Condoleeza Rice explaining why the use of harsh interrogation techniques was justified against Al Qaeda suspects, but not World War II German POWs: With all due respect, Nazi Germany never attacked the homeland of the United States In fact, the German Kriegsmarine sank approximately 600 US and Allied merchant vessels in and around US territorial […]
Tag: world war ii
MRG forwarded me this piece this morning. I had seen it previously and intended to refrain from comment, but… you know. In general, it’s best not to get one’s defense news from the W
Apparently there is still some controversy. The standard story is this; a flight of torpedo bombers approached the Japanese task force, and was massacred by Japanese combat air patrol. That CAP was th
Erik starts off this week’s discussion of From Colony to Superpower. Chapter XIII covers the years between 1942 and 1945, which involved a rather significant expansion of the global profile of the United States. Herring talks a bit about the debate that surrounded the decision to pursue the “Germany first” strategy. Naval officers in particular […]
Cool. The significance of the flight is best illustrated by the records that were set by Ford and his crew. It was the first round-the-world flight by a commercial airliner, as well as the longest con
Does anyone out there interpret Downfall in the same way as Ron Rosenbaum? This has always been my problem with films like the German-made Downfall, which while initially being taken seriously by many
How important is Gallipoli to Australian identity? A row has erupted between Australia’s PM Kevin Rudd and his Labor predecessor Paul Keating over the importance of Gallipoli, a WWI battle site in Turkey. Mr Keating dismissed as “nonsense” the view that a new Australian identity was forged in 1915 at Gallipoli, where 300,000 troops were […]
Kingdaddy visited the WWII Memorial, and wasn’t impressed. Here were my thoughts. Forthcoming is a post about my visit to the Air Force Museum in Dayton, which is awesome….
John Quiggin, riffing off this Edward Lengel column, suggests that the respective experiences of Europe and the United States in World War I may explain cultural differences on the use of force: In an
Between December 1941 and August 1945, Japan and the United Kingdom fought an extraordinarily brutal war over control of Southeast Asia. In the larger arc of World War II history, this campaign is often treated as a sideshow, as it had neither the glory nor the decisive character of the Eastern Front or the drive […]
Brad has a good post on the Freeman Dyson review of Michael Neufeld’s new biography of Werner Von Braun. Essentially, Dyson makes the argument that the V-2 was a poor allocation of scarce defens
Andy over at Siberian Lights has a nice little history of the Battle of Khalkhin-Gol. Khalkhin-Gol was the outcome of several years of competition between the Soviet Union and Japan over the border be