Operation Gomorrah, launched on July 24, 1943 and continued for more than a week by the USAAF Eighth Air Force by day, and RAF Bomber Command by night. The heaviest air assault to date, with 3,000 sorties flown, 9,000 tons of bombs dropped, 250,000 homes destroyed, and 40,000 people killed.
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A couple of excellent episodes from We Have Ways discussing the July Plot with Roger Moorhouse. Really good stuff with smart people discussing morally ambivalent actors and motives.
As discussed in the podcast, Stauffenberg understandably gets most of the attention, but Henning von Tresckow understood what was at stake for some time:
Hitler is the archenemy not only of Germany but of the world. When, in few hours’ time, I go before God to account for what I have done and left undone, I know I will be able to justify what I did in the struggle against Hitler. God promised Abraham that He would not destroy Sodom if just ten righteous men could be found in the city, and so I hope that for our sake God will not destroy Germany. No one among us can complain about his death, for whoever joined our ranks put on the shirt of Nessus. A man’s moral worth is established only at the point where he is ready to give up his life in defense of his convictions.
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A fantastic discussion with Richard Frank about why the war with Japan ended when it did, the way it did.
In a topic fraught with a lot of received wisdom in search of support, Frank tends to present the end of the war with Japan in the broader context of the war as a whole, the alternatives to using atomic bombs, Japanese leadership’s thinking in the summer of 1945, and US political reality.
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Altdertag: August 13th, 1940, the first day of the Germans’ Unternehmen Adlerangriff air offensive.
This put the Dowding System to the test, which it passed brilliantly (despite twits like Leigh-Mallory trying to cock it all up). Dowding was a towering, forward-thinking figure whose efforts made as much difference to the direction of the war as just about anyone, and should be more well known.
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I get the Russian desire to emphasize the re-do from 1905, but man that is some less than glorious “victory over Japan.”
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As it looks like He won’t be able to celebrate victory in Ukraine anytime soon, the only way to do it is to make do with what’s at hand.
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I think you nailed it.
Let’s all remember the glory of the Great Patriotic War while the Somme of the 21st century rages on! And if our current actions remind you more of September 1939 and Katyn Forest than summer 1944 and Bagration, well that’s nothing a trip to the front for your youngest son won’t cure.
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Putin: Oh great ghost of Joseph Stalin! The enemy has taken Kursk! What should I do?
Stalin: Do what I did in 1943. First you need the finest Ukrainian troops and tons of supplies and equipment from the Americans.
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Tucker Carlson’s interview with “historian” Darryl Cooper combined rank ignorance with just about every trope of WWII revisionism and fascist apologia.
It’s easy to roll your eyes at WWII history as a middle-age dad cliché, but revisionism like this shows why its so important to actually understand the seminal event of the last century beyond the bumper-sticker tropes.
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