WWII - Why the Eternal Interest?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Maybe because it was the US’s last “good” war?

There is a current thread in GQ about Midway - how many thousands and thousands of hours of history and military people have gone over that battle? Yes, it was the turning point of the Pacific war, yes, it established the carrier as the pre-eminent capital ship.
Yes, a text book battle for those who need to wage war.

But the millions of hours of entertainment? - I suspect that, as long as commuication is possible, somebody, somewhere will be talking about some point of the war.

WHY?

2

Because it was the largest, broadest event in human history and it happened recently enough that many have grandparents (and quite a few still have parents) that fought in it?

3

It was such a vastly massive and earth-shattering conflict that we are still living with its consequences today. It also has a classic good vs evil dynamic (Nazis vs Americans and Brits and Russians), and a great story (Allies almost beaten, defiant resistance, slowly regaining upper hand, dramatic denouement in Hitler’s Bunker and dramatic full stop with the A-bomb), and also innovative new weapons, tactics and ideas.

That, and it makes a smashing set of films.

4

err… I think the Eastern Front was pretty much evil vs evil

5

I’ve wondered this too and have a few thoughts.

Firstly, it was the last major war with clearly identified, uniform-wearing Bad Guys who were A) Unambiguously Bad and B) separate from the civilian population.

Also, despite their own propaganda to the contrary, the Nazis were not a race (master or otherwise). Thus, it’s not viewed as “racist” to make movies in which hordes of Nazis are machine-gunned by a rag-tag group of square-jawed Allied heroes.

I’d also suggest it was the last major war fought on a scale which did not involve simply pressing buttons to launch a missle and blow up something on the other side of the map*, which helps. Tanks and aeroplanes still went (comparatively speaking) toe-to-toe and you had big set-piece battles like the Normandy Landings, Kursk, El Alamein etc.

The outcome was also a clear victory for the Allied side (The Director’s Cut of WWII features six years of deleted scenes starring the British Empire!), territory was gained, and it’s widely accepted by everyone on the winning side that Good Triumphed Over Not Good and Made The World Safe For Democracy etcetera and so on and so forth.

Also, it was a long time ago now. The youngest Allied WWII vets are in their mid-late 70s now, so there’s a sort of “distance” to the whole thing that even Vietnam doesn’t have yet, IMHO.

And finally (for now), it really was a decisive event which shaped the course of history for quite literally the entire planet. And there were several times were things could have very easily gone the other way, in which case Diese Diskussion könnte statt in deutscher Sprache または、日本のことについては.**

But yes, by now I’d be inclined to say pretty much every minute of WWII has been studied in copious depth - and yet I don’t think we (as a society) are going to run out of things to say on it anytime soon, either.

*Yes, I know they had rockets and longish range missiles in WWII. You know what I mean.

**This discussion might be taking place in German, or Japanese for that matter.

6

Plus, it was the last direct military clash between major powers. If you want to talk about warfare between huge armies with basically comparable technology, what are your options?

7

From a fascination point of view it can’t be overstated that WWII was the first media war. We’re jaded, now, but things like The Hitler Channel and similar jokes come about because of all the video available about it. Without that it would be fading into history as WWI has and as the Civil War (U.S. version) would have without Ken Burns documentary.

8

WWII is a fairy tale story with a happy ending.
It appeals to the child in us.

But , unlike the fairy tales we read to our children at bedtime, this is one that adults can re-tell over and over again without embarrassment.

9

The Civil War never lost its fascination, though. Burns just caused another of several periodic increases, but you’ll find nearly as much written about the Civil War each year as WWII (just nowhere near as much TV).

It had many of the same elements of WWII: good vs evil (slavery), though you also had the myth of the gallant Southern army, new technologies (ironclads – though there’s new technologies in every war*, epic battles, brother vs. brother, and much more.

*In that area, WWI is the champ, with the first wide use of the machine gun, airplane, rolling barrages, gas warfare, telephone and wireless communications, submarine warfare, and, for that matter, taxicabs. :wink: )

10

Well, yes; but evil vs even nastier evil ends up being distilled into good vs evil, at least for entertainment purposes!

11

It’s because it’s very easily malleable to a wide range of situations, IMO. The Nazis’ agenda was evil enough that you can easily make them 1-dimensional cartoon villains. However, because this is reality and there were many people with different views on that side – and because even the really evil people were “heroes of their own story” (thought they were doing what was best for Germany), you can also make works that have a lot of depth, even tragic.

A lot of wars have the latter aspect, of being controversial wars that have jerks and saints on both sides, with the potential for drama and depth, but the whole Nazi agenda (esp. the death camps) was just so insanely evil by modern standards that nobody really blinks at the reduction of the war to a cartoonish Good vs Evil story (as long as you only present it that way in fiction) the way they would with, say, Vietnam.

12

The modern world is largely a consequence of World Wars I & II (which are themselves inseparable, really).

Want to know why China is rising? Why Russia dislikes the US? Why Iraq has different ethnic groups struggling for influence? Why Saudi Arabia is so important? How the US landed on the moon? How agriculture boomed because of nitrogen fertilizer? The invention of computers? Why is there a European Union? Why are the French in Mali?

All these subjects (and many, many more) have their roots in the two World Wars.

13

But my perception is that the Soviets were defending their country while Germany was the aggressor nation, so to that extent, the Russians were the “good guys.”

14

The war was evil versus even bigger evil on all fronts.

15

People like heroic narratives, and WWII was the last “romantic” and heroic war (if there can be such a thing).

By that I mean that you had clear good and bad guys, and they squared off and fought in the skies, on the oceans and on land, force on force like armies are “supposed to”. There were obvious, clear and worthwhile reasons to fight as well. Finally, you had all manner of spy-type clandestine business with the various Resistances and the OSS.

The bad guys were bad, and they were competent for the most part. The war wasn’t a cakewalk, and followed a somewhat literary trajectory with the almost losing and grim tenacity, then fighting back to absolute victory.

It gives military wonks the chance to read up on air, sea or land strategy and tactics, on whatever scale they choose. It gives the human interest people a lot of very clear good/bad stuff to read up on.

And, for many of us, relatives we knew well were actually involved in the war in some capacity or other. Hell, my grandmother’s still alive, and she married my grandfather in 1942 or 1943 while he was in the Army.

Contrast that with more recent wars like Vietnam, Afghanistan and the Gulf wars, where the good/bad guys are more ambiguous, and our reasons for fighting were a lot more gray than in WWII. Add to that the fact that militarily, we far outclassed our enemies, and the narrative becomes a lot less heroic and romantic, and become complex and a little painful sometimes.

It’s harder if you’re a military wonk to get behind stories of moral ambiguity framed by overwhelming military superiority versus one’s enemies, who resort to unconventional tactics (which are thought of as underhanded by many) to try and prevail.
There’s also a matter of scale- WWII was just so humongous relative to most wars before or since, that it’s not even funny. Take Gulf War I- we had maybe a half-dozen divisions in theater to fight. That’s less than the Allies used in the invasion of Sicily, which took place while the US was fighting in the Pacific, and had just got done fighting in N. Africa. Subsequent operations were even larger, and some even were going more or less concurrently in Europe, and there was an entirely separate huge scale fight vs. Japan going on at the same time. That has to do a lot for the interest in the war- it’s not 7 divisions vs. the Iraqi army, it’s 100 US plus however many other Allied divisions vs. the German and Japanese Armies.

16

The Korean War, the Indo-Pakistan Wars, the China-India War of 1962, the 1973 War, the Falklands…

17

It was the most recent time that America’s existence was actually at stake. (Its fall would have occurred a long time after the defeat of Russia and England, but the threat was real.)

The Nazis and Japanese Imperialists were very bad people. It serves as a still relevant reminder of the dangers of extreme nationalism.

It was the greatest showpiece of competing technological powers. For about 7 years, with their existence on the line, the Allies and Axis punched and countered punched with tanks, bombers, fighter planes, missiles, radar, sonar, submarines, carriers, codes and code breaking, espionage, camouflage, and finally atomic power.

18

While I agree that the public perception of WWII in America might trend toward “not painful,” the war was plenty painful even for Americans. A few weeks ago I spent some time helping a WWII vet partly clean out his basement. The man is in his nineties, and he tearfully gave me a book about the Bataan Death March he himself was unable to read because so many of his school friends had died there.

Of course everyone outside North America had a much worse war.

The Falklands meets your standard for “huge armies?”

19

Fine, Navies then.

20

There’s also a element of examining the “why” it came about.

For example, Herr Hitler was not a stateman to be trusted to keep to his word on various treaties, and there were plenty of high profile people trying to sound the alarm on his regime. How did they not see his duplicity? Why did they make the decisions they did?

Trying to learn the lessons of the past (the Interwar period) theoretically will prevent us from making the same mistakes (the long march to war) again. It seems to me, though, that as an event passes from living memory, those lessons start to get forgotten.