70 years ago, WWII started

@Ceili,

Quote:

She surprised a group training in the fields behind her home.

That's amazing.

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@Setanta,

I thought "Ah, les cons" meant something else.

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@Ceili,

I take it your mother was from the 6 counties (Northern Ireland) then (the 26 counties southern government of the Irish Free State adopted a neutral stance in WWII).

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@lmur,

My mother was an officer in the U.S. Army (she was a registered nurse), and her maiden name was Antrim, so, with typical bureaucratic idiocy, orders were cut to send her to County Antrim, for no discernible reason other than the name.

But then her hospital got shipped out to North Africa, so she never got to see the homeland of her ancestors.

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Yes, Down.
I was recently there and saw the remnants of a 5 inch airstrip the US soldiers built. It's now a ditch/fence.

http://picasaweb.google.com/ceilityme/IrishFamily#5361182149149820818

(I think the picture works if you click on it, in another tab)
Although Ireland was neutral... Many Irish soldiers fought in the war.
Just after the war, Dad and his family emigrated to the south, Wicklow then to on Canada 10yrs later. My parents have very different stories about the Black'n'Tans.

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@Setanta,

Lucky she wasn't the offspring of Irving Berlin! (sorry Walter).

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@Ceili,

Ceili wrote:

Walter... I think it's high time for people like you to stop feeling guilty for the crimes done by your country in days gone by. Nobody asks the Italians or Spanish to apologize or feel guilty for the atrocities done under their dictators.
The Holocaust was a terrible, terrible part of history. The people that caused this blight are mostly long gone. Sadly, there are nations where these horrors keep happening and we still don't do much to prevent or save the victims. Where is the collective guilt for ignoring the Sudan or Darfur, or the victims in Bosnia....

My father was born two years after the war started. His earliest memories are of the Canadian pilots camped on his English farm and watching them taxi out on the airstrip just behind his house. He remembers how many didn't return each day...
It was the influence from these boys that enticed my dad to emigrate to Canada.
My Mom remembers when the Yanks finally showed up... to train in Ireland. She surprised a group training in the fields behind her home. The black men with guns gave her the first piece of chocolate she'd ever eaten.

Well, it's not really guilt, it least not how it understood generally.

I really can't understand how such could happen - but do understand how people were led to the war.

Currently, I'm starting to look through various (family) sources from that period.
Which really is very hard, from whatever side you might look at it.

Not that they did something I (or they) should feel guilty about.
But ... well, never mind, I don't know how I would have acted in those days.

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Spendi wrote:

I thought "Ah, les cons" meant something else.

What would that be?

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Ah Walter, I don't think your alone there either. I think we all ask our selves that question. Some of us would have been Champs, other chumps and still other would get shot as they walked out their front door. Who knows, but I'd like to think, eventually we will outgrow our blood lust and live in Peace.
One can hope...yes.

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@Ceili,

Ceili wrote:

Ah Walter, I don't think your alone there either.

I know. But some of the 'stories' are so incredible ...

Well, I do hope that we all will live in peace.

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Truth is stranger than fiction.
My grandfather's mother was Austrian. He became a conscientious objector during WWI, his brother was shot down and died of serious burns 5 days later. During WWII he had too many kids and was too old to join, so instead he handcuffed himself to trees to stop the war movement from destroying the forests. I believe, he was the first environmentalist to do this, back in the day... people thought he was nuts.
And he was... during the war, he would dress my dad up like a nazi and send him out to the fields to salute the canucks. As a kid I would hear him play his nazi marching albums and talk about Hitler like an uncle.
People never fail to amaze me.

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@Ceili,

We used to have a sing at the trades union hall in Sligo (a ceili, in fact), and there was more than one old timer there who would propose a toast to Hitler at some point in the evening. For some of them, his having been the enemy of England was enough for them.

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@Setanta,

Setanta wrote:

Where the hell do you clowns come up with the notion that i am only interested in the American participation in this war. I was referring to the beginnings of the war in Africa and Asia. I didn't mention the United States at all. I didn't call it a "Euro-war," i was specifically pointing out that it began elsewhere than Europe.

But it's nice to think you value so little the efforts and sacrifices the United States did make once they were drawn into the war.

Again, you show what an ass you are by making such assumptions and innuendos as this. I said no such thing about any efforts or sacrfices.

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@Intrepid,

When it comes to being an ass, no one can dispute the palm with you. Your comment to the effect that the United States did not get involved until much later implies that they were at fault because of that. Roosevelt would have loved to haven gotten involved earlier, but that was not the will of the American people. Then there was your comment to the Wabbit about fools rush in . . . a great many Canadian fools have rushed into Afghanistan, and have gotten killed for their trouble.

When it comes to making an ass of yourself with what you write, i've got nothing on you.

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@dlowan,

dlowan wrote:

Setanta wrote:

That's a rather Euro-centric view, Walter. I'm sure the Ethiopians and the Chinese might have something to say about that.

It also started for Australia, Canada, and I would guess a number of other Commonwealth countries on that day.

Given that the Chinese had already been viciously and horrendously attacked by an Axis power, (though I am not sure that Japan was formally an Axis power at that point) and a number of countries nowhere near Europe decided that Hitler was worth fighting right there and then, I think your comment re Eurocentrism is quite misplaced. ...

The US was very late to the struggle...but many countries NOT anywhere near Europe were not. ...

I find myself in tears at the anniversary, as I think of the horror and slaughter experienced by so many millions upon millions of people.

I so do not generally do national pride and such crap...and I am aware of the awfulness of theWW I treaty of Versailles and all the other **** that led to this.....and all the other awfulnesses everywhere......

But I find your nit-picking quite untoward and distressingly inaccurate and USA-centric.

I think this is where it started. dlowan is caught somewhere between pride in Australia's early involvement in the conflict (at the behest of Empire) with an associated rebuke to America for delaying; and sad regret for the great suffering the war inflicted on all participants, willing or unwilling.

The fact is that America's delayed entry was a direct result of similar attitudes towards the damage and suffering created during WWI and the nearly complete pointlessness of that struggle. There were other complicating factors as well: a very large population of German descent and a large population of Irish descent which generally had little love for the British Empire. My father, himself a childhood immigrant from Ennis in Ireland, was in the U.S. Congress during the late 1930s and voted against the "Lend/Lease " program for armaments for the UK.

All wars are horrible. Some are fought for bad or unsavory reasons - or sometimes for no apparent reason at all. Others are fought for what at least appear to be very good or defensible reasons; some that stand the test of history, some that don't. Had the European powers that drove and enforced (initially) the Treaty of Versailles either been wiser (and less vindictive) in crafting the initial treaty, or bolder and more active in enforcing its terms when Hitler first challenged it, the European aspect of the War might not have happened.

Japan's interest in a Pacific Empire was in part stoked by her role in WWI sweeping up the island remnants of the German Empire in the Pacific; her cooperation with the Royal navy in doiung so; and the temptation presented by a nearly prostrate China after a century of exploitation and abuse by the European powers.

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Canadian didn't rush into to Afghanistan, we were asked to go in response to a horrific crime perpetrated by the Taliban on the USA. We went to fight the Taliban in the most vicious place on earth while the Americans rushed in to Iraq. A country that had NO part in 911, they toppled a dictator and past ally that had NO WMD and generally destroyed the country in response for oil. Doing so, you took a secular country with no interest in Al Quaida and opened the border giving them free reign. Thousands of American soldiers have been killed or wounded. The Iraqi population has been decimated...
Fools rush in... nice.

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@georgeob1,

thinking that Henry Ford, a respected spokesman for right-wing extremism and religious prejudice, was once asked about having a close friend who was a jewish judge (detroit) Harry Keidan, Henry answered 'He's only half jewish".

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@dyslexia,

It is clear that old Henry wasn't entirely categorical in his judgements. He could tell the difference between one half and all !

There was a powerful anti WWII strain in Detroit in those days. The "America First" movement was strong there, and my distant impression, from hearing stories about it and subsequent reading, is that it was largely motivated by impressions of the folly of WWI; the pointlessness of the European rivalries that led to it; the uselessness of our intervention in 1917; and distaste for the economic & political movements that emerged from the war and the revolutions it produced.

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@georgeob1,

yeah, during WWI and the lead-up to WWII Henry opined that only bankers and other potential profiteers wanted either war, but then Henry most likely made billions manufacturing weaponry for the war. Henry was, above all, an opportunist more than an ideologue which puts him squarely in both the republican and democrat camps. His investment in Fordlandia remains a puzzlement however.

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@Ceili,

Ceili wrote:

Canadian didn't rush into to Afghanistan, we were asked to go in response to a horrific crime perpetrated by the Taliban on the USA. We went to fight the Taliban in the most vicious place on earth while the Americans rushed in to Iraq. A country that had NO part in 911, they toppled a dictator and past ally that had NO WMD and generally destroyed the country in response for oil. Doing so, you took a secular country with no interest in Al Quaida and opened the border giving them free reign. Thousands of American soldiers have been killed or wounded. The Iraqi population has been decimated...
Fools rush in... nice.

Unfortunately, some do want want to accept this, but what you say is exactly right on. And, it comes as no surprise that Setanta made the comment regarding Canada and Afghanistan in the first place. I guess Canada is good enough to live in but not good enough to respect.

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70 years ago, WWII started

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