re: World War 2 still boggles my mind

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Life magazine actually put a picture of dead Americans on its cover for the first time to help reignite support.

LINK

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That link will definitely send me down a rabbit hole. Thanks for that.

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I just don’t understand why the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, 

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We were strangling their economy with an oil embargo in response to their aggression in China. They needed to take the Dutch East Indies oil fields and to do that they had to put our navy out of action. That's the short answer. The long answer is they believed themselves entitled to a Pacific empire so we were eventually going to butt heads. The current rhetoric coming out of China is eerily similar to what Japan was saying in the 1930s

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I've been lately consuming a lot of literature and media about WW2. The technological innovations, battle strategies, and the incalculable carange inflicted on so many people is so hard to completely comprehend. It's something so massive of an event that our economy and history we are through living now is all catagorized as "Post-War".

I'm not new to this subject either. I just think we, as a society, take for granted that such a big historical milestone took place in living memory and we have interacted with people who witnessed this. I dunno just thinking about the scale of WW2 sometimes just makes me sitdown and say, "Holy shite this stuff actually happened. It's all real." Few corners of the world were left untouched by the war.

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To be honest I look at WWI and WWII as one massive war with a calm period in the middle but not much of one when you put Japan and the Second Sino Japanese War into the equation. It was a war between countries, classes, and races all over the board. It was an incredible point in human history and the biggest event in human history since the Black Plague.

World War 3 has been going on without much resistance from the US

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I think about this with how we built the interstate system. And now how it’s impossible to build even one mile of new interstate.

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We've decreased our state capacity to the degree that we are barely a country. Though people dislike the New Deal, reading about it shows that often people just did things in a way we don't anymore.

I started studying WW2 around 1980 and just realized more time has passed from that year to now then the actual war itself when I started. It seemed like ancient history back then! I'm boggled.

World War II still fascinates me.

This plus a bit more to do the way they were disrespected by the major Allies after WW1. The amazing YouTube channel Kings and Generals is doing a podcast on this very subject now called "The Pacific War week by week".

As a 'side-note'...many military/social scholars credit the end of WW1/treaty of versailles, with the origin of WW2...at least in the European theatre.

There is a documentary on YouTube, no pictures, just stories by German soldiers who were at D Day, giving their version. ( The Germans Version of D Day). Several comments were interesting, different stories, same subject: the Germans had never seen tanks capable of operating in the water. The 2 soldiers were in bunkers on Omaha Beach & freaked out when tanks came out of the landing crafts through the waves. One said his captain had to threaten to shoot those in the bunker who were terrified & freezing up. Another said his initial view out the bunker showed the landing crafts seemingly side by side by side, stretching forever. They were not prepared for that type of invasion. Another told graphic stories about American planes strafing Germans behind the lines. After each dive run, he looked around at the 100's of bodies and did not see one that was a whole body, they were all chewed up into pieces. Another described a graphic scene where 10-15 soldiers were huddled behind a half track, trying to get shelter from the planes. When a plane came at the half track head on, guns blazing, its driver panicked & backed up over all the soldiers. He said he couldn't see one "body" afterwards, they were all flattened to pieces.