#world war 2

[mapsontheweb]

Japanese internment camps 1942

[theworldatwar]

Operation Barbarossa gets underway. German soldiers await the order to advance - 22nd June 1941

[philosophicalconservatism]

The Morality Of Hiroshima And Nagasaki

A small debate has arisen in Conservative circles over the morality of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. One side proclaims that the decision was evil because it targeted innocent civilians on a massive scale (regardless of how many lives it may have saved) and furthermore anyone who will not denounce the decision is evil themselves. The other side declares that it was a moral decision because it saved more lives than it claimed. Now one error that many critics of the decision seem to make is that they speak as though this was a choice between the deaths of the innocent civilians of these two cities, and the deaths of a larger number of armed troops on both sides. It was not. If it were it would be an easier decision.

The first thing that needs to be acknowledged is that, like contemporary discussions of slavery, this is a discussion of a different moral climate. Innocent civilians were not merely targeted by the hydrogen bomb but were regularly targeted by conventional bombs during the war in a way that would be entirely unthinkable today. Entire cities were bombed out. Hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians were killed in German cities alone. So the grim practical choice here was between years and years of more targeted conventional bombing of innocent civilians, or these two acts against Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

If I were personally sent back in a time machine and given the power to make this decision I could not, for I am a product of a different time. The question is whether or not, within the context of that time, this was the best decision. In my opinion it was for the time. Some will object to my claim that this was a different moral climate by pointing out statements of the era that express an awareness of the evil of targeting civilians. But we can do the same thing with slavery. Every single major founding father is on record condemning the institution of slavery as grossly immoral. This does not change the fact that it was a different moral climate; for in today's Western world the very notion of slavery is unthinkable.

The targeting of civilians was not some extreme deviation peculiar to World War 2 either. It was practiced in World War 1, and in most earlier wars, indicating that the extreme taboo against it presently is indeed a convention of the modern world.

[thepopculturearchivist]

LIBERTY, April 24, 1943

[lonestarbattleship]

"USS YORKTOWN (CV-5) operating in the Pacific, photographed from a Douglas TBD-1 torpedo plane that has just taken off from her deck. Other TBD and SBD aircraft are also ready to be launched. A F4F-3 'Wildcat' fighter is parked on the outrigger just forward of the island. The other ships in the company include the fleet oiler USS GUADALUPE (AO-32), a destroyer and a heavy cruiser. This view has been retouched to censor the CXAM-radar antenna mounted atop Yorktown's foremast."

Date April 1942

U.S. Navy photo: 80-G-640553

[kroz-zivot-srcem]

[whereserpentswalk]

The nazis that you see in movies are as much a historical fantasy as vikings with horned helmets and samurai cutting people in half.

The nazis were not some vague evil that wanted to hurt people for the sake of hurting them. They had specific goals which furthered a far right agenda, and they wanted to do harm to very specific groups, (largely slavs, jews, Romani, queer people, communists/leftists, and disabled people.)

The nazis didn't use soldiers in creepy gas masks as their main imagery that they sold to the german people, they used blond haired blue eyed families. Nor did they stand up on podiums saying that would wage an endless and brutal war, they gave speeches about protecting white Christian society from degenerates just like how conservatives do today.

Nazis weren't atheists or pagans. They were deeply Christian and Christianity was part of their ideology just like it is for modern conservatives. They spoke at lengths about defending their Christian nation from godless leftism. The ones who hated the catholic church hated it for protestant reasons. Nazi occultism was fringe within the party and never expected to become mainstream, and those occultists were still Christian, none of them ever claimed to be Satanists or Asatru.

Nazis were also not queer or disabled. They killed those groups, before they had a chance to kill almost anyone else actually. Despite the amount of disabled nazis or queer/queer coded nazis you'll see in movies and on TV, in reality they were very cishet and very able bodied. There was one high ranking nazi early on who was gay and the other nazis killed him for that. Saying the nazis were gay or disabled makes about as much sense as saying they were Jewish.

The nazis weren't mentally ill. As previously mentioned they hated disabled people, and this unquestionably included anyone neurodivergent. When the surviving nazi war criminals were given psychological tests after the war, they were shown to be some of the most neurotypical people out there.

The nazis weren't socialists. Full stop. They hated socialists. They got elected on hating socialists. They killed socialists. Hating all forms of lefitsm was a big part of their ideology, and especially a big part of how they sold themselves.

The nazis were not the supervillians you see on screen, not because they didn't do horrible things in real life, they most certainly did, but because they weren't that vague apolitical evil that exists for white American action heros to fight. They did horrible things because they had a right wing authoritarian political ideology, an ideology that is fundamentally the same as what most of the modern right wing believes.

[listen-to-the-inner-walrus]

so in an attempt to actually use positive thinking, anytime i fuck up and my brain reacts as if ive cause a minor apocalyptic event, i compare my fuck up to the 4 minute fuck up committed by the crew of the uss william d porter.

and only today, as i was having to explain what happened to my mom when i was explaining the whole comparison thing, did i realise that most people dont know about it and ive decided that needs to change because its objectively hilarious.

...which is a weird thing to say about an event that occured on a warship in 1943, specifically november 14th.

see the uss william d porter was a fletcher-class destroyer but you dont need to know what that means, just that she had guns that went bang bang and that she was escorting another ship, the uss iowa, to cairo.

while they were on their way there, they performed some gun trials like testing the anti-aircraft guns or the torpedos. and while they were running a torpedo drill, the crew of the porter managed to fire a live torpedo straight at the iowa which you know, in terms of a list of things to do while escorting a ship, shooting a torpedo at them is not on that list.

especially if the president of the united states is on board.

yeah so fdr was on board and the gun trials were actually his idea, and part of the trials was that they were conducted under radio silence.

and that means the crew of the porter couldnt just call the iowa to be like "move out the way, we accidentally shot a torpedo at you."

but they did have signal lamps and you know, the signalman on board was trained to signal this exact kind of message.

...and uh never mind, the signalman did manage to successfully tell the iowa that a torpedo was coming toward them but wasnt as successful when it came to the direction the torpedo was coming from.

not all hope is lost though because the signalman could still use the signal lamp to correct his previous mistake and-, never mind, he announced that the porter was reversing, which she wasnt.

yeah so at catastrophic mistake number 3, they broke radio silence to warn the iowa and she managed to turn out of the way just in time which meant no one got hurt. and even though the inquiry into the incident led to chief torpedoman (fantastic job title btw) lawton dawson being sentences to hard labour, fdr intervened and waved away his sentence, saying it was all an accident.

but yeah, so thats my new measure for "how much did i really fuck up?" and when i compared accidentally picking up a pencil case without a tag on it in wilko, turns out it was a very minor fuck-up. yes, the cashier had to ask another worker to grab a duplicate so they could scan the barcode, but i didnt nearly kill the president during wartime via accidental friendly fire

[xoxoauntscripty]

*TW for amateur surgery*

Okay. It's 1942.

There's a US submarine, USS Silversides, operating in HIGHLY dangerous Japanese waters.

And one poor bastard, some machinists mate, gets a case of acute appendicitis

They can't radio for an airlift because the Japanese will find them

But they don't have a surgeon on board.

The only medical person they have is a fucking pharmacist's mate

As in, a pill counter guy

As in, the cold and flu and small stitches guy

Not the "cut open a machinists mate on a moving submarine" guy

Not even 3 steps below that guy

But he's all they have, and if they do nothing, this guy is gonna fucking die.

So this motherfucker

Risks a court martial

To do surgery

Without an OR

With bent fucking spoons as makeshift retractors

And the patient's coworkers as assistants

He somehow miraculously fucking gives the dude spinal anesthesia, correctly

Opens the abdomen

Cuts out the appendix (somehow without rupturing it, which would have killed the guy)

Almost kills everybody with ether (because of course he does, it's incredibly dangerous for everyone in the room)

Identifies a MAJOR fucking bleed

Can't find the source of the bleed, so he *runs the bowel like a fucking surgeon*

Figures out it's a clamp that slipped

Does fucking vascular surgery to fix the bleed

Closes the guy up

And the patient fucking lives

This fucking completely untrained pharmacist's mate

Performs a major surgery

Underwater

On a moving ship

Without antibiotics

And saves a motherfucking life

(And manages the patient through multiple rounds of getting depth charged by a Japanese destroyer, because war)

The fucking patient is back on duty less than a week after the surgery.

So tip out a fucking glass to Pharmacist's Mate Thomas A Moore, who risked a murder and professional suicide

And possibly had

The biggest balls under the waves.

[kemetic-dreams]

Honoring the 1st US Army African Female Pilot - Millie Bailey. She served in WWII and was 104 years old when she passed away in May of 2022. Show this Beautiful Woman some Love! RIP. Thank you for your service to our country and freedom for all.

[theworldatwar]

A German Dornier 17 plunges to earth after being hit during an air raid - England, 18th Aug 1940

[sgtgrunt0331-3]

An American G.I. leans out his tent to shake hands with a dog in Luxembourg’s frozen landscape during the Battle of the Bulge, January 1945.

[starlightshadowsworld]

The idea that because of the Holocaust Israel has the right to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians, is absurd.

That's like saying the genocide of native Americans is okay because America was once under British control.

Hell that's like saying every country that was under British imperialism has a pass to commit genocide.

Because they suffered they should be allowed to let other people suffer.

That's not how that works.

You under went something awful, that does not give you the right to inflict that on others.

And they want to, a Israeli politican today (18.12.2023), David Azoulai said that Gaza should be made into Ausuwitch.

“The whole Gaza Strip needs to be empty. Flattened. Just like in Auschwitz. Let it be a museum for all the world to see what Israel can do. Let no one reside in the Gaza Strip for all the world to see, because October 7 was in a way a second Holocaust.”

The Ausuwitz Museum actually commented on this, calling it sick and hateful.

Agreed.

And that's without mentioning that Israel treats its Holocaust survivors like shit.

As of 2023 there are 165,000 Holocaust survivors in Israel and 1 in 3 live under the poverty line.

And it's not like they don't have the money for it either, given America gives them millions.

But they'd rather use that money to kill Palestinians than help their own people. Even putting foreign settlers above their own people.

They have the Hannibal protocol which calls for the killing their own civilian hostages, which they've done multiple times.

Even when they've stepped forward with a white flag and spoke to them in Hebrew, they've shot them and said they thought they were the enemy.

Because they don't care, they are using the trauma of the Holocaust as a tool to kill others.

Holocaust survivors are speaking out that what Israel is doing to Palestinians is exactly what the Nazi's did to them, but the Israeli government doesn't care.

Not for them, and definitely not for the Palestinians.

The fact people think they should be allowed to do any of this and thinking it's justified is disgusting.

[odairfilm]

christopher nolan did such an exceptional job at making the audience feel the tension and horror during the trinity test sequence even though we already knew the outcome and what it meant when they realized that the bomb actually works

[shinishmermaid]

[thesixthduke]

Spitfire pilots of No. 43 Squadron RAF keeping warm in their dispersal hut at Drem airfield, East Lothian.