WW ll Questions

[DemocratSinceBirth]

I was watching Ken Burns' documentary and in it he suggested that some of the Nissei troops were used as cannon fodder by the Americans... Is that true? If it is that was messed up...

My friend also said the British used Canadian troops as cannon fodder at Dieppe...

Wow, Paul Fussell is good... I liked his account of Abe Goldman... He said Abe Goldman was the only Jewish soldier in a group of about forty soldiers ...He said most of the other soldiers were from the south and had never met a Jewish person before...Fusell said Goldman was the bravest of the lot "because he knew what he was fighting for"... Fussell said his bravery got him killed but those other soldiers never looked at a Jewish person the same way again...Fussell was crying when he told the story...

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

1. Pretty much.

That's why the 442 ended up with record medals and a 314% casualty rate.

Don't know much about Dieppe.

[DemocratSinceBirth]

3. I Think It Was The Normandy Invasion On The Cheap...

I can't imagine what the initial casualties were in that first wave...

I would have fought in WW ll but I would have liked to have had a chance and not be used as cannon fodder like that first wave...

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

5. yeah, it was certainly a fuck up.

I don't know of the COs felt their men were expendable though.

[Jack from Charlotte]

9. I never read any accusations that The 442 was intentionally given....

worse duty. doesn't mean it didn't happen but never recall hearing or reading of that accusation. Sen. Inoye was a member of The 442. Ask him.

[Blue Belle]

2. This whole documentary has been fantastic.

All of the stories have been so compelling. I've been so close to tears so many times.

[DemocratSinceBirth]

4. Did You See Fussell Cry?

He has written some great stories about WW ll...

I enjoyed the Native American's story too...

[Blue Belle]

14. Yes I did.

It was very moving.

[Jack from Charlotte]

6. Paul Fussell's book... Wartime" is just startling.....

I recall seeing Fussell being interviewed by Dick Caveat about 20 years ago. He described what war was like thusly..... It's not like you see in the movies where a guy gets shot and falls down and just appears to be asleep. It's body parts flying all over the place. He described someone in his outfit being killed by a mortar attack. The mortar went over the head of him and they guy he shared a fox hole with. He hears a loud whack-like sound of the guy in the fox hole with him. Looks over and they guy is dead. The mortar that went over them hit guys behind them. The severed leg of the guy behind them flew forward, hit the other guy in the jaw and broke his neck. Dead.

That's war, not John Wayne being shot and laying down sleeping.

[Kutjara]

7. The Canadians usually seemed to end up with the dirtiest duty.

Actually, it was probably a tossup between them and the Australians/New Zealanders. Of course, this only considers the "white" colonial troops. The full stories of the Indian and other "brown" armies has yet to be told.

The Canadians got saddled with Dieppe, which was a hellish sausage-grinder. They acquitted themselves heroically, but suffered enormous casualties. Then they got the "honor" of doing it all again at Juno Beach on D-Day.

The Brits threw the Australians at Gallipoli in WWI, with similar results.

There's a long and noble history of colonial powers using their "lesser" members in this way.


edit: Swapped "Dieppe" and "Juno Beach" so they're the right way round. :blush:

[rockymountaindem]

10. Dieppe was in 1942

it was the testbed for the later Normandy landings.

[Kutjara]

12. Oops, my bad...I got it the wrong way around.

I meant to say the 6k Canadians on the ground at Dieppe got hammered, and then had the "honor" of doing it again at Juno.

Help stamp out Lysdexia!

[Posteritatis]

11. Er, what? Normandy came two years *after* Dieppe.

And compared to some of the other beaches, the Canadians on Juno got off comparatively lightly, especially compared to what the Americans caught on Omaha. In those battles, 340 killed out of a full division doing an opposed landing wasn't considered enormous casualties.

Dieppe bugs me to a point, but I'm not going to affect outrage at how the army was used for most of the rest of the war in Europe.

[Kutjara]

13. Sorry, mixed up Dieppe and Juno in my previous post.

Dieppe was a bloodbath by any measure, but Juno wasn't exactly a picnic. It was the most heavily defended beach after Omaha, and the initial Canadian attack suffered 50% casualties.

[Gabi Hayes]

8. very highly recommended memoir by Fussell

http://www.salon.com/sneaks/sneakpeeks960927.html

Fussell's.....memoir, "Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic," is an account of how his experience in World War II, in which he was gravely wounded by an exploding German shell, transformed him from "a fat boy into a thing that would be called, in later wars, a lean, mean killing machine." It is also the story of how Fussell, raised in an upper-middle-class family in Pasadena, California, became so sick of the army's "institutional fraud, boredom and futility" that he vowed never to have to take anyone's orders again. He sought instead a life among books. "In literature I fled the farthest possible distance from the simplifications and conformity demanded by the military," he writes. "I am entirely serious when I assert that if I have ever developed into a passable literary scholar, editor, and critic, the credit belongs to the United States Army."