WW2: Who were the Allies fighting in Europe?

[Bromley]

It's (hopefully) not quite as stupid as the title indicates.

Ignoring the other axis members, would an allied grunt (especially in the British army, but any ally) think that he was fighting Fascism or the Germans?

This is more a question of who/what he really thought he was fighting, rather than what he might say. So he might say that he was fighting "Jerry", but was he thinking "Hitler, his henchmen and their evil system of government" or was he thinking "Those upstart Germans and their leader Hitler".

The context is that I've always assumed that most people thought that they were fighting the Germans. Someone (a Brit) is telling me that he thinks your average chap in the British army thought that he was fighting Fascism and not Germans. By the way, this is not a wierd axe-to-grind thing. I'm not trying to prove that Germans are inherently nasty people or somesuch. I just don't like to see history revised because of good intentions.

I'm sure that there's an answer to this, but if it turns into a poll please feel free to move it.

[Padeye]

Are the answers going to be meaningful if they don't come from someone who actually fought in WWII? I won't say there aren't any but I doubt if WWII combat vets make up a big percentage of SDMB membership.

[Bromley]

I know what you mean. However, I'm assuming that this is a question that historians, even amateur ones, will be able to answer.

[Ezstrete]

Originally Posted by Bromley

I know what you mean. However, I'm assuming that this is a question that historians, even amateur ones, will be able to answer.

Having spent the "big deuce"seriously working at outlasting the japanese soldier I can tell you that the average Marine of my period was not a politician.

Nor,I believe, was the average Sailor or Army man.

All we cared about was that the other guy was intent on making us a statistic-----and we were just as intent as he toward him.

Idealism and idealistic terms were left for the writers and rah-rah crowd.

As I told my sons many years ago, after the first five minutes in harm's way I knew the entire strategy of the Japanese army----------the ba----rds were trying to kill me.

I assume that the european theater guy felt the same way.

Idealism takes a back seat to survival---------ask any one who has heard "angry" fire!

EZ

[Slithy Tove]

Bill Mauldin addresses this in his memoir Up Front. The Americans were told "it's not the Germans, it's the Nazis." But besides a few Waffen SS units he encountered, the average GI knew he was fighting average Germans, who did the things Mauldin describes such as shooting at medics or showering pornographic propaganda leaflets over to the Americans, then firing high explosives as the GIs left their foxholes to gather them up.

[Ezstrete]

Originally Posted by Bromley

It's (hopefully) not quite as stupid as the title indicates.

Ignoring the other axis members, would an allied grunt (especially in the British army, but any ally) think that he was fighting Fascism or the Germans?

This is more a question of who/what he really thought he was fighting, rather than what he might say. So he might say that he was fighting "Jerry", but was he thinking "Hitler, his henchmen and their evil system of government" or was he thinking "Those upstart Germans and their leader Hitler".

The context is that I've always assumed that most people thought that they were fighting the Germans. Someone (a Brit) is telling me that he thinks your average chap in the British army thought that he was fighting Fascism and not Germans. By the way, this is not a wierd axe-to-grind thing. I'm not trying to prove that Germans are inherently nasty people or somesuch. I just don't like to see history revised because of good intentions.

I'm sure that there's an answer to this, but if it turns into a poll please feel free to move it.

they often made refer3ences

To Bromley:

When the 8th NZ brigade returned from the middle east in '43 they wound up in ,I believe, Fiji,probably at Suva -----and later spent some time in the Bougainville theater - Treasury Island go.

Like most of us , they never talked about engagements and actions ,but they always made remarks about the "Krauts","Jerries", "Wops" and "Eyeties".

I was a Marine on detached service to them and better men were never made..

Never do I remember even the most gungy of them mentioning Fascists or nazis-------but they did often mention those "effing" aforementioned people.

If any of them are still around,and read this little bit of nosatalgia--------my hat's off to you mate!Forever!

EZ

[tomndebb]

A selection from Bill Mauldin's [u]Up Front[u], written while he was in Italy in 1944:

It makes dogfaces sick to read articles by people who say, "It isn't the Germans, it's the Nazis." Our army has seen few actual Nazis, except when they threw in special SS divisions. We have seen the Germans--the youth and the men and the husbands and the fathers of Germany, and we know them for a ruthless, cold, cruel, and powerful enemy.

When our guys cringe under an 88 barrage, you don't hear them say, "Those dirty Nazis." You hear them say, "Those goddam krauts."

Elsewhere in the book, Mauldin makes it pretty clear that most guys are fighting for their own units--the other men alongside whom they are fighting and dying. Home is nice and "saving Democracy" has a nice ring, but the reality is that the soldier's world is circumsribed by his companions and his enemy and that his goals are reduced to surviving another day.

[tomndebb]

That'll teach me to post without reviewing the thread after I start looking for sources and typing.

[RickJay]

Originally Posted by Bromley

The context is that I've always assumed that most people thought that they were fighting the Germans. Someone (a Brit) is telling me that he thinks your average chap in the British army thought that he was fighting Fascism and not Germans.

Both my grandfathers fought in Europe. I heard many, many stories about them fighting "Germans." I never heard a story about them fighting "Fascists" or "Nazis." Both were certainly aware of the distinction, but they knew they were figh5ting ordinary Germans. My maternal grandfather, as kind and gentle a man as has ever walked the earth, told me, "It was us, or them." After the war he served in Germany, and he would explain to me that the Germans seemed to be perfectly nice people, but from 1939 to 1945, we had to kill a whole mess o' them.

[OttoDaFe]

This isn't a quote—I don't have the book handy—but in The Brass Ring (his autobiography) Mauldin points out that epithets against the enemy tend to be racial or ethnic, not political. After all, he says, it's bad enough to blame a man for having an ancestry he couldn't help; no reason to blame him for a political system he had no hand in choosing.

[Dissonance]

I can’t claim any personal knowledge past being an armchair historian and having read a number of memoirs of soldiers in combat, but what I’ve read leads me to believe that soldiers in actual front line combat don’t so much fight against or for some idealistic ideal such as democracy, security of the free world, lebensraum for the German volk, the communist revolution for the proletariat, the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere or some such. Their world comes very narrowly and sharply into focus whatever the overt political reason for the war might be and they fight for their buddies in the foxhole or slit-trench next to them.

[Tokyo_Mann]

Originally Posted by Dissonance

they fight for their buddies in the foxhole or slit-trench next to them.

In Good-Bye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War William Raymond Manchester makes the same point -- the fighting men risk their lives for their buddies, not for countries, and not to defeat another political cause.

I've also read somewhere (maybe even in the same book?) that although the classic thought is that Japanese kamikaze pilots went off to die for the emperor, their letters and journals show they were thinking of their buddies and families just before they left.

You can see that in some of the the interviews with US solders in Gulf II, where they say that they were just doing what the sergeant says.

[ftg]

One of my uncles was an engineer on a bomber crew, shot down over Hungary and held as a POW. Got to see a lot of the German countryside on a forced march for two months during the winter of 1945.

He hates Germans to this day.

It wasn't politics, it's the people.

BTW: During "The Black March", there was no concept of working together. Each soldier was solely trying to survive as best he could. Many didn't. Eventually that's how wars end up.

[Hunter Hawk]

Speaking as somebody who had relatives fighting on the losing side of WW2, the Finns were fighting the Russians (the combat was an extension of the Finno/Russian conflict that had been going on since I forget when). And then they also ended up fighting the Germans--it wasn't Fascism that ordered the destruction of Rovaniemi, it was the Germans.

The German vets I spoke to didn't say much, but I got the impression that they were between a rock and a hard place--they could either fight and take their chances on getting shot by the Allies, or refuse to fight and definitely get shot by the German army. They hated the German army and its officers.

[Walloon]

Originally Posted by OttoDaFe

After all, he says, it's bad enough to blame a man for having an ancestry he couldn't help; no reason to blame him for a political system he had no hand in choosing.

Don't you think the German people had just a little bit to do with it? Hitler and the Nazi Party were elected to the Reichstag by popular vote.

[OttoDaFe]

Originally Posted by Walloon

Don't you think the German people had just a little bit to do with it? Hitler and the Nazi Party were elected to the Reichstag by popular vote.

Since the rank-and-file German soldaten weren't in a position to vote when the Nazis came to power—and toward the end many hadn't even been born at the time—I would tend to agree with Mauldin that holding them personally responsible for Hitler was kind of disingenuous.

(It wasn't unrelievedly negative, though. In the same book, Mauldin recounts seeing a badly wounded German officer brought in to an aid station, along with an enlisted man who had volunteered to stay with him to help ensure that he was captured and got medical care. Since this was close to the thick of the fighting, where there was no guarantee that a surrender would be accepted, such an action took more than a little courage—a fact that the GIs who brought the pair in seemed to appreciate, since they were carrying the officer with unusual gentleness and had supplied his colleague with chocolate and cigarettes. Mauldin recalls discussing the incident with one of his friends, and they agreed that they would be hard pressed to think of an officer for whom they would make a similar effort.)

[Walloon]

Originally Posted by OttoDaFe

Since the rank-and-file German soldaten weren't in a position to vote when the Nazis came to power—and toward the end many hadn't even been born at the time—I would tend to agree with Mauldin that holding them personally responsible for Hitler was kind of disingenuous.

You're claiming that many 12-year-olds were serving in the German army?

[aruvqan]

Originally Posted by Walloon

You're claiming that many 12-year-olds were serving in the German army?

AS he said, towards the end, yes. Hitler Youth were recruited into fighting in the fall of Berlin and many other areas they formed the defensive militia along with the aged men who had not been fit to join the regular military.

http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/berlin.htm

I do know my father who was in the Ruhr Valley at this time found more children and old men than men his own age. Heck, he wasnt *that* old himself...18 and out of boot camp. He *should* have been trying to get a date for the 5th of July picknic, not lugging 50 lbs of weapon, grenades and ammo and not geting shot at.

[David Simmons]

Originally Posted by Ezstrete

I assume that the european theater guy felt the same way.

Idealism takes a back seat to survival---------ask any one who has heard "angry" fire!

EZ

I can't answer for anyone else but my feeling is that you do what you do because you are there, you are in the army and that's what people who are there and in the army do.

Aerial bombardment is impersonal to the nth degree from the sending end. I had no sense of being on a "mission" to rid the world of Hitler or Fascism. You go for an airplane ride, drop bombs, either get shot at or don't, come home, repeat as directed.

I was an insignificant cog in a vast machine that was moving in some direction and would finally reach an end of one kind or another to the job at hand, but that all went on and would have gone on with or without me.

[jastu]

Originally Posted by Ezstrete

they often made refer3ences

To Bromley:

When the 8th NZ brigade returned from the middle east in '43 they wound up in ,I believe, Fiji,probably at Suva -----and later spent some time in the Bougainville theater - Treasury Island go.

Like most of us , they never talked about engagements and actions ,but they always made remarks about the "Krauts","Jerries", "Wops" and "Eyeties".

I was a Marine on detached service to them and better men were never made..

Never do I remember even the most gungy of them mentioning Fascists or nazis-------but they did often mention those "effing" aforementioned people.

If any of them are still around,and read this little bit of nosatalgia--------my hat's off to you mate!Forever!

EZ

I just wanted to say thank you Ezstrete for your post. My father did not serve with that brigade but he did see action in PNG. I hear many reports like yours about Aussie and NZ troops from veterans from WWII and Vietnam. On the other hand many non veteran Americans I've come across don't even realise we participated in WWII.

My father didn't talk much about the war but I know he was fighting not only to stay alive and his mates but for the safety of his family back in Australia.

[Blackeyes]

Originally Posted by Walloon

Don't you think the German people had just a little bit to do with it? Hitler and the Nazi Party were elected to the Reichstag by popular vote.

*Remembers to add this to that Pit thread on commonly repeated historical inaccuracies*

Hitler became Fuehrer not through a mass popular uprising of support or bossed his way into the position with brownshirts.

The short story: Paul von Hindeburg was elected President by a popular vote. The nazis held thirty percent of the vote. However, he saw that they were in fact the only party experiencing any growth (and growing fast), so he knew the Nazis were something to be reckoned with. Hitler was then made Chancellor. Suddenly Hindenburg dies. Hitler was able to combine President and Chancellor into one office. Using the burning reichstag building, Versailles, and other events the Nazi party was able to draft laws that added more support to Hitler.

[Blackeyes]

Originally Posted by aruvqan

AS he said, towards the end, yes. Hitler Youth were recruited into fighting in the fall of Berlin and many other areas they formed the defensive militia along with the aged men who had not been fit to join the regular military.

http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/berlin.htm

I do know my father who was in the Ruhr Valley at this time found more children and old men than men his own age. Heck, he wasnt *that* old himself...18 and out of boot camp. He *should* have been trying to get a date for the 5th of July picknic, not lugging 50 lbs of weapon, grenades and ammo and not geting shot at.

Was your father in any way involved with Market Garden? If so, he may have met my grandfather.

He was lugging 50 lbs of weapon, grenades and ammo and not getting shot at at fifteen.

[Walloon]

Originally Posted by Blackeyes

*Remembers to add this to that Pit thread on commonly repeated historical inaccuracies* . . . Paul von Hindeburg was elected President by a popular vote. The nazis held thirty percent of the vote.

Blackeyes, I did not write that Hitler became Chancellor by popular vote. I am quite aware that President Hindenburg appointed him to that position. And the Nazi Party won 230 out of the 608 seats in the Reichstag in the July 1932 elections — 38% of the seats, not 30%.

You may be thinking of the presidential election in February 1932, in which Hitler (not the Nazi Party) got 30.1% of the vote in the first round, and 36.8% in the secound round.

[Bromley]

Thanks for the answers people. Sounds like the average soldier from all (allied) countries would have thought that they were fighting Germany and not Fascism.