#world war ii

[nueveg]

[salmonella-destroyer-of-worlds]

[nerds-yearbook]

Decades after he had left it, Jack Harkness slipped through time and found himself once more back in 1941 where he encountered the REAL Captain Jack Harkness whose identity “Jack Harkness” had stolen after the real Jack Harkness’ death in World War 2. ("Captain Jack Harkness", Torchwood, TV)

[adventurelandia]

"Don't be a Job Hopper" 1940s Disney WWII propaganda poster

[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

[uss-edsall]

I read a very interesting article recently.

Hiroo Onoda is a famous name among WWII history buff circles. He was the soldier who disappeared into the Philippine jungle at the end of the war with three other soldiers, and ended up being the last to surrender after 29 years fighting a "guerilla war" until he surrendered in 1974. For at least twenty years he fought with one other, Kinshichi Kozuka; who was killed by police in 1972.

The article was about one woman named Mia Stewart, a Filipino-Australian, who's trying to get the funding to finish a documentary she's been working on for about 20 years.

The documentary she's making is trying to shed a little more light than the fascinating "lone samurai" legend that has been built up around Onoda. It very pointedly asks one thing -- what is this "guerilla war" he was fighting for 29 years? Who were his opponents? Who was he fighting?

Onoda (and Kozuka until his death) were killing, sometimes in very gruesome ways, almost exclusively Filipino civilians. Innocent people who were just living their normal lives -- who couldn't fight back. One of their victims was Mia Stewart's great uncle, when she was barely two years old.

The article essentially asks, "war hero or serial killer?"

Those civilians he stalked and killed or stole from for nearly thirty years weren't ever asked their opinion before the Filipino president gave a blanket pardon, Onoda was welcomed home a hero, and he gained worldwide fame. Their side of the story entirely forgotten as some nebulous force he was fighting "guerilla warfare" against.

It was genuinely kind of enlightening because even I have kind of looked at the Onoda story as a, "wow that's crazy" and never really gave it more thought of "who exactly was he fighting?" I figured he was shooting at cops, if anything. But no, it was nothing as simple as that.

The documentary is not out yet (she doesn't have the funding to finish it, the article was essentially one long ad to go "and if you can donate please do so") but there is a nine minute extended trailer from two years ago

On some level I think if I'd just given it any ounce of thought I'd have gone, "who was he fighting actually?" But instead I just assumed he spent nearly thirty years fighting cops… not doing what the IJA did best and mutilating helpless civilians. But I bought the popular narrative entirely and didn't give an ounce of a think at the question of who was he fighting in this 'guerilla war.'

"Actively fighting a war… against who?" is a question that just straight up never came to my mind.

[prokopetz]

The trouble with self-consciously edgy urban fantasy RPGs which are explicitly set in the real world is that they always get fixated on the Second World War, and there's literally no good way to speculate about whether Hitler was a vampire or whatever – not only is it tasteless, it's done. It was cliché even in the 1990s, and it hasn't become any less cliché since. Like, at least switch up the war – I want to see an edgy urban fantasy RPG whose Secret History™ revolves around the proposition that Archduke Franz Ferdinand was from space.

[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.

[incognitopolls]

We ask your questions so you don’t have to! Submit your questions to have them posted anonymously as polls.

[usnatarchives]

Uncle Sam had a green thumb? Digging into the history of victory gardens 🍅🌽🥕

Victory Gardens emerged during World War I as a way to ease the strain on the nation's food supply and foster solidarity among citizens.

Citizens were encouraged to grow their own fruits and vegetables to ensure a steady food supply for both the home front and the troops fighting overseas.

The movement continued during World War II, when the United States faced severe food shortages due to rationing and the need to support a growing military force. 

Victory Gardens became a symbol of community, patriotism and self-sufficiency, and by 1944, an estimated 20 million gardens were cultivated across the nation.

The U.S. government heavily promoted the Victory Garden movement through various initiatives and campaigns. The Department of Agriculture's Extension Service provided guidance and resources, such as instructional pamphlets on gardening techniques, to help citizens establish and maintain their gardens and plots.

The government also created a range of promotional materials, including posters, films, and radio programs, to encourage citizens to participate in the effort.

Further Reading:

[nueveg]

[ghostwarriorrrr]

[yeoldenews]

Written three days after Pearl Harbor.

(source: The Webster Review and Signal Tribune, December 16, 1941.)

[girlactionfigure]

May his memory be a blessing.

[dragoneyes618]

"Holocaust novels that have sold millions of copies both in the United States and overseas in recent years are all "uplifting," even when they include the odd dead kid. The Tattooist of Auschwitz, a recent international mega-bestseller touted for its true story," manages to present an Auschwitz that involved a heartwarming romance. Sarah's Key, The Book Thief, The Boy in Striped Pajamas, and many other bestsellers, some of which have even become required reading in schools, all involve non-Jewish rescuers who risk or sacrifice their own lives to save hapless Jews, thus inspiring us all. (For the record, the number of actual "righteous Gentiles" officially recognized by Yad Vashem, Israel's national Holocaust museum and research center, for their efforts in rescuing Jews from the Holocaust is under 30,000 people, out of a European population of at the time of nearly 300 million - or .001 percent. Even if we were to assume that the official recognition is an undercount by a factor of ten thousand, such people remain essentially a rounding error." In addition to their wonderful non-Jewish characters, these books are almost invariably populated by the sort of relatable dead Jews whom readers can really get behind: the mostly non-religious, mostly non-Yiddish-speaking ones whom noble people tried to save, and whose deaths therefore teach us something beautiful about our shared and universal humanity, replete with epiphanies and moments of grace. Statistically speaking, this was not the experience of almost any Jews who endured the Holocaust. But for literature in non-Jewish languages, that grim reality is both inconvenient and irrelevant." 

- Dara Horn, People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present

[muspeccoll]

For Banned Books Week, we offer you this 81-year-old image from our collections.

No man and no force can put thought in a concentration camp forever. No man and no force can take from the world the books that embody man's eternal fight against tyranny.

A print of this poster currently hangs in the hallway between our reading room and classroom, along with several other posters about libraries, books, and reading, dating from the 1920s to the 1940s.

Books are weapons in the war of ideas [graphic] / S. Broder. RARE FLAT D743.25 .B75 1942