@SuperbattleshipYamato hard to argue against any of this really. The IJN was so far gone by this point in the war that there’s not really much they could have done to salvage their situation one way or another. The bit about the allies not having many LSTs in general is something I never knew before though.
What are you reading
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Currently reading The First World War by Hew Strachan.
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Reading a 1928 circular published by the Republican Party. It claims if Hoover was elected, he would provide a Chicken in every pot and even has a few recipes provided by Hoover on how to prepare it. Never realized what a smart man he was. Should have imparted his thoughts in History books.
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@ABWorsham:
Currently reading The First World War by Hew Strachan.
If you enjoy the book (which I’ve never read), you might want to pick up the DVD of the documentary television series into which it was made. I’ve seen it and it’s pretty good.
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I tend to get stuck on either a subject of interest or an author and read my way through a list until I’m sick of it.
I finished Clay Blair’s two volumes on U-boats (The Hunters, The Hunted) which essentially covered every recorded sortie during the war, including personal information of both sides. Fascinating and exhausting.
That peaked my interest in British X-craft, so I grabbed a copy of Target Tirpitz, which peaked my interest on both the Bismarck, Nazairre Raid as well as manned torpedoes, so I have a few books either on hold at the library or on the way in the post while I finish Tirpitz.
I’ve been reading about WWII for about 20 years now and every book opens a whole new interest or bit of the war I haven’t heard of before.
My wife wonders why I don’t read fiction, but this stuff is wilder than anything any author could invent.
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Hirohito’s War: The Pacific War 1941-1945 by Francis Pike.
Then, moving back to the war in Europe with The Guns at Last Light by Rick Atkinson.
The final book in The Liberation Trilogy. -
Eastern inferno - the journals of a german panzerjager on the Eastern front 1941-43. Edited by Alexander Christine and Mason Kunze.
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The Eastern Front is a good one, ill look for the version/author is interested. Also, I love the Uniforms/Ranks of WWII.
Im not currently reading it, as I already have, but “A Bridge too far” is great, read it in Jr High, unfortunately for me that was 25+ years ago lool.
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Looks like some good ones I hadn’t heard of on here.
Just finished David Glantz’s updated “When Titans Clashed”. Never did read the '95 version although I saw it quoted a lot. Seems as if it has a little too much Russian love in it, but was still pretty interesting.
Read “The Taste of War:World War ll and the Battle for Food” a while back. Thought it was very good. I knew the Japanese had poor logistics but didn’t realize they neglected it to the extent they did.
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Only 50 pages into The Secret War by Max Hastings, but it already looks really excellent. As always his willingness to draw big strategic conclusions from the evidence makes his books well worth reading.
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I have just started A Beevor’s: Ardennes. Had it since last Christmas!
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Double Standards
Based around Rudolph Hess’s flight to Scotland in an attempt to broker a peace deal.
Examines the theory that Hess had contacts with a group in Britain hostile to the war and that included the Royal Family, hence the subsequent murder of the Duke of Kent disguised, like all royal murders, as an “accident”.
Also discusses the theory that Churchill had Hess shot and replaced with a Doppleganger. The real Hess knew too much, hence he (or the double) was never released despite having no part in war crimes, and was probably murdered in Spandau by the British secret services when the Russians finally agreed to his release.
Personally I cannot buy the idea that Hess was not Hess, but the fact that he refused to see his family for 24 years is highly suspicious.
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Hmm. Does “the Royal Family” mean the Royal Family as a whole – which is a pretty large group, and presumably would even include King George VI – or does it refer to a few statistical outliers like the Duke of Windsor (formerly Edward VIII, until he abdicated), who was a little too cozy with Nazi Germany for comfort and who was shipped off to the Bahamas in mid-1940 as a precaution?
The part about Hess being “murdered in Spandau by the British secret services when the Russians finally agreed to his release” sounds a little bizarre to me. As far as I know, it was the Russians who were always adamant that Hess would never be released and who insisted that Spandau prison would keep operating – with him as its sole prisonner of need be – for the rest of his natural life.
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King George and wife were against the war - remember the hero’s welcome at Buckingham palace for Chamberlain after Munich. Of course this has been airbrushed from history. The Duke of Windsor effectively deserted his command in France and should have been shot, unthinkable for royalty, hence the exile in the Caribbean.
The body Duke of Kent was found with a stash of Swedish bank notes, suggesting he was on the way to Sweden to negotiate a peace deal when his plane “crashed into a hillside”.
http://spartacus-educational.com/2WWkentD.htm
Kent was also offered the throne of Poland by his pal General Sikorski - another “accident” victim.
Did a bit deeper into Hess’s imprisonment and you’ll find it was the British who blocked his release; they didn’t want him spilling the beans. Certainly the Russians treated him more harshly in Spandau, but they thawed towards the end of Communism and would have given in, hence the Brits had him finished off.
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The author argues that the removal of the jews was (at least in Hitler’s mind) a rational consequence of a certain world view. Hitler supposedly didn’t believe in the concept of countries as entities defined by borders, but only in “nation” as in a racial community, and all foreign elements had to be eliminated for such a nation to thrive.
Also that the great crimes of the 20th century, especially the holocaust required statelessness and de facto anarchy, it could not have been done anywhere in western Europe. This is why the countries of eastern Europe needed to be disbanded so the great project could be completed. In western Europe the governments were overthrown but the states more or less maintained, in the east not just governments were overthrown, but states were obliterated creating the very environment in which the deed could be done.
Less known is that after winning the war Hitler and friends also planned to do to the Poles what they did to the jews (after assimilating maybe 5-10% into the German nation) and then also vast population reductions across the Baltic States, Ukraine, Belarus and Russia itself to establish his dream of a German racial empire.
Another book of his that is really good is Bloodlands (eastern Europe between Hitler and Stalin).
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Fairly good doc on the background of the Hess affair:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30bZh-rqQiE
Al in all, I think Hess was rather harshly treated. He left Germany before the Holocaust was discussed, and the evidence is that he was a somewhat restraining hand on Hitler, being one of the few people with the guts to argue with him. If it was “war crimes” (Poland?) that convicted him, then he was surely no more guilty than the Soviets who prosecuted and kept him in prison.
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The author argues that the removal of the jews was (at least in Hitler’s mind) a rational consequence of a certain world view. Hitler supposedly didn’t believe in the concept of countries as entities defined by borders, but only in “nation” as in a racial community, and all foreign elements had to be eliminated for such a nation to thrive.
Also that the great crimes of the 20th century, especially the holocaust required statelessness and de facto anarchy, it could not have been done anywhere in western Europe. This is why the countries of eastern Europe needed to be disbanded so the great project could be completed. In western Europe the governments were overthrown but the states more or less maintained, in the east not just governments were overthrown, but states were obliterated creating the very environment in which the deed could be done.
Less known is that after winning the war Hitler and friends also planned to do to the Poles what they did to the jews (after assimilating maybe 5-10% into the German nation) and then also vast population reductions across the Baltic States, Ukraine, Belarus and Russia itself to establish his dream of a German racial empire.
Another book of his that is really good is Bloodlands (eastern Europe between Hitler and Stalin).
Almost none of the factual claims in the above post are true. (The exception being Hitler’s view of race and nation. So for example Hitler would consider someone of German ethny to be a fellow German, regardless of whichever nation in which that person resided. On the other hand he would not consider a black or Asian person to be a German, even if that person had obtained German citizenship.)
During the 1930s, Hitler’s proposed solution to what he called the “Jewish problem” was Jewish relocation to Palestine. Large numbers of German Jews relocated during that period. So much immigration happened, in fact, that the Palestinians rebelled against British rule. Britain ruthlessly suppressed the rebellion, of course, but it also felt it had to give the Palestinians something to reassure them that little additional Jewish immigration would occur. The something that it gave them was the White Paper of 1939. That white paper restricted Jewish immigration into Palestine to 15,000 per year. A trivial sum in relation to Europe’s Jewish population.
The 1935 Nuremberg Laws stripped the 500,000 German Jews of their citizenship. Jewish migration was impeded by Nazi restrictions on the transfer of finances abroad (departing Jews had to abandon their property), but the Jewish Agency was able to negotiate an agreement allowing Jews resident in Germany to buy German goods for export to Palestine thus circumventing the restrictions.
Hitler didn’t go around tearing up Eastern European nation states in preparation for the Holocaust. Prior to the White Paper of 1939, Hitler’s plan for the Jews had involved resettlement, not extermination.
As for the Poles: during WWII, German officials had drawn up plans to relocate 30 - 50 million Poles eastward, to make room for German expansion. (This relocation was to be done during the postwar period.) If at that time there was still an Allied food blockade/famine conditions, the deaths of large numbers of these Poles would have been seen as an acceptable way to reduce pressure on Germany’s food supply, and to prevent the starvation of others living in German-held territory. On the other hand, there was no plan in place to starve any Poles if the blockade had been lifted, or if food conditions had fully or partially returned to normal. The idea that Hitler had planned to exterminate all Poles is a wild exaggeration, and is no more credible than any other Allied propaganda.
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http://lincolnslunch.blogspot.com/2012/03/herbert-hoover-chicken-in-every-pot-and.html
reading this. good recipes!!
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Great Read. But I’m still looking for the recipe in WW2 that was called “Soup De Sole”.
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@Imperious:
http://lincolnslunch.blogspot.com/2012/03/herbert-hoover-chicken-in-every-pot-and.html
reading this. good recipes!!
A friend of mine who was a teenager in the 1960s says that the hippie version of the Hoover recipe was to put “some pot in every chicken.”
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@CWO:
@Imperious:
http://lincolnslunch.blogspot.com/2012/03/herbert-hoover-chicken-in-every-pot-and.html
reading this. good recipes!!
A friend of mine who was a teenager in the 1960s says that the hippie version of the Hoover recipe was to put “some pot in every chicken.”
:-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D
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