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.

My grandfather on my mother's side - for Japan.

My father's oldest brother - for the allies.

(And he was a marine in the pacific so in a way - they were fighting each other. But he was never less than lovely to my mother.)

All sleepy. Wants a vacation, I does.

I am so overwhelmed.

I'm sleepy FROM my vacation! Somehow, in CA I kept waking up at 4:30 in the morning, but last night in NY I couldn't fall asleep. How is it that I'm on eastern time in CA and western time in NY? Not on, dudes.