Knowing Mackenzie King, Arthur Meighen?
It is indeed human nature. Required viewing.
Quoting RickJay quoting someone else: you don’t win wars by getting killed. You win them by killing more of the other side.
Not to sidetrack, and not to say they were necessarily telling the whole truth…but the Japanese themselves stated this very thing, in their surrender offer. No mention of either of the a-bombs in the previous days.
So, exactly like property rights, then.
Hirohito’s address to the nation most famously did mention an “inhuman and most cruel bomb”, though.
Referring to your own nation (or group) as ‘we’ isn’t necessarily taking credit or responsibility for anything - it’s just an informal way of talking about something that happened to a collective entity of which you are a part.
Otherwise nobody would be able to say things like “We won 29 gold medals at the London 2012 Olympics” - (not even the individual athletes who won gold - I mean, why should we let a gold medal cyclist take credit for something that the rowing team achieved)
I know that film. A British and not Hollywood film.
Along with this bit of pouting: “The war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage.”
In the indirect manner in which Japanese is spoken, that statement is the equivalent of saying “Folks, we just got our asses kicked.”
Of course, since Hirohito was speaking in an archaic version of Japanese, most of his subjects couldn’t understand much of what he was saying at all.
It’s a pithy reference, but wrong. Or misleading. Just ask Ho Chi Minh, Pyrrhus, or in this case, Zhukov.
I thought it was common knowledge the German war machine was destroyed in the East. Most German military deaths occurred there. Calling the Western front a sideshow or a clean up job is a bit flippant, but battles like Stalingrad and Kursk made the stuff in the West look like a tea party and was just on a completely different scale. Germany was already hosed by the time D-Day happened.
Yeah, but the point is it wasn’t all the Soviet deaths that won WWII. It was the Soviet killing/capturing of Germans.
Perhaps this was to save face. Let’s say the Japanese were too ashamed and humiliated to admit that the United States had defeated them, and so they quickly made up a load of hogwash about how they were surrendering “because of the frightening involvement of the Soviets.”
Why would they hate* Das Boot*?
Cite?
Even before the US entered the war we were supplying allies. 50 billion in WWII money, in today’s dollars that would be 656 billion.
My guess would be, “because it glamorizes the U-boat crews who were hellbent on starving England to death.” Having seen Das Boot, I myself wouldn’t say it “glamorizes” anyone, but maybe it’s based on the “any publicity is good publicity” saying.
I’ve never heard of anyone hating Das Boot. The few people I know who have seen it seem to like it.
For my part:
Certainly the Sovs absorbed about 75% of Germany’s war effort, and they eventually forged a highly competent military. It wasn’t all human wave attacks by half-armed peasants; eventually it was a shattering combined-arms offensive with first-rate tanks, solid artillery, and adequate air support. This has been vigorously ignored in America’s internal monologue.
However, Soviet participation – particularly Soviet offensive participation – depended heavily on logistic support supplied by the Americans (and transported heroically by the American, British, and Commonwealth merchant marines). Just to mention a few figures I can offhand recall, the US supplied 500,000 pairs of warm boots and enough food to feed every Soviet soldier for every single day of the war, along with railroad track, rolling stock, and “those magnificent Dodge trucks,” among literally hundreds of tons of other stuff. And remember, that freed up Soviet production to focus on weaponry – take away Lend-Lease and there would be a significant reduction in the military strength of the Red Army…and no way to get to Berlin as fast as they did, either.
And the American fighting contributions were quite significant as well. But I wouldn’t say people are minimizing America’s fighting contribution so much as trying to offset what’s been (in the US at least) a very one-sided view.
You know what’s bad about the German cast? In the copy of the film I own, there were no subtitles for the German language part! Completely left off the print! And it’s not just a few scenes - a good chunk of the film is from the German perspective. I still have no idea what was going on. But the planes looked great!