We don’t claim to be WW2 experts.

What made WW2 incomprehensible to me for so many years was, I now realize, the contradictions surrounding its exposition, at least in the US, that cause a logically-oriented mind to grind to a halt. The contradictions are a result of deliberate lies. Once these lies are exposed, it becomes quite easy to study the period with profit. Here are just a few examples:

1. “Japan started it (with the US) by bombing Pearl Harbor”

2. “We had to stop Hitler in his march to gobble up Europe.”

3. “We were justified in fighting Hitler because of the Holocaust.”

(1) is simply false. Japan was driven into a place from which she had no choice but to lash out, by the belligerence of the Roosevelt administration.

(2) is absurd at several levels. Most of central Europe was allied to or sympathetic with Germany in its march against Bolshevik Russia, which was universally recognized by everyone except jews and Churchill as the primary threat to the safety and freedom of the world. The German grievance against Bohemia and Poland was fully justified. Germany did not want war with Western Europe and bent over backwards to prevent it. All the countries that Germany was trying to “gobble up” according to the myth were handed over to Stalin by Roosevelt and Churchill after the war. Then, we spent 50 years in a cold war with the USSR, which could have all been prevented had we joined Germany in dealing a quick knock-out blow to the Bolshevik terror.

(3) won’t work, because even according to the story, the death camps were not constructed until starting in 1942, after the US entered. If there was a holocaust at all, it was as likely a result of the US entry into the war as a cause thereof.

Think about it: you enter a bank with intent to rob it at gunpoint; but your gun goes off accidently; lo and behold, it turns out you killed some bank-robbers that got there before you.

Can you now take credit for “stopping the bank robbers”?

Of course not. It was happenstance.

Now add to that, that the men you killed were not bank-robbers at all, and you will start to understand the point.

So you have to get the basic narrative straight before the facticity will make any sense.

We have already mentioned various resources. Toland to get the “rest of the story” about Japan; Stinnett to learn about Roosevelt’s deliberate trickery to get the Japanese to attack. Buchanan’s new book “Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War” would not be a bad place to get introduced to the European front, though Buchanan has not fully extracted himself from some of the mythology. As far as the basic sequence of events, the Thomas Childers lectures available in audio or video from The Teaching Company are as good a place to start as anywhere. After that, getting a deeper understanding of the war criminal Churchill will be needed. I have found that you don’t even need to go to “revisionist” histories to gain this insight. Even the hagiographies will do once your mind is dejudaized. I go to Jenkins’ biography first. You can see my beginning of a summary of Churchill’s life in several posts under the history-20th century tag.

We are still uncovering new connections. WW1 and the Bolshevik Revolution is going to be key. In that regard, even the Mary Phagan case I sent you to before has its important place.

Here is a story that is good news. A SS guard finally gets his do. Clik
here

Before Admiral Dönitz announced Hitler’s death to the German people on May 1, 1945, the Adagio of the Symphony was played.

These events may seem trivial to most. They are mistaken. Small things like this reveal much about a nation.

Contemporary Germans now listen to the musical descendants of jazz, swing, and pop. Germany lost the war, but more significantly, it lost its culture.

“This hurts me so much because the heroism of so many soldiers is nullified by one single characterless weakling . . . You have to imagine, he’ll be brought to Moscow, and imagine that rat trap there. There he will sign anything. He’ll make confessions, make proclamations — you’ll see. [Hitler was proved correct about this.] They will now walk down the slope of spiritual bankruptcy to its lowest depths. One can only say that a bad deed always produces new evils. With soldiers the fundamental thing is always character, and if we don’t manage to instill that, if we just breed purely intellectual acrobats and spiritual athletes, we’re never going to get a race that can stand up to the heavy blows of destiny. That is the decisive point.

“Yes, one has to take brave, daring people who are willing to sacrifice their lives, like every soldier. What is life? Life is the nation. The individual must die anyway. Beyond the life of the individual is the nation. But how anyone can be afraid of this moment of death, with which he can free himself from his misery, if his duty doesn’t chain him to the Vale of Tears? Na!”

Later he said to Jodl (Chief of Staff OKW):

“I’ll tell you something. I can’t understand how a man like Paulus wouldn’t rather go to his death. The heroism of so many tens of thousands of men, officers, and generals nullified by such a man who lacks the character to do in a moment what a weak woman has done.”

It’s a pity when the Peter Principle promotes guys like Paulus just beyond their level of competence; for, there is a mix of skills that is very valuable in the second-in-command, or adviser to the commander, which very skills render one an inadequate first-in-command. I’m thinking of the line from Gandalf, to the effect that he could see things far off very clearly, but couldn’t see things nearby very well. There is a mind that hovers and dwells, and for that reason is able to gain insights that go beyond the conventional wisdom; yet because of that very habit, is unable to converge on action now.

The more I learn about Göring, the more I think he must have had a vanity and superficiality about him that allowed him to make wild promises that bore no relation to reality. And if so, then it was surely a corresponding defect in the Führer to not see through that serious deficiency.

Rather than surrender, Paulus should have broke the Army out of the Kessel at the moment that he saw there was just enough fuel left, and taken his lumps with the Führer, rather than lose all those men.

Given the desperate situation of fuel, it seems quite understandable that the B group was sent to go try to fetch some more. It reminds me of how Lee felt he had to divide his forces just before Sharpsburg. Fortunately, the man with the distant assignment in that case was Stonewall.

It’s interesting that one of the Russian interviewees remarks that Germans seemed to them to be quite religious.