Factual response to a troll-y question on Quora. Why do I spend my time like this? Sad, really. I ought to stop.
A: You ought to read some actual history. Read real history books. More than one. The narration on “The History Channel” on tv and similar junk is, well, junk. Go to a library. Get a couple of 1 volume books about WWII. Start by leafing through the beginning. If it includes Europe, it should start in 1938 or earlier. It really ought to include the Spanish Civil War, and even the Nazi rise to power from 1933 onward. Try “WWII” on Wikipedia or the Britannica Encyclopedia site.
The USSR, which Stalin considered an extension of Russia, “entered” WWII when the Red army and the German Army invaded Poland from opposite directions, in September, 1939. Germany invaded Poland on 1 September, 1939. The USSR followed on 17 September. This was a week after, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, 23, August, 1939. which secretly divided all of Poland between the USSR and Nazi Germany.
US sympathies were not with the Russians or USSR in 1939, 1940 or early 1941. Even ithough the USSR had supported the more attractive of the two sides in the Spanish CIvil War. See Hemingway’s “For Whom The Bell Tolls”. As long as Russia / USSR was an ally of the Nazi’s, there was little sympathy for their “struggles”.
The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact pledged non-agression between Nazi Germany and the USSR for 10 years. In fact, the Germans invaded the USSR, including those parts of Poland they had taken, 22 June 1941. Given the existance of a non-agression pact between Germany and Poland, as of 1934, Stalin’s trust in Germany in 1939 is surprising.
Japan attacked the USA on 7 Decembner, 1941, so there were only 6 months when US support of USSR would even have been considered, before events took over.
WWII, in Europe, is usually dated from the German invasion of Poland, 1 September, 1939. or sometimes by the French and British declaring war against Germany because of that invasion, on 3 September, 1939.
Stalin, aka the USSR, aka Russia, wasn’t content with seizing half of Poland. 0n 30 November 1939, the Red Army attacked Finland. The USSR hoped to establish a puppet Communist state but could not prevail, militarily. The Russians and Finns signed the Moscow Peace Treaty, March 1940, in which Finland ceded 9% of its territory to the Soviet Union.
All of this is after the Spanish CIvil War, and Fascist Italy’s wars in North Africa, followed by the Nazi seizure of the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia, and merger with Austria.
In the Asia / Pacific area, WWII starts with Japanese aggression in Manchuria, 1931, and China, 1937.
During the early to mid 1930s, the USA was understandably wary of wars outside of the Americas and the parts of the Spanish Empire it had seized in 1905. US politicians advocated strict neutrality and disarmament. Even though the Roosevelt administration was sympathetic to the British and French, and brought the USA on line as an Arsenal of Democracy, there was great public opposition to declaring war, which meant a formal bill passed by Congress.
Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December, 1941, changed all that, and President Roosevelt asked for and received a declaration of war against Japan on 8 December. Hitler validated Germany’s treaty agreements with Japan and declared war against the USA and there we were. No more would US citizens have to cross the border into Canada to join the UK’s Royal Navy, Air Force or Army,. Or join the murky semi-covert US support of Chinese forces against the Japanese (Flying Tigers and others). Or travel on their own money to Spain to fight the Fascists on the losing side of the Civil War there.
Interested in Russia? USSR? Read “Russia At War” by Alexander Werth. He was a BBC reporter and in the USSR from 1941 to 1945. Saw it with his own eyes. Lots of 1st person stories from the Red Army, some civilians, lots of well judged history.
Besides that wide-angle view of 1941–1945, focus on the Battle of Stalingrad, summer of 1942 to winter 1943, is worth your attention. “Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege, 1942-1943” by Antony Beevor. Most of us cannot imagine that battle, which the Russian / USSR utterly and completely won. It’s one of three points that Winston Churchill identified as “The Hinge Of Fate”.
Another battle in the USSR worth your time is Kursk. After Stalingrad, the Germans knew they could not win. After Kursk, they were clearly losing.
Another good book for the USSR / Russian struggle in WWII, is “The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation” by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Read part 1 for a start. I’ve read all 3, but but as they came out, not 1–2–3. Read something nicer between. Solzhenitsyn was an artillery officer in the Red Army, sent to the Gulag after WWII, for the crime of being captured by retreating Germans and then released, instead being murdered. Stalin took of dim view of survivors who were in contact outside the NKVD-policed world. The 3 volume, non-fiction series, written between 1958 and 1968. But only published, in the West, after Solzhenitsyn left the Soviet Union.
If you like fiction, you can try “The Winds of War” and “War and Rememberance” by Herman Wouk. His first book was “The Caine Mutiny” which won the Pulitzer Prize and was made into an excellent movie back in the day. USA-centric, but he gets his protagonists all the way around the world.
If you prefer the quick, non-fiction version, try “Why the Allies Won” by Richard Overy. He’s including the USSR in “Allies” because, post 1941, they were. He starts in the late 1930s and follows up to 1945. With a couple of pagers of simple statistics at the end. Very good book.
Nobody experienced the whole of WWII, so you’ll find you need multiple first person accounts. Books written by historians are often useful because they collect impressions and try to be truthful. But personal stories are more gripping. One of the best is “Incredible Victory” by Walter Lord, about the battle of Midway. The Japanese were winning, overall, in the Pacific/Asia theatre, until they weren’t.
Everything changes in one day, but a lot builds up to that day, from the US Navy reading the Japanese Imperial Navy’s ciphers and codes to a vast and complex Japanese plan that depended on the US responding just as the Japanese expected, A still usable transpacific telegraph line that allowed the Navy in Hawaii to exchange messages with Midway that the Japanese could never hear. A first attack by 108 Japanese A6M Zero, fighters B5N Type 97 level bombers and D3A type 99 dive bombers that damaged but did not destroy Midway’s defences, because MIdway knew they were coming. Over 300 Marine, Navy and Army Air Force pilots attacked the Japanese carrier force and separate invasion force with F4F Wildcat and F2B Buffalo fighters, SBD Dauntless and SB2U VIndicator dive bombers, TBD Devastator, TBF Avenger, PBY Catalina and B-26 Marauder torpedo bombers and B-17 Flying Fortress high altitude level bombers, in a long, futile series of defeats until suddenly, yet another set of US fliers appeared when least expected and disabled 3 of the 4 Japanese aircraft carriers in 10 minutes. And that’s just until 10:30am. Both one American and one Japanese submarine fired torpedoes at aircraft carriers. And the main battleship forces of the Japanese navy never arrived, having decisively lost the surprise they were counting on.
Lord interviewed over 250 US combatants and over 100 Japanese and tells the story in their words. History writing at its finest.
Another good book is “Duel of Eagles” by Peter Townsend– the RAF fighter pilot, who tells the history of the RAF and Luftwaffe from WWI to the failure of the German forces in the Battle of Britain. History rolls over his real life and he mixes his personal experience from pre-war service in Asia to being one of “The Few”, flying Hurricane fighters during the Battle. He also interviewed German survivors and goes in depth on their lives in parallel to his own, including one German flier he shot down but did not kill, who spent the rest of the war as a British prisoner. The book describes the structures of the two air forces, their military industrial complexes and their successes and failures. It ends at the Battle of Britain.
After recovering from being shot down himself, he served the Royals at Buckingham Palace, in the later war years. He was the divorced man who wasn’t allowed to marry Princess Margaret, if you watched “The Crown”.
“Iron Coffins” by Herbert Werner a survivor and former captain, explains how the German U-Boats fought and lost their attempt to strangle the UK and also the USSR, and how they were defeated.
“Seizing the Enigma” by David Kahn explains the origin and development of the mechanical cipher system the Germans adopted for all military communication. They thought it was unbreakable. It was not. In fact, Polish intelligence figured out how to break it before September, 1939. They took what they knew to France, where it didn’t prove to be a magic bullet, and then the UK where they were listened to carefully and interned. Plenty of Poles flew with the RAF, severed in the Royal Navy and Royal Army, as well as the later Free Polish forces. But the Brits took what they were given and ran with it, adding Alan Turing’s brute-force cipher breaking to the fight. In the end, the British managed to read the German Air Force messages quickly, the German Navy’s with great effort and the German Army’s somewhere in the middle.
Notable for being used as source material for the recent steaming series “The Pacific“, “With The Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa” by Eugene Sledge is an unflinching, deeply thought and rightly disturbing, memoir of a Marine infantryman fighting against the Japanese Empire. Sledge kept notes on tiny slips of paper that he carried in his Bible, and wrote the book after the war, to explain to his family what happened and why he didn’t talk much about it.
Notable as the basis of the Tom Hanks movie “Greyhound”, “The Good Shepherd” by C. S. Forester is fiction, but built on fact, as Forester did with his Napoleonic war books about the fictional Horatio Hornblower. Forester use the log books and after battle reports written by participants in real naval battles as the factual skeletons of his stories, and told the stories with fictional characters modeled on combinations of real people and his own inventions.
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