Still Fighting Granddad’s War…
Posted over at SLOG…
From the NYT:
Military engineers defused a giant bomb from World War II that was discovered in East London during construction for the 2012 Summer Olympics, a military spokesman said. The 2,200-pound bomb… started to tick at one point while being defused by a team of Royal Engineers from the British Army. Thousands of bombs fell on East London during World War II.
It strikes me as odd that this necessarily short “World Briefing” item avoids mentioning just who it was that dropped all those bombs on East London during WWII. Those bombs decide on their own to fall all over East London.
Er…what’s your point Dan? You think the American readers of the New York Times might not know where that bomb came from without being told? Hmmm… World War II bomb… East London… Now where the hell could that thing have come from… think… think… think…
Well it probably wasn’t the Japanese. Maybe the Times should have told its readers what that ticking sound signified too because goodness they might think the British had dug up a 2,200 pound Soviet era kitchen timer some poor East German refugee family brought back with them during the cold war, and promptly threw in a ditch when they saw how much better the kitchen timers in the west are. You never know. Maybe there’s a Trabant buried somewhere nearby…
June 10th, 2008 at 1:20 am
…or it may have something to do with the fact that most Brits think "Nazi" not "German" when they think of WWII…
June 10th, 2008 at 11:46 am
Yeah… You know…the difference in how Europe and The U.S. remembers WWII is something most of us over here don’t really appreciate. For us it was all "over there" and for you folks it was your own cities and homes getting it, and it was coming from right over the border (or in the case of Britain just over the channel…). The only war we’ve really had over here that did massive amounts of damage from an enemy who was our neighbor was our civil war. And even then it was mostly the south that got its cities pummeled. The nations of Europe, with all their different languages and cultures, were all neighbors before the great wars. Europe is a big place, but it’s only half the size of the continental U.S. There would have been family ties, business ties, romances, friendships. Those would have been ripped apart. Europe had to have been devastated both physically and emotionally by those wars. And then everyone would have had to go on living next door to each other afterwards. That’s something we just don’t really seem to get the magnitude of over here.
And you know…I think Germany gets it now, why it is dangerous to let a bunch of ignorant hate filled thugs rise to power and rip up their constitution a lot better then we do here in the U.S. That’s a thought that keeps me awake nights lately, anyway.
June 10th, 2008 at 4:23 pm
"The only war we’ve really had over here that did massive amounts of damage from an enemy who was our neighbor was our civil war."
In 1812 the Royal Navy burnt much of Washington to the ground, including the President’s palace; the only exceptions made were to private residential buildings. The fire scorched the stones of the palace so badly that it had to be repainted when rebuilt, and white was the colour chosen.
Interestingly, 10 Downing Street is also painted – black! It was built with pale yellow Cambridge brick, however by the time the first photographs were taken of the building it had been turned black from pollution. When the structure was replaced in the 1950s (the façade is all that remains of the original building) the cleaned yellow bricks were repainted black to preserve its "traditional" look.
"The nations of Europe, with all their different languages and cultures, were all neighbors before the great wars."
From a European perspective, the world wars were the culmination of a series of wars stretching back to the fall of the Roman empire, both influenced by and influencing social change – the 30 years’ war, 100 years’ war, wars of the Roses, English civil war, Anglo-Dutch wars, Crimean war, Great Northern war Russian, French etc. revolutions, Napoleonic wars, the Reconquista, French Wars of Religion, Italian, Dutch and Irish wars of Independence…
In fact Europeans are so keen on war that our history includes – simultaneously in a single conflict – both the second-longest and least-bloody war – the Scilly-Dutch (I kid you not) War, also known as the 335 Years’ War, had no casualties, saw not a single shot fired and lasted from 1661 until 1986.
Europe’s nations may have all been "neighbours" but that didn’t stop us spending most of the last two millennia trying to blast one-another out of existence.