V-E DAY LET US NOT FORGET THE DAY EVER
 

It was 60 years ago today (May 8th, 1945) that victory in Europe was claimed.

Let us not never forget the veterans who helped win the "War to End All Wars" in the European Theatre. And may we forever remember their courage, valor, honor and dignity that allowed us to be free from true terror and evil.

GOD BLESS AND THANK YOU WWII VETS.

By posting this in "politics" you open this topic as fair game for disagreement, unpleasantness. Why should we remember every military victory with an entire calendar date? Do we still commemorate the Union "victory" at Shiloh? Anyhow anyone who knows their WW2 history knows that victory in Europe was largely a Russian endevour. The Germans held off American and British forces with little more than a skeleton army while the largest sacrifices were made by their communist allies at Stalingrad, Petersburg, et al.

As such I think it's a little more than rude for our president to commemorate this date with didactic speeches about democracy. How about sincere note of appreciation for the nation that beat Hitler's army?

was this the day hitler committed suicide also?
I just saw Downfall and it made me think of it.

While I will agree that the Soviets did most of the fighting, as 80% of the German military was deployed on the Eastern front, I have my doubts that they would have been able to win singlehandedly. If not for the Americans, and to a lesser extent the Commonwealth, German industry would have been relatively unscathed. There would be no war in the desert, thus securing Mideast oil for the Nazis, and, perhaps their greatest general, Erwin Rommel, would have been on the Russian front. The Atlantic Wall would not have been created, thus freeing up resources to build more defensive lines in the east. The Red Army would be hard pressed to feed all of it's men without the food that America sent them. Their industry would also not have been as focused on creating tanks, but would have to produce support vehicles as well if not for the Lend Lease Act.

So, yes, the Russians sacrificed the most in World War 2. 20 million dead is nothing to scoff at. However, all of the allied nations played a vital role in the destruction of Hitler and the Nazi party. To think otherwise is foolhardy arrogance.

It's a shame the sacrifices of so many is falsely invoked by the grandstanding of a depraved few.

I agree..... So sorry I posted in politics but considering it was a WAR and they are usually over politics I felt this was the best arena for it. Why people cannot observe 1 freaking day and just say THANK YOU and put their energies (if they must) into arguing elsewhere is beyond me.

If hitler had not started a war on two fronts, either with the anglo-american europeans or with the russians the reich might still be in power today

True. But, in that same vein, if worms had machine guns, birds might not mess with them.

I think that Hitler started the war on one front, but was enjoined on a second front by Canada, Britain & France.

Actually, Hitler had a non-agression pact with Stalin that he broke, thus starting the war on the Eastern front.

Had he not done this, his major battles would have been with England and the Western nations.

I don't want to further hijack the thread, but I think that with the development of the atomic bomb, the allies would have won regardless. This assumes that they could keep the pressure on Germany and kept them from doing the same.

(sorry, first time I hit the edit button instead of the quote button)

just because the soviets did more of the dying doesn't mean they contributed more to the winning.

That's pretty callous... I don't really want to get into a numbers game about VE Day... or a series of what ifs...

The whole point is, in my mind, to remember the sacrifices made by our collective nations (and by that I also include the Germans).

i disagree.

the whole point of victory in europe day is the victory. it isn't about honoring the sacrifices of the enemy... those sacrifices killed our men and prolonged the war. the enemy sacrificed their lives to the end that we would have to sacrifice more of ours. that did nothing to hasten victory.

let's honor the day... but don't get wishy-washy.

I disagree... *many* Germans view this day as their liberation... I see no reason not to remember that...

I also feel that taking the approach of "those sacrifices killed our men and prolonged the war" does nothing to promote healing. It continues to support an us vs. them mentality that was part of the problem to begin with... nothing wishy washy about it. It is time to move on from the confrontational approach.

i dont understand what is at stake for the folk above who resist the simple fact of the matter.
world war 2 was won by a coalition--you know, a multilateral type arrangement---and that the soviet union, like it or not, played an overwhelming role in what that coalition was able to do.
to say this is simply to acknowledge what actually happened.
it has nothing to do with the ways in which the post-hoc sentimentalization of those who died has come to be shaped. it has nothing to do with how one might feel about those who were killed. you can remember what you like as you like--just dont substitute that for history.
how ww2 is remembered in general is a seperate process, shaped with seperate ends in mind: remember the cold war?


the fact of the matter is that the relation of the americans to the ussr were not pretty even at the height of the war...
remember that stalin asked the americans to open a second front to take some of the pressure off the ussr from 1942: remember that the americans decided on a sequence of actions that did almost nothing to reduce pressure on the ussr until 1944. remember that lovely speech by harry truman, in which he encouraged this--it was among the first moves in the cold war--it was in 1942---the culminating phrase was lovely: let them bleed each other white.

the point is that the erasure of the soviet role in winning ww2 is a coldwar relic. to adjust for that erasure is just that. but if you push at the question, things grow ugly really quite fast. that this sort of thing rarely if ever enters into the nationalist fetish outing that is memorialization is a good index of the void that seperates the past from the official "memory" of the past.

true, many germans did see that as a kind of liberation. however, that was mainly a liberation from the grip of war itself and not necessarily from hitler. i defy anyone to prove that the german people would have abandoned nazism had the war gone their way. additionally, any german soldier who would have viewed allied victory as a liberation wouldn't have made the sacrifices we honor our men making on VE day.

whether you like the approach or not, that is the reality of it. confronting evil is at the root of a just war. if western europe hadn't appeased hitler when he annexed the sudetenland and if the US hadn't been fixated in an isolationist mode... we might have saved millions of souls. i think the lessoned learned is clear: confrontation is the ONLY way to deal with evil in the world.


roachboy,

please quit making things up. you make discussion on this board very tedious.

This is a gross generalization... I know, personally, many Germans that saw it as a liberation from Hitler and not just the war... To ask if the German poeple would have abandoned Nazism is like asking if the Iraqis would abandon the Baathist regime. Since when do "the people" have a choice in removing a dictatorship... very, very rarely.

As for the soldier... nazis are one thing, regular German forces are another...

irate:

sorry, but once again you might not like what i say above, but what is there is true.

you might consider doing some research--or maybe take a class or something--try giving yourself access to a range of actual scholarship on the history of world war 2 from a viewpoint not entirely about reiforcing the mythology of american super-hero standing in the world.

maybe look up the truman quote rather than simply assuming it is false.

maybe think about the question: why north africa, why italy from a viewpoint that factors american anti-communism in.


[[unnecessarily snippy remark deleted]]

It's not that often that I say this, but Roachboy is right. The Soviets were without a doubt a linchpin of the war effort. Their ability to absorb attrition like a sponge and somehow continue to increase numbers caused enough Germans to be sacrificed in a front away from Britain/American invasions.

Yes, the quote "let them bleed themselves white" is true. It was a calculated attempt to have the Soviet communists come out of the war victorious, but ravaged and unable to continue it's advances in other fronts for some time (this was before the A-bomb).

We would have won the war if Russia fell, by that point they would have cost the lives of many Germans during the two or three winters it would have taken, and their supply lines would have been too long. However it would have been much more difficult fighting the remenants of the army.

At the same time Russia would not have lasted the war without us. Their industrial base was obliterated, their food base was conquored, and they had little or no Iron mines east of the Urals. Their army would not have the proper equipment, they would have been starving, and could not have produced the massive amount of tanks that were used to win the war.

How is it so hard to believe that we could not fight the two most highly trained and best equipped nations in the world at the same time on the opposite side of the globe? Britain, Russia, and the US all were victors because they kept each other alive. The US came out ahead without a doubt, but that's due more to geography than anything else.

What?

I can't begin to understand that paragraph - beyond it being a blanket justification for war on the grounds of "evil". Probably it's this fantasy concept of evil that completely negates any possible rationalization you might have been attempting. But even when I simply switch "evil" to "massively corrupt, power hungry delusion" it still seems like you missed something rather obvious:

If Western Europe and the U.S. had worked diplomatically and with sanctions (as opposed to fully endorsing Nazi Germany through strong business arrangements), we could have saved millions of souls.

Confrontation only became a necessity when Nazi Germany not only had free reign (due to the lack of concern for peoples who had no financial benefit to Western Europe and the U.S.) but SUPPORT via mutual corporate involvement.

And so then I realize that your conclusion is WAY off-base. Massively corrupt, power hungry delusion is best dealt with by people who are not themselves seriously corrupt and power hungry. None of the players are evil - specifically because none of the players are good.

Well said. Many individuals sacrificed their lives in the war, and should not be forgotten. The "evil" that has been mentioned, however, really never went anywhere.

Roachboy isn't making it up, those quotes and things are indeed true

Seaver is right too - the Allies probably would've won had Russia fallen or not, but the cost and length of war would have been very very long and the idea of unconditional surrender may not have been fulfilled. And geography perhaps above all else is what pushed the U.S. ahead of the world.

We lost less than 10 civilians in the entire war. Our cities were left untouched. Our indsutry was rebuilt. The same can't be said for the old imperial powers Britain and France. Russia was devastated - it lost 27 million people (half the estiamted killed during WW2) and its cities were in ruins.

As for German soldiers... there is a pretty fine line between German soldiers and Nazi's, and in that case, war criminals. Van Braun was forced into the Nazi Party, built the V1 and V2 weapons, and yet he and his crew came to the U.S. and provided a great boost to our own space program and NASA (he designed the Saturn V and finally fulfilled his dream of bringing men to the Moon). Rommel was a general of Germany and yet he's not remembered as a Nazi and instead is respescted by everyone as a soldier who served his country and was forced to commit suicide by the leaders.

Many were forced to fight and others fought because they believed in their country and loved it to fight for it.

Yep, fighting for your country and beliving in your leader no matter what reasons he gave for the war are still virtues to most americans.
It was the same spirt the made most german soldiers fights, they thought they fight against comunism was a just one...

He was not the only Nazi who worked for the US after the war
Remember the "Butcher of Lyon"?

he was also involved in the resistance movement, which also adds to his "brave" reputation.

Wow, you could almost apply this to the situation today. The more things change....

at the risk of being cynical, the number of anti-nazis grew exponentially in june-juily 1945--kinda like the rapid expansion of the ranks of the resistance in france by september 1944.

it was in everyone's interest after the war to talk about how they were forced to become nazi party members. it was in their interest at the point where they were "being forced" to be a party member to not mention that they felt forced. the americans. for example, round about the fall of 1945 were far more worried about communists than about ex-fascists. they preferred electoral tickets all over germany, when they came, that excluded kpd members...

in the case of folk like von braun or memebrs to the ss apparatus engaged in "curious" types of experimentation of human subjects, it was in the american interest to believe these stories, since the americans sheltered many of the foulest war criminals from prosecution on the grounds that the information they had was a kind fo war reparations. read christopher simpson's book "blowback" for a detailed history of this glorious period of american history.

the question of how perfectly ordinary folk in the germany of the mid 1930s could have found fascism appealing, in a nationalist common-sense kinda way, is really pretty interesting. far more interesting than the save-your-ass stories about forcing that came after the war had ended. what there is to be learned from that experience, and applied to the american one in particular, is how easy it was (and is) for perfectly ordinary folk, who were not evil by nature, who were not exceptional in any way, could become supporters of a fascist regime without even really noticing the shift. or so it seems. maybe a few more military-style rallies. but they would be the logical extension of nationalism, yes? maybe the disappearance of a few neighbors--but that's all good as well, if the purity of the body politic is at stake. a few civil liberties here, a few there--no problem, you arent giving anything away, you have nothing to hide, you are a good person, these things are for bad people--the militarization of everything will weed them out anyway. it was easy then, i think, for folk, particularly petit bourgeois folk who did not understand themselves as being political, to just follow the lead of their radio and papers and neighbors and neighhborhoods and slide right into this. of course they did not know how the story was going to go in the longer run. but the future is never clear, is it.

Are you sure you are describing 1930's Germany and not 2000's USA? Time changes, people don't.