re: What fascinates you concerning WW2?

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Yes, but hearing about it on the radio or seeing numbers on a screen is much different than live film.

And you don't think troop morale was low throughout the Vietnam war?

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It appears you've fully bought into the Cronkite version of the Vietnam War.

LC

Unit 731

How anyone could do that to other humans (children included) is beyond comprehension.

outside of hitler invading the ussr, there's nothing intriguing about wwii, imo ... some evil people took over their countries and decided to carry out their personal agenda ... other countries sat around until it was almost too late ... hitler doesn't invade the ussr, things get interesting ...

The Maginot Line was an engineering marvel yet a gigantic tactical blunder at the same time.

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fascinated that the winners of the war wasn't something that was inevitable from the get-go.

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I was always fascinated Hitler took a small country like Germany with little natural resources and few ports and conquered most of Europe, took Great Britain to the brink of defeat, and gave Russia and the US all they wanted.

Strategically it's remarkable. Hitler was a real life "evil genius" so to speak.

There's a reason their uniforms were badass. They had one of the world's most famous fashion designers come up with a lot of their uniforms. In fact, that company is still around and still known as one of the top fashion design companies in the world. I'll give you a hint to which company this is....



That's a 1933 ad for their line of SS, SA, and Hitlerjugend (Hitler Youth) uniforms.


Need another hint? OK, here's another more modern advertisement for this company...

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It's intoxicating now. I love the Nazi memorabilia stuff. I hate what they did as leaders of Germany and what they stood for but if you can put that bias aside you can objectively say their symbols,pageantry, uniforms, etc were pretty badass.

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They had the best symbols and decoration. That clean, bold, deco design was fantastic.

Just starting to read "Killing the Rising Sun" and it talks about the invasion of the Phillipines by the Japanese shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. It talks about Japan planning it for a decade. They sent solders into the country as immigrants to map it and give them a small force on the island.

The President of the Philippines later remembers "Only later did I discover that my gardener was a Japanese major and my masseur a Japanese colonel."

Just starting the book, but it has been great thus far. Would recommend it to anyone interested in WWII.

France was politically fractured in 1940. Keep in mind that in 1940, Germany and the Soviet Union were practically allies because of the German Soviet Pact of 1939. They cooperated in the destruction of Poland.

In France, the Leftists and the Communists were not in favor of fighting Germany, the ally of the Soviet Union. Many of these people had strong allegiance to the Worker's Paradise of the Soviet Union, so, they were not highly motivated to fight against Germany, the Soviet ally.

Many people who reflect on the events like to say, "The French people were surrender monkeys because they would rather surrender then fight." Well, for those Frenchmen who were Leftists or Communists (and there were many in France) it was easy to surrender to an ally of the Soviet Union, because many had higher regard for the Soviet Union than they had for their own home country, France.

There were some Nazi sympathizers in France, very few, of course, but, those men would also be inclined to surrender rather than fight.

Of course, after 22 June 1941, the Leftists in France immediately began to organize themselves as Partisan Guerilla fighters sworn to defeat Nazi scum. 22 Jun 41 is the date when Germany invaded the Soviet Union.

Is the experience of France in 1940 unique? Indeed no. The USA was politically fractured during the Vietnam War and the Radical Leftists of the USA certainly were not inclined to fight Communist North Vietnam.

Even more recently, Democrat Senator Harry Reid announced in the Senate that "This war is lost" after his political enemy Republican POTUS Bush had initiated the ultimately successful "Surge" in Iraq.

So, History has examples of how the political fracturing of a nation-state can operate to weaken the warfighting ability of a nation-state.