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.

greenlloon
My father would have begged to differ that the war ended in May.
As a Japanese POW captured in 1941 at the fall of Singapore, he was not liberated until September 1945

I'm also curious who cracked Enigma if not Britain? The Polish resistance supplied the machine in the first place but Britain did crack the code.

It really makes me sad that in order to show you are not a racist you have to disparage everything about Britain's history.

People's school experience in the 70-80s will vary as it was before the national curriculum was introduced.

Grumpy have you applied for his service record?

@Grumpyoldpersonwithcats, I share your irritation with people who think the war ended in May 45. At that point assorted relatives of mine still had almost 4 months to go as POWs, internees or civilians under Japanese rule.

Have you ever got hold of your father's LibQ? Those can be interesting.

@thighofrelief101, one of my DC once asked me why Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. I think the answer took about 20 minutes and went back to about 1930. And extended forward to the present day.

Francis I didn't know the Poles were forbidden to march. Did the Czechs and Norwegians?

I had the same experience as those born in the 70s who had no education about either war. We learned absolutely nothing about them.

The only reference I remember to the Holocaust was a poem in English class, and the Latin teacher irritably correcting a girl for saying holocaust instead of hypocaust.

When Schindler’s List came out in 1993 it was considered a very daring subject matter and almost taboo. A few years later I passed through a town in Poland on a business trip called Oświęcim and I was surprised to realise where I was. My own ignorance shocked me and I couldn’t understand why I’d never been taught about it.

I bought some books and started reading. How can we say ‘never again’ if we don’t know what it is?

Otoh why should the average person who hasn't studied history have more than basic facts and dates? I have subjects I'm very bad at.

Ive noticed the airbrushing out of Russia as well. Which is ludicrous really, because we couldn't have won the bloody war without them! They were as much a part of the allies as the Commonwealth and the USA.

On another site, an American poster, trying to counter the American idea that they almost singlehandedly won the war in Europe, posted his own estimate that 80% of German military casualties were inflicted by the Russians, and 5% by Americans.

The more usual statistic is how many people each ally lost, the Russians having lost something like 50 times as many as the Americans, but he was dealing with the counter-agument to that statistic, that it should be the casualties you inflict rather than those you suffer that should be looked at.

caution what history was taught before you chose options at the end of 3rd year?

Why did Japan get involved? I know they were part of the Axis but what was in it for them?

China, Korea, Singapore, Malaysia - in short an empire. Japan had been at war for years and occupied areas of China.

The US had been supplying them with oil but then wanted them to get out of China.

petty weren't 9 out of 10 American pilots taking off from Britain ultimately lost?

thigh I remember a lot about the Tudors at junior school, then in senior school dark ages, medieval times and Tudors again. Then for GCSE history of medicine, England in the 1830s, and British architecture.

Russia / Stalin must have felt like a very uneasy bedfellow for the politicians.

caution interesting. I did ww1-2 and right up to the Vietnam War in secondary school then at A Level 1500 - WW1 Britain and Europe. Junior school was the various invaders and the Tudors/Stuarts/War of the Roses.

caution I think before options at secondary school I did Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions.

Looking back I had some really excellent history teachers and very dense curriculums. A Level in particular was exhausting.

To those who have asked - no I haven't followed up on DF's service record.
The small number of stories my father told about being a prisoner are enough.
He was at one point sentenced to death in the camp for refusing to bring an British officer a drink of water (after DF had just returned from his work duty). The officer then complained to the Japanese. My father was only saved as a result of a Belgian Officer stepping in and threatening to kill the British Officer if he didn't retract the complaint.
Interestingly my father never had much of an issue with the Japanese guards who he viewed as just being soldiers doing their jobs. He had a much bigger problem with the Sikh guards who, apart from being much more brutal than the Japanese, he regarded as traitors.

Perhaps it's time to cull your Facebook friends list.
I never see any of the shit in there that some people on here complain about. But then I'm quite selective about who I'm friends with.

I have a friend, Anatole, from Dresden. He's about my age, 34ish. I asked him how what they are taught about WWII at school. He said they made an excursion to one of the death camps, aged 10 or 11. And it was impressed on them how much they were to blame.

Now I know how evil Hitler's régime was

But it doesn't strike me as right either, forcing that knowledge on such young ones, making them feel culpable for acts committed decades before their birth

With regards to the Poles in 1946 (as FrancisCrawford has already commented upon) they were banned from the victory parade after Stalin himself put pressure on the Labour Government at the time.

There was a big controversy at the time, but Britain would have been in a diplomatic crisis if they had recognised the Polish Government in exile, as opposed to the "official" Soviet backed regime actually in Poland. A big public fuss ensued, and a representative group of Polish Pilots were invited to attend, but they declined. The official invite was sent to the Soviet backed government, but that was also diplomatically declined.

I'm also curious who cracked Enigma if not Britain? The Polish resistance supplied the machine in the first place but Britain did crack the code.

The Poles cracked it first, with the help of the French. The Enigma machine was first used by the Germans in 1932. The poles had cracked it by 1934.

Unfortunately, the Germans updated the method of encrypting the Enigma machines in 1938, and after this the Poles could no longer crack the code.

No matter what "Hollywood" tells us, the British struggled at first with the Enigma machine. Military tactics were first used, and a secret operation was launched to capture the Enigma code machines and the code books. Several of these machines (and more importantly the code books) were captured from German lightships stationed off the coast in places such as Heligoland, and also German merchant vessels. A special troop of commando's were set up for this task, and behaved a bit like Pirates, boarding lone ships very quickly and capturing the machines before they could get thrown overboard or otherwise destroyed. All the time they had to ensure that the Germans didn't guess what they were doing, so had to sort of disguise these operations, so the Germans didn't notice a pattern. The two famous cases (not related to the "pirate" raids), were the capture of machines from 2 U-Boats (U559 and U110).

Eventually the maths did take over, but that wasn't really until about 1943.