Back to the wars and dead people

That barely counted, since it was actually leaning more towards your admittedly adorable daughter talk, but thank you.

Alibelle--how do I vote for your friends? if you give me a number, I'll call it.

Just so we're clear, everyone, Robin is by far my favorite of all of you. Hands down, no contest. I don't know if the phone lines are still open, but Alec and Josies's number is: 1 (800) 868-3402. You get six votes per phone line tonight, and I was having tons of trouble logging into the voting online thing at ABC.com, so I don't even know if that's worth a shot.

ETA:

In Miami, it was very common for Cubans to pierce their babies ears.

Well, that is where I spent my babyhood. So that probably explains my ears.

The U.S.does have some responsibilty for WWII. The whole world stood by while Mussolini took Ethiopia. There was the civil war in Spain where Hitler and Mussolini intervened massively while the U.S. and Europe honored what was supposed to be a universal arms embargo, and the then Soviet Union gave some aid, but not as much as it could have. Spain in particular was where Hitler might have been contained or at least delayed at a low cost - simply by selling as many arms to the Loyalists as they were willing to buy -even just as many as they had actual cash for.

Just been reading over the last couple of hundred poosts. Sometimes, Ireland kind of sucks. We have no abortion, stayed neutral in WWII (although I still think that was the right thing to so), oh, but let a load of Nazis in after the war while turning away Jewish refugees. Lovely country I have myself here.

Though the genealogy/war conversation reminded me that my great-grandparents were tortured to death by the Japanese for leading the Malaysian guerrilla movement (according to family lore, anyway), which is cool and also tragic.

Ooh! And I just found a wiki page on my great-uncle, Uncle Don.

[link]

All I know about my father's WWII service is that he worked on the big cannons used in bombardments in the Pacific, and I have seen several pictures of him (so shockingly young -- he was born in 1917) in South Pacific-like locales. He was Army, so it was probably Papua-New Guinea or along that path. Will have to talk to my brother who has done more research....

I'm pretty sure my great-grandfather was in the German military in WWI, and my grandfather was a US airplane mechanic in WWII. Which makes me really angry when I think about the Japanese-American internment. They didn't let my grandfather serve in Europe (which is why my father spent a bunch of his childhood in Hawaii), but they didn't lock him up either.

I haven't had nearly enough coffee to discuss WWII coherently at this hour of the morning, so instead I will just say (apropos of yesterday's Natter) that this morning on my way to the subway, I saw a girl with a whale-tail-tramp-stamp. (Which is to say, a tattoo in the shape of a thong peeking out of the top of her jeans. For all those times when you just want to look trashy without the bother of actually putting on underwear?)

My grandfather, being a Cajun, spoke French, so they sent him to France to teach pilots.

Funny thing is, it is reminding me of the Cherry..Adams? books I read growing up. All nurse-mysteries, set in WW2, for the most part. Sanitized, sure, cause they were written for pre-teens of the time. But I still remember bits of one set at the Midway battle.

I think this is a Buffistas weird hive-mind thing, because all I could think of during the Battle of Midway section of War was the Cherry Ames book!

The Japanese interment makes me angry, too. Learning about it when I was younger was one of the first times I realized that the winners of a war weren't always good. Then I learned about how shabbily the Union treated Southern wounded soldiers, and I just think that war sucks. However, in the Cherry Ames books, it seems like fun!

Why should have the United States entered WWII (or WWI for that matter) earlier than they did?

WWII, actually, I'm not sure actually entering the war earlier would have helped, but it's reasonably clear that Congress should have smelled what the planet was cookin' and increased the military budget at least two years earlier. The size of warships (and maybe even the number of them) was restricted by treaty, but it might have been nice to send those first soldiers into combat with rifles made after, say, 1919. There's a lot of preparatory spending that could have been done in advance; instead, it was a concurrent mad scramble.

the Allies accepted as many German Jewish immigrants as the Nazis would allow

Lesson #1 of the US Holocaust Museum is, "Dude, let those people on that ship into a US port, will you? They're refugees." That was 1938, but, in 1938, they were already refugees.

Even something like the previous Armenian genocide was relatively hidden from public awareness.

This is like that Doonesbury cartoon about the Cambodian refugees testifying before Congress. "But wasn't it secret bombing?" "Well, the bombs fell on my head. They weren't secret from me!"

There was the civil war in Spain where Hitler and Mussolini intervened massively while the U.S. and Europe honored what was supposed to be a universal arms embargo, and the then Soviet Union gave some aid, but not as much as it could have.

I think the Republicans were doomed in that war. Not just because they had no professional army, but because they weren't prepared for the total war tactics the Nationalists employed. (There were a lot of peremptory executions.) The only parties who got involved in that war were parties who thought they could grab some power thereby. England and France saw no profit in it, and so abstained; and the US, while officially neutral, in fact was full of anti-communist businessmen selling to the fascist side. Kind of a rehearsal for the early years of WWII itself.

No direct relatives that I know fighting in WWII. My parents' generation was too young. One grandfather only had sight in one eye due to a childhood accident, and I don't know what the other grandfather was doing at the time (although he was well past 45YO at the time of Pearl Harbor, so he likely didn't fight).

One grandmother was a nurse's aide at the time, but I don't know where she worked other than I'm pretty sure she didn't go overseas. Also not sure about my other grandmother, except that she had TB at some point during the early '40s, so she probably didn't do much.