and communicates its meaning just fine, if they're not going out of their way to find "gotchas".
My point is pretty simple: It was not an American war, America was not a major party to the horrors of the war (except as a perpetrator of nuclear attacks on civilians), and an article purporting to describe the real visceral combat traumas of world war 2 would include descriptions from forces of countries that lost millions in the war. The piece only makes sense, and is only interesting, in the context of a fantasy world in which US forces played a much more decisive and heroic role than they did. It’s jingoism.
