What They Didn't Teach You About World War II

Informationen zum Autor Mike Wright Klappentext Packed with personal anecdotes and details you won't find anywhere else! this is the secret history of World War II. "A fast-moving overview stuffed with interesting factoids and historical tidbits . . . Casual readers will find themselves carried along! and hardened military buffs will learn much that is new."-Library Journal "It's almost guaranteed to make you so interested in the subject you'll want to learn . . . By including hundreds of interesting anecdotes and facts! [Mike] Wright not only piques our interest repeatedly! he also gives areal feel for the war era."-Manchester Journal Inquirer "An excellent overview . . . [with] interesting chapters on spies! POWs! censorships! and the building of the atomic bomb . . . Wright's style is accessible."-The Post and Courier INTRODUCTION   A World Gone Mad: But What if Tomorrow Never Comes?   Shortly before the middle of the twentieth century, the world lost its mind. Beginning in 1931, the people of one Asian nation invaded another Asian nation; it remained a local war until the Japanese claimed that their invasion of China was part of a new order (the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere) to rid East Asia of the detested white race.   Beginning in 1939, the people of one European nation invaded another European nation; it remained a local war until the Germans claimed that their invasion of Poland was partly a need for living space (Lebensraum) and partly to rid Western Europe of those they detested as a race of inferior beings.   From September 18, 1931, (in Asia) and September 1, 1939, (in Europe) until May 7, 1945, (in Europe) and September 2, 1945, (in Asia), the world turned to war. We killed more people and did more physical and psychological damage than ever before in history. If we are lucky and we work at it, we will never break our own record for death and ruin.   For most of history, when people fought other people it was their world war, because their worlds did not yet go beyond boundaries written by waterways or mountains or deserts. When their worlds expanded, so did their wars, and they were forced to find a new way to name those wars.   Gone were the days of fancy or fanciful names: the War of Jenkins’ Ear (in 1739, Spanish revenue agents cut off the ear of an English seaman named Robert Jenkins; a member of Parliament displayed Jenkins’s pickled ear in England’s House of Commons), The War of Austrian Succession (which grew, so to speak, out of the War of Jenkins’ Ear), and The Hundred Years’ War (a good name, although it lasted more than a hundred years, from 1337 to 1453). Even the American Revolution and the Civil War had definitive names.   The start of the twentieth century saw the Great War, which only later we called the World War. The next time we got into trouble, all we did was give the war a number: World War II. It was the largest war the world has ever known. By giving it a number, not a name, we admitted that we were doing it all over again.   During World War I, Britain’s prime minister, David Lloyd George, bitterly commented, “This war, like the next war, is the war to end all wars.” Each time we hope it is “the war to end all wars.” So far, we’ve been wrong.   Americans were called out of factories, out of offices, and out of schools; called to pick up rifles, get behind cannons, get into tanks or airplanes; called to ride bucking destroyers in the dead of a North Atlantic winter and slip their carriers over a sun-flattened ocean somewhere in the South Pacific. They fought under seas and along stormed shores. Others kept factories rolling, continued growing corn and raising cattle, and saw to the millions of items needed to stay alive.   Those who fought often fought alongside their British and Canadian and Australian cousins who had been doing the same things...

Product details

• Authors: Mike Wright
• Publisher: Presidio Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 24.10.2000
• EAN: 9780891417231
• ISBN: 978-0-89141-723-1
• No. of pages: 370
• Dimensions: 140 mm x 216 mm x 19 mm
• Series: What They Didnt Teach You; What They Didnt Teach You
• Subject: Non-fiction book > History > Miscellaneous