To think there are a lot of people out there who have no grasp of WW2 history

[Stripyseagulls]

My grandfather fought in WW2 and I have visited the Normandy sites & it’s extraordinary how moving they are.

Today on Facebook/Twitter I have seen loads of really disturbing posts saying stuff like ‘our war hero’s didn’t fight world war 2 to live in a country full of muslim/ foreigners’ etc. Really really disturbing and horrible.

Aibu to think people don’t understand history and that the war was fought to defeat facism and these kinds of beliefs. Hitler didn’t start off gassing people- it was a long propaganda campaign against religious and ethnic groups that ended up with the holocaust.

Aibu to be disturbed by the lack of understanding of why the war was fought and what it was fought against. I find some of the attitudes in the UK today so troubling.

Nobody should forget that ww2 is not a black and white subject. We (the allies) had to be every bit as ruthless as our enemy. In some ways we were more so. As we grow ever more distant from those days I despair at the depravity of modern society. It can take a disaster such as total warfare to show us how fortunate we really are.

Im about surprised about some of these responses. I went to a secondary school in the 80s to 90s and had ww2 taught ever year. I think the sadly was learning about the Poor boys who died that horrible winter for no reason in russia.

Ive noticed the airbrushing out of Russia as well

The commemorations this week were to mark the anniversay of D-Day in which Russia took no direct part, hence their absence.

Next yeat is the 75th anniversary of the end of the war, in August although they'll pretend it was in May, and there will be plenty about the Russians, not all good. There's an amazing bit of film about a Russian woman commanding a tank into Berlin, she looked formidable, hope they show it.

I recall sobbing in a Museum in Wanaka, NZ where there were lots of photos of their fliers who died fighting half way round the world. Lots of nations, 12 I believe, were directly involved in D-Day, I know it's considered clever among the intelligensia in this country to belittle anything British, but the majority were British, American and Canadian.

Revisionism is to be expected if you're only studying secondary sources. Your own OP is written through the prism of today's post colonial agenda. History can be a list of dates or studied from a much wider political and economic perspective which is constantly changing.

Battling racism had nothing to do with the agenda for the Allies going to war at that time. Battling facism yes, but more as a political force than as a symbol of racism.

I would say one of the most serious reasons for WW2 was the Treaty of Versailles and it's subsequent economic annihilation of Germany.

@thighofrelief101 you are completely right. I was taught about WW1 and WW2 in depth at school, but entirely through the eyes of AJP Taylor, who my teacher revered. We had no idea that Taylor's Origins of the Second World War was considered controversial and revisionist. It has a well argued thesis and we just lapped it up. I still have my very well thumbed and annotated copy.

I also get tired of the misunderstandings.

We didn’t go to war to fight fascism. We went to stop German expansionism. We would have done that if they had been communist or any other ist. Over the course of the war the German regime became part of the justification, and after the holocaust was discovered it became part of the case that the Germans were uniquely evil. But we didn’t fight fascist Spain ever, or indeed fascist Italy until the latter unwisely backed the Germans.

Germany invaded Russia. Prior to then, they had been allies and the Germans could not have rearmed without them. Stalin willingly sacrificed his own people in huge numbers then slaughtered countless more in “reprisals” etc and carried on doing so after the war.

Britain never stood alone - it was the British empire fighting from day one.

At the time though the consciousness was that the British Empire was Britain. The Gurkhas, Sikh regiments et al would have been under the ultimate command of a British Commander in Chief for their area ultimately and locally also by a British officer.

Immediate prior to WW2 you have the Molotov Ribbentrop Pact ie Germany and Russia. Again I would say the economic situation in both Germany and Russia paved the way for personality cults ie Hitler and Stalin.

Communism wasn't particularly seen as the big baddie and even Demark was still flirting between socialism and communalism right up until the Hungary Uprising in 1956.

"We didn’t go to war to fight fascism. We went to stop German expansionism."

But that's a but simplistic, too, isn't it? It wasn't expansionism that was the problem. It was expansionism by force. If the Countries that they were expanding into were willing, it wouldn't have been an issue. It was the fact that they were annexing Countries, taking them by force.

I think AJP was an excellent historian who was of his time. The minute a historian starts to interpret primary sources for his audience he alters it. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, look at the thousands of reimaginings of Shakespeare - why not?

Some of the posts on this thread are frustrating. We are in a post colonial era but that doesn't mean we have to deny facts in a mass apologia constantly.

Yes but that doesn’t change my point (made in a short post by mobile phone so necessarily shorthand). It was not to fight fascism, if Hitler had stayed at home we would not have attacked him - as indeed we didn’t from 1933 to 1939. It was him attacking other countries.

Communism was seen by ruling classes as a major threat - one of the reasons for appeasement since Hitler was seen as a bulwark against it (another key reason being no one wanted a reprisal of WW1).

I did ask a fairly young German historian about how the Germans commemorate their war dead. She told me that they do commemorate the soldiers but I can't remember any details.

As I get older I realise how the 21 years between the 2 world wars was nothing at all and how people who were adults in WW1 must have dreaded the arrival of WW2.
I grew up in Australia with a beloved grandfather who fought in WW1 and was able to share stories and show us his diary. My dear father spent a life with undiagnosed anxiety and unresolved grief from the loss of his beautiful big brother in WW2 at El Alamein. So both wars were very real in my family and also quite solidly dealt with in my education.
WW2 for Australia includes both the European theatre and the Pacific and Asian stages. There was a real threat of Japanese invasion of Australia. At one point a map was drawn up with a line across the middle of Australia which was the half that would have been ceded to the Japanese.

yes a scary amount of people think national SOCIALISTS were right wing despite government controlling business and hitler himself saying 'We are socialists. We are the enemies of today’s capitalist system of exploitation … and we are determined to destroy this system under all conditions'

and how everyone says we fought the nazis we didnt we fought the germans the Italians not members of a german political party we though Germans and Italians.
Nobody should forget that ww2 is not a black and white subject. We (the allies) had to be every bit as ruthless as our enemy. In some ways we were more so. no we wernt

OP’s determination to understand WW2 in PC terms has led them astray. It was not a war against fascism. In Europe it was a war against German imperialism. In the Pacific it was a war against Japanese imperialism. The fact these nations were genocidal fascists is by the way.
If it was a war against fascism we would have invaded Russia after defeating Germany. Stalin murdered more of his own people than Hitler and in practice there was no difference between Hitler’s fascism and Stalin’s communism, but we allowed the latter to continue because they had been our allies against German imperialism.

no difference between Hitler’s fascism hitler was a nazi it was the italians that were fascists

And because they had proved themselves to be a ferocious enemy.

Next yeat is the 75th anniversary of the end of the war, in August although they'll pretend it was in May for Britain it was may

If I remember correctly WW1 and WW2 were not covered at any point during GCSE or A Level for me. The only 20th century history covered was Stalin and Russia and Mao and China.

Stalingrad was the turning point of the war

Minimising the sacrifice made by the Russians in WWII is disgusting

Stalin murdered more of his own people than Hitler

Yeah? How many Georgians did he personally murder, then?

Well he had rather a special relationship with the Georgians.

Rivers oh sorry, goddit now.

I'm really surprised how many people are saying they didn't learn about the world wars in school in the 80s and 90s. I was in school in that period and felt (at the time at least) like we did little else. Admittedly more from the point of view of what it was like to live through it rather than the political /strategic detail of how the war proceeded.

But we studied the holocaust in primary school (Anne Frank for instance), the experiences of soldiers and letters from the front, the blitz, rationing and conscription. In secondary school we did much more on the political lead up to both wars and the ramifications of both for more events like, say, conflict in the middle East. Also I know it sounds silly but both world wars saturated TV and other culture during that period with comedies like Allo Allo and Dad's army and Goodnight sweetheart (among others). It felt weirdly close at hand for something that was fifty years gone, in a way it doesn't so much today I think.

I absolutely agree it was a very partial education though, as much too Europe focused. Almost no mention of the Pacific theatre or Africa/Asia. So weirdly even though my grandfather fought in Africa I never got much of a sense of that part of the conflict.

behind I agree, 70/80s for me and I got very in depth history lessons re WW1/2 at secondary school. Also there were still a fair amount of the population who had at least been alive during WW2 even if not combatants.

I think it's lazy that almost the entire focus of WW2 has been on Germany. We hear almost nothing about the Japanese or the Italians. The action in the Far East is very interesting and had huge repercussions but it's a footnote.