b. traven Over 100 years ago Carl von Clausewitz wrote his definitive analysis of war vs. peace. One of his key mandates to those under attack went something like this “When under a strong attack, a stronger counterattack is called for.” That is how we and our allies won WW II in less than four…
Dr. Stephen Ray A few things to remember for those fretting and not celebrating last Tuesday’s election results. There was not a single pollster who gave the Democrats any chance of retaking the Senate. The question was always about the margin by which they would lose. Anything within 4 percentage in states which Trump carried…
b. traven In June 1996 Kurt Vonnegut, the author of Slaughterhouse Five and other novels, wrote the following to a friend: Politics? I will vote Democratic because that is the most humane of the two parties, but not by much. The Clintons are shallow, opportunistic, Yuppies but they are the only game in town. Doesn’t…
b. traven I remember that day in August 1945. The war was over. We were all in “for the duration.” It was not a ‘perpetual war.’ With the war over, so was our commitment to war. It started as just another day at the bomber base I was attached to. No sailors around. They were…
W.J. Astore I recently read Blood Red Snow: The Memoirs of a German Soldier, by Günter Koschorrek, which focuses mainly on combat on the Eastern Front between the Germans and Soviets during World War II. As Dan White has noted, military history sometimes degenerates into war porn – exciting tales of derring-do that save the…
Daniel N. White Been buying lots of books recently from Half-Price Books’ dollar bin. A fair percentage of them are new books that were publisher’s returns at some time in their life, books that were marketed but never sold. Good percentage of these are books originally from the UK. Books judging from their blurbs that…
W.J. Astore My dad was in the Army in World War II. He was a dental technician in an armored headquarters group and never went overseas. But many of his friends did go overseas and saw combat. What follows are some excerpts from letters sent to my dad. Bill Zerby was attached to the 781…
W.J. Astore August 6, 1945. Hiroshima. A Japanese city roughly the size of Houston. Incinerated by the first atomic bomb. Three days later, Nagasaki. Japanese surrender followed. It seemed the bombs had been worth it, saving countless American (and Japanese) lives, seeing that a major invasion of the Japanese home islands was no longer needed.…
b. traven We talk a lot about war on this blog but we only talk about the deaths as numbers killed. We don’t talk about the intimate details of how a mother, a father, a spouse and children, and other relatives and loved ones can handle that horror. The government and the media like to…
W.J. Astore In 2006, I presented the following talk on Jewish resistance to the Holocaust. It’s a dangerous myth, and sadly a common one, that Jewish people did not resist the Nazis in meaningful or effective ways. From this myth stems a far more insidious one: that Jewish people were somehow complicit in the murderous…
The Contrary Perspective 