Hi GMC,
Thank-you. Although, I can't take credit for this material. Thank the many historians over the years that spent so much time pouring over the actual records of events and spent so much time interviewing soldiers and officers.
History is indeed fascinating. Information like this is invaluable. I think it helps give better perspective on our current events as well.
The one thing that strikes me in reading this - and my memories of talking to my grandfather who participated in WW2 - is the amount of absolute screw-ups, ironic events, dumb-luck, good luck, and divine providence that played a part in every episode.
It certainly makes me a believer that good does eventually win out over evil.
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Originally Posted by gmc
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I'm impressed. Most americans seem to know little history, it gets a little wearing seeing posts about how you saved the world from hitler when the reality was a lot more grey. Pointing things like the above out to them is a waste of time because they take any such comment as being anti american and end of discussion. Telling them to go and read some history is not very constructive either. If we had made peace with Hitler history would have been a lot different., but the people would not have had it.
There are now a lot of books being written by amricans that fought with the RAF in the early days of the war. They make good reading as it brings home just how different the two countries were at the time, but yet how much the same. It is now almost three generations ago.
On British POW's in Italy my father was one of them having being captured at Tobruk.
My sister in Law married an Austrian from a small village. They have a museum commemorating those who died in WW2 and also pictures of troops fronm the area in action at Tobruk. It was a strange feeling to realise that when they were the same age as us, the father of my brother in Law and mine were trying to kill each other. It's hard to imagine what it was like.
At the outbreak of war no one had any real reason to expect america to get involved, we were not allies but rival countries.
The more you study history the more you realise that the simple explanations are not good enough.
On a side note if Kennedy had believed the intelligence services and followed their advice we would have had nuclear war during the ciban crisis. What they did not know was that there were already battlefield nuclear weapons in cuba ready for use (the cubans did not control them) and nuclear armed Russian Submarines in the area.
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