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Chuck_D posted:TIL the back stock of Purple Hearts produced for the expected casualties from the invasion of Japan have finally run out. I was under the impression they had stocks for decades to come, but I guess the government contracted to have a new production line spooled up. Speaking of, I just saw the grave of a twenty year old who was killed in Vietnam (God rest his soul) and it had PH next his name. I'd always seen it portrayed as something awarded to those wounded in action, but is it near automatically given in the event of them being KIA?
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May 16, 2024 11:56
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Asking again, does anyone know a good book about the Russian civil war?
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May 16, 2024 12:03
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Arbite posted:Speaking of, I just saw the grave of a twenty year old who was killed in Vietnam (God rest his soul) and it had PH next his name. I'd always seen it portrayed as something awarded to those wounded in action, but is it near automatically given in the event of them being KIA? After 1962 it was authorized to be awarded posthumously, and eligibility was backdated to 1917.
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May 16, 2024 12:38
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Chamale posted:The protagonist of Come And See was played by a 14-year-old, Aleksei Kravchenko. He suffered PTSD and his hair turned grey. Sounds like an ordinary Russian childhood to me.
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May 16, 2024 13:13
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skasion posted:Asking again, does anyone know a good book about the Russian civil war? It's hard to narrow it down to one. I'd go with Orlando Figes' A People's Tragedy as a starting point; it's a good summary - not without it's limitations, but it will get you going, and it's a good read. You can also go with Ten Days that Shook the World by Reed and And Quiet Flows the Don by Sholokov, but understand that these should be approached as primary sources. I'll also recommend James Palmer's Bloody Red Baron for a look at how weird things got in the east. It's about Ungern von Sternberg, a German Russian general and absolute madman who took over Mongolia and declared himself to be the reencarnated Genghis Kahn.
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May 16, 2024 15:21
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Cessna posted:I'll also recommend James Palmer's Bloody Red Baron for a look at how weird things got in the east. It's about Ungern von Sternberg, a German Russian general and absolute madman who took over Mongolia and declared himself to be the reencarnated Genghis Kahn. Dude features in one of Charlie Stross's Laundy novels,
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May 16, 2024 15:27
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It's kind of like asking "does anyone know a good book about World War II" - there are a lot of options and a lot of ground is covered and there are a lot of different kinds of sources. Helmet for my Pillow is a good WWII book. Wages of Destruction is also a good WWII book. What are you really looking for?
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May 16, 2024 15:27
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:Helmet for my Pillow is a good WWII book. With the Old Breed, please.
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May 16, 2024 15:34
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Cessna posted:It's hard to narrow it down to one. Thanks, I’ll start with Figes I guess. I’ve heard of von Sternberg, sounds like a character. KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:It's kind of like asking "does anyone know a good book about World War II" - there are a lot of options and a lot of ground is covered and there are a lot of different kinds of sources. Helmet for my Pillow is a good WWII book. Wages of Destruction is also a good WWII book. What are you really looking for? narrative and explanation of events for non Russian readership, here. I really don’t think it’s comparable to WW2 which is probably the single most written-up subject in history, this is a war that just isn’t taught in any detail below college level in US school system. Like my curriculum as a kid just went from “world war 1, Lenin on a train”to“and then the Soviet Union”. This seems like an innately improbable jump. I have vague ideas of like Kerensky setting up a fail government, Winter Palace getting sacked, Wrangel nobly yachting away to sulk, Don Bluth’s “Anastasia” happening etc. but I would like to know about the real events.
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May 16, 2024 15:55
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There's been more ink spilled about WWII, sure, but it's not a meaningfully different amount in that I doubt it's possible for you to read all of the extant works in English on the topic in your lifetime
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May 16, 2024 16:01
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Well yeah, that’s why I asked for recommendations.
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May 16, 2024 16:10
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skasion posted:this is a war that just isn’t taught in any detail below college level in US school system. My son does IB (International Baccalaureate); they spent half of his Junior year in HS History on the Russian Revolution as a focus. I understand that this is an exception, but it was an interesting choice.
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May 16, 2024 16:33
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Yeah idk, maybe it’s different now, I’m only speaking from my experience. Im sure it would have been a sensitive subject to sell a 20th century American school board on.
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May 16, 2024 16:36
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skasion posted:Well yeah, that’s why I asked for recommendations. right which is why people then asked to clarify what you were actually interested in
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May 16, 2024 16:39
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Not quite the Russian Civil War, and not really a history book per se, but I will always recommend Red Cavalry by Isaac Babel to people. It's a collection of short stories by Babel while he's embedded with the 1st Cavalry Army (Cossacks, essentially) during the Soviet-Polish war, which took place between 1918-1921 at the same time as the Russian Civil War.
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May 16, 2024 16:40
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:right which is why people then asked to clarify what you were actually interested in Which I did. Do you have anything to recommend?
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May 16, 2024 16:40
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skasion posted:Which I did. Do you have anything to recommend? Trotsky will take you from the lead up to the February Revolution through the October Revolution. It's not an unbiased academic work, of course, as he was an active participant at many points. But it's well-written and has a good feel for events, naturally.
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May 16, 2024 16:47
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skasion posted:Yeah idk, maybe it’s different now, I’m only speaking from my experience. Im sure it would have been a sensitive subject to sell a 20th century American school board on. I'm sure that one of the big problems of being a High School History teacher is the limitations imposed by time and attention spans. Yes, they covered the Russian Revolution, but what else did they completely ignore? ("Mexican War? What's that?")
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May 16, 2024 16:48
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:Trotsky will take you from the lead up to the February Revolution through the October Revolution. It's not an unbiased academic work, of course, as he was an active participant at many points. But it's well-written and has a good feel for events, naturally. Cool! I didn’t know he wrote a direct account of it, I will look it up. Cessna posted:I'm sure that one of the big problems of being a High School History teacher is the limitations imposed by time and attention spans. Yes, they covered the Russian Revolution, but what else did they completely ignore? ("Mexican War? What's that?") Yeah, I learned about that one from my dad’s copy of Grant’s memoirs.
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May 16, 2024 16:49
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Cessna posted:("Mexican War? What's that?") Which one, lol
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May 16, 2024 17:34
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Cessna posted:I'm sure that one of the big problems of being a High School History teacher is the limitations imposed by time and attention spans. Yes, they covered the Russian Revolution, but what else did they completely ignore? ("Mexican War? What's that?") poo poo, it's a major constraint of intro level university courses. Somewhere I've got intro World History syllabi from back when I was teaching a decade ago, which was a auditorium seating class full of people who were taking it for one of their only required history credits. I forget what the exact requirements were (I think it might have been one Am Hist, one non-AmHist) but either way there was no guarantee that the student was getting both halves of it. So World History 1 was pre-history through 1492, and World History 2 was 1492 - Present. You've got 18 weeks, two classes per week. 36 lectures. One is admin bullshit on the first day, two are for miderms/finals, and then you need at least two more in there to talk about papers etc. Work in one flex day to cover the inevitable unexpected contingency, if nothing happens turn it into a review for the final. So figure 30 lectures. Note that this is assuming you don't have any holidays (Memorial Day etc) eating up your classes so likely less. So you've got about 500 years of history across 30 lectures, and you need to cover the entire planet. American Civil War, WW2, and British colonialism in India all in the same class. I still remember the loving crazy measures I had to take to give myself one lecture - one whole lecture, about 90 minutes in total including any admin work like taking attendance or collecting assignments - to specifically focus on the Holocaust in the WorldHist 2 course, because I thought it was important enough to warrant that. Most other people just covered it as part of the single WW2 class. As I recall I robbed a bit of time from inter-war Europe, basically shaving a little WW1 and WW2 and then folding in a post-war section into the WW1 lecture and a pre-war section into the WW2 lecture. It's insane the compromises you end up making in that kind of format and how tightly it gets scheduled.
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May 16, 2024 18:20
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Cyrano4747 posted:It's insane the compromises you end up making in that kind of format and how tightly it gets scheduled. I teach upper secondary school history in Bogland. There's three compulsory history courses, consisting of roughly 16 to 18 lessons of 75 minutes each, plus a day reserved for each course that can go for 3x75 minutes. Course 1 starts from cradle of civilization and goes through antiquity, middle ages, age of exploration to the industrial revolutions. Course 2 is the last 200 years, so imperialism, nationalism, world wars and the interwar period, cold war, decolonisation and the Middle East. Course 3 is the last 200 years of Bogland history. Ever tried to cram the entire Cold War into three 75 minute lessons? Lessons, not lectures, I might specify.
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May 16, 2024 20:09
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Chamale posted:The protagonist of Come And See was played by a 14-year-old, Aleksei Kravchenko. He suffered PTSD and his hair turned grey. He went on to get a degree in theater but didn't appear in another movie until he was 30. I don't know about PTSD but the grey hair thing is an urban legend according to wiki: quote:Contrary to what some rumors suggest, though, Kravchenko's hair did not turn permanently grey. In fact, a special Silber Interference Grease-Paint, alongside a thin layer of actual silver, was used to dye his hair. This made it difficult to get it back to normal, so Kravchenko had to live with his hair like this for some time after shooting the film. Fun fact, Kravchenko also played a Soviet soldier in the 2019 film The Painted Bird, which has a similar plot to Come and See. That film also has Barry Pepper playing a sniper, similar to his role in Saving Private Ryan.
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May 16, 2024 20:30
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joat mon posted:After 1962 it was authorized to be awarded posthumously, and eligibility was backdated to 1917. Interseting, thank you.
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May 16, 2024 23:36
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Ok milhist thread I saw this in an NPR article of all places. Is this true because I've never heard it before?quote:According to Terry Gould, author of The Lifestyle: A Look at the Erotic Rites of Swingers, swinging in the U.S. started on military bases during World War II among fighter pilots and their wives. One in three pilots died in combat, and so they shared spouses with the understanding that the men who lived would take care of the widows It sounds like an urban legend.
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May 17, 2024 01:01
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Cessna posted:My son does IB (International Baccalaureate); they spent half of his Junior year in HS History on the Russian Revolution as a focus. I understand that this is an exception, but it was an interesting choice. I did IB History HL many years ago and enjoyed every moment. My favorite thing about it is that topics weren't really divided up chronologically as much as they were according to "stuff historians argue about". Sadly I don't remember as much as I'd like, but for WWI we compared the various causes that were being discussed several pages ago, like German aggression, the alliance system, pan-Slavism, the breakdown of A-H, the naval arms race etc. I remember reading Fischer and Paul Kennedy, but other names are now lost to me. For Nazi Germany we jumped right into the intentionalist/functionalist debate. The reading list ended with Kershaw, which iirc was a synthesis of the two positions. Overall I got the feeling that nothing was dumbed down for us - the quantity we read was limited and we had to cover topics quickly, but the historians' works we were reading were exactly what "grown-ups" would be working with.
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May 17, 2024 01:25
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D-Pad posted:Ok milhist thread I saw this in an NPR article of all places. Is this true because I've never heard it before? Let me emphasize that I've never read this book and I don't have a copy. It could very well be that he cites something in it and we can trace that story back to some kind of origin, and then judge it on the basis of that. But, a few things: 1) the author is a journalist. An investigative journalist who seems do to a lot of stuff on the mob, which is kind of interesting. I'm the first person to say you don't need to be an academically trained historian to do history, but it helps and both proper citing of your sources and having a critical eye to judge sources with is part of what makes it useful. 2) and perhaps more important: this kind of history can be really difficult to write in general, just because the source base can be incredibly thin and frequently poisoned by both the dominant cultural values of the time AND the motivations of the people talking about it decades after the fact. You see these difficulties a lot in any non-mainstream sexual topic, or things that impinge on non-mainstream sexuality. It's something that people writing about historical homosexuality and the rise of as 20th century LGBTQ subcultures have had to work with. Now, this doesn't make it impenetrable. Plenty of those books exist, and the sources do exist. But it's more difficult and it takes a lot of methodological creativity and a keen eye. For example, let's say you have some salacious rumor in elite Victorian English high society circles about a secret society that holds parties at lord so-and-so's estate and conducts "unnatural carnal acts." It gets enough traction to actually get a brief (but appropriately oblique) reference in the society pages of a newspaper, in addition to whatever letters etc. you've got gossiping about it. Now, is this actual evidence of (perhaps non-straight) sex parties in the Victorian upper crust? Or is it a rumor spread for other reasons - perhaps to slander a political rival - that leans into the prejudices of the day? Note that none of this means it's worthless as a source. The fact that people are worked up enough about the story at the time for evidence of it to trickle down to the present day would say something about sexual attitudes in that time and place in and of itself. But you also have to be careful about just stating it as fact. To make any kind of judgement about swinging fighter pilots we'd really have to grab the book and see how he's written it and what his source is. It may well be a thing that some people did, but which wasn't any kind of wide spread. It may be a weird barracks rumor that got started, or a rumor that was started in the 50s or 60s by people who were already into swinging. Now, we DO have evidence of plenty of non-normative stuff in WW2 fighter pilot culture. Post-war biker gangs are pretty well established to have had a lot of founding members who were adrenaline junkie WW2 pilots who had a lot of PTSD and couldn't really re-integrate into society. It's a challenging topic to work with and I'd have ot know where the author was getting his claim to make any kind of judgement. That said, I am naturally a little skeptical for two reasons: 1) fighter pilots engaging in communal marriages because of the occupational risks of their job is just the right intersection of a cool group of people and a sexy (literally and metaphorically) topic that it raises a few red flags for me. It's a good story and that always makes me prick my ears up and ask for proof. That's not an automatic disqualifier, but you really have to show your work. 2) just intuitively I kind of suspect that people had the idea of having sex with other people's spouses in a semi-organized way before this. Even if we can definitively trace this as a thing that WW2 fighter pilots did, my follow up question would be what the evidence is that this is when swinging comes to the US? Or is this an instance where something that was already going on only enters the historical record because it started happening with the sort of people who get history books written about them and who others pay attention to in general? Would we even have evidence if there was a swinging culture in working class 19th century Chicago, for example? Not to mention the existence of people and cultures besides the dominant English-speaking, white, American one. "First time in the US' is a pretty bold claim.
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May 17, 2024 13:43
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Would the wives of American pilots flying combat missions be living in bases in UK, North Africa etc? I know that families of American service men could live in bases in foreign countries during the Cold War but was that the case during WW2 too?
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May 17, 2024 14:22
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Bomber crews were more gang bang enthusiasts, iirc
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May 17, 2024 14:28
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I think the US Army had something around 150k-180k fighter pilots in WWII so I don't doubt there were instances of some of them loving each others' wives, but that doesn't make them trendsetters
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May 17, 2024 14:44
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FuturePastNow posted:I think the US Army had something around 150k-180k fighter pilots in WWII so I don't doubt there were instances of some of them loving each others' wives, but that doesn't make them trendsetters this lends additional credence to the idea that pilots are just sky cav
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May 17, 2024 14:49
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AU, NZ, UK conscripted vast amounts of their male populaces to go, say, get dysentery in a trench in Italy, so US service men on leave in their places really did not have a hard time getting laid.
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May 17, 2024 15:07
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Also, this was a generation that also self reported an average of three partners lifetime. If you're going to argue that US fighter pilots were out screwing each other's wives, you're gonna have to show a lot of anecdotal evidence.
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May 17, 2024 15:10
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Cyrano4747 posted:It's a challenging topic to work with and I'd have ot know where the author was getting his claim to make any kind of judgement. That said, I am naturally a little skeptical for two reasons: All true. But if you've ever spent time on a military base you know weird sex / relationship stuff goes down. There is ALWAYS something weird going on with someone in your company's spouse or whatever. Was this commonplace or established practice? I seriously doubt it too. But at the same time people don't change, and I can believe it happened sometime, somewhere. And if the article had framed it in terms of "it is rumored that this happened," I'd buy it completely. Glah posted:Would the wives of American pilots flying combat missions be living in bases in UK, North Africa etc? I know that families of American service men could live in bases in foreign countries during the Cold War but was that the case during WW2 too? No, they would have stayed stateside. Cessna fucked around with this message at 15:18 on May 17, 2024 |
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May 17, 2024 15:15
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Cessna posted:All true. Oh absolutely, if you told me it happened I'd believe it. An anecdote about a clique of pilots and their wives that were loving each other? Sure. gently caress, I"d be more surprised if it didn't happen. It' the claim that this is the birth of the American swinging movement - implying that it both hadn't been happening before and exploded into a sub-culture after this - that is a really strong claim that needs some kind of backing.
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May 17, 2024 15:30
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Cyrano4747 posted:1) fighter pilots engaging in communal marriages because of the occupational risks of their job is just the right intersection of a cool group of people and a sexy (literally and metaphorically) topic that it raises a few red flags for me. It's a good story and that always makes me prick my ears up and ask for proof. That's not an automatic disqualifier, but you really have to show your work. Cessna posted:But if you've ever spent time on a military base you know weird sex / relationship stuff goes down. There is ALWAYS something weird going on with someone in your company's spouse or whatever. One of the more 'Hollywood' aspects of the life and times of the American Volunteer Group was the presence of the unit XO's wife in Burma, a glamorous 32-year old called Olga who was half American, quarter Spanish and quarter Serb by ancestry. A lot of histories of the AVG and a lot of accounts, diaries and memoirs from pilots are full of innuendo, rumour and assertions that of sexual encounters between Olga and the AVG pilots. Except that when you actually compare all the accounts, every pilot is equally insistent that 1) Olga slept with a lot of the pilots and 2) she never slept with them in particular. So while the presence of an attractive women who was fond of wearing figure-hugging safari suits and a large-brimmed hat was not unwelcome at Kyedaw and Toungoo, the reality did not meet up with the rumour that was so widely and assuredly believed. There isn't a single account, verified or not, of Olga Greenlaw having relations with any of the AVG pilots, just lots of nudge-nudge innuendo about how she was definitely carrying on with the other pilots. In fact, the constant threads across all the accounts is that all Olga ever did was sometimes cut the pilots' hair, do some knitting/darning and sometimes accompany them on walks or trips into town. Aside from the rambunctious reputation and joshing of a bunch of 20-something fighter pilots, it was remarkably chaste. She was basically the unit's therapist/counsellor, giving the chaps a chance to get away from the war and have some domesticity for a few hours.
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May 17, 2024 15:35
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Cyrano4747 posted:It' the claim that this is the birth of the American swinging movement - implying that it both hadn't been happening before and exploded into a sub-culture after this - that is a really strong claim that needs some kind of backing. Agreed, yes. BalloonFish posted:One of the more 'Hollywood' aspects of the life and times of the American Volunteer Group was the presence of the unit XO's wife in Burma, a glamorous 32-year old called Olga who was half American, quarter Spanish and quarter Serb by ancestry. Her autobiography was pretty good, even with the melodramatic cover:  I'm sure unfounded rumors and innuendos are commonplace, and that's most probably the case with Greenlaw. And I'm also sure all kinds of things DO happen.
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May 17, 2024 15:41
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A Festivus Miracle posted:AU, NZ, UK conscripted vast amounts of their male populaces to go, say, get dysentery in a trench in Italy, so US service men on leave in their places really did not have a hard time getting laid. bangin is different from getting married and swinging
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May 17, 2024 15:49
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Tevery Best posted:Half-tracks were terrible maintenance hogs and actually all around bad ideas. Counterpoint https://youtu.be/mtSieJIXrj4?feature=shared
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May 17, 2024 15:52
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Cyrano4747 posted:Let me emphasize that I've never read this book and I don't have a copy. It could very well be that he cites something in it and we can trace that story back to some kind of origin, and then judge it on the basis of that. Excellent post and your concerns are the same I had and why I asked the question. The story seemed just a little too "neat" to be true. That being said as I've dived into more WW2 history I have been a bit surprised at how much debauchery everybody was getting up too compared to the typical view we have of the sexuality of that generation.
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May 17, 2024 16:00
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