quote:

Cracks in the edifice of racism appeared when the US armed services expanded from a few hundred thousand to over 14 million. The state now had no choice but to appeal to the country’s nine million blacks. In 1940 the Selective Service and Training Act opened the forces to ‘any person, regardless of race or color’ and promised ‘there shall be no discrimination ...’.68 Yet the Services remained thoroughly segregated. As Roosevelt put it: ‘The policy of the War Department is not to intermingle colored and white enlisted personnel in the same regimental organization.’69 Presumably ‘no discrimination’ only applied within separate black and white sections, not between them.

The justification given by the Secretary for War was that blacks were ‘basically agriculturalists’.70 Consequently, ‘Negro units have ... been unable to master the techniques of modern weapons.’71 In the Navy blacks could aspire only to be messmen and cooks because, according to the Secretary of the Navy: ‘it would be a waste of time and effort [to train those who] by reason of their race and color could not properly and efficiently fill the higher ratings.’ Admiral Nimitz warned desegregation was ‘the Soviet way, not the American way’.72 In the army 95 per cent of black soldiers were restricted to service roles,73 because, as General Marshall put it, integration would have meant ‘settlement of vexing racial problems [that] cannot be permitted to complicate the tremendous task of the War Department and thereby jeopardize discipline and morale’.74 As the morale of racists took priority whites could command blacks, blacks could never command whites. So in 1940 there were only two black army officers.75

Segregation even applied to blood donations. Protesters called this ‘abhorrent to the principles for which this war is being fought’ and a ‘Hitler-like policy’.76 But there were many other outrages. This was the experience of one black soldier: ‘I saw German prisoners free to move around the camp, unlike black soldiers, who were restricted. The Germans walked right into the doggone places like any white American. We were wearin’ the same uniform, but we were excluded.’77 In town German POWs sat at the front of buses while blacks were relegated to the back.78 He concluded the USA was fielding ‘two armies, one black, one white’.79 When proposals emerged for segregated bomb shelters in Washington DC, one paper wryly commented: ‘Wouldn’t it be just like Hitler to make American whites choose a “fate worse than death” – running into a Negro bomb shelter?’80

Some radical blacks responded to the situation by rejecting participation in the war altogether:

Why should I shed my blood for Roosevelt’s America ... for the whole Jim Crow Negro-hating South, for the low-paid, dirty jobs for which Negroes have to fight, for the few dollars of relief and the insults, discrimination, police brutality and perpetual poverty to which Negroes are condemned even in the more liberal North?81

Answering talk of ‘saving democracy’, one black newspaper wrote, ‘We cannot save what DOES NOT EXIST’.82 The Second World War was a ‘white man’s war’ to a significant minority.83 Thirty-eight per cent of black people believed it was more important to ‘make democracy work at home’ than beat the Germans and Japanese.84 An apocryphal epitaph summed up the bitterness felt: ‘Here lies a black man killed fighting a yellow man for the protection of a white man.’85

quote:

Admiral Nimitz warned desegregation was ‘the Soviet way, not the American way’.72

vyelkin posted:

Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:

Re: that quote from Nimitz, the "Hero of Midway":

Black people don't automatically like other black people just because they're black. They're human beings. Imagine being a "mess boy" on a navy ship in WW2 where you live in a tiny floating metal box that you can't get off of for weeks or months and you aren't allowed to hang out with anyone other than the other 3-10 black people and you don't particularly like any of them and there's combat situations going on and you can't serve a gun or do anything other than make ham sandwiches and coffee.

Raskolnikov38 posted:

e: or did you mean coolidge

Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:

"Ewww you saved my life with a black person's blood??? Take it back out of me!!" - an American

quote:

Late in the nineties, he began a major trend by founding the Chuck Connors Association, the sole purpose of which was to hold an annual ball, an affair that could guarantee a sizable profit from ticket sales and bar take, and whose profits were transmitted directly to Chuck’s pocket. As well connected as Connors was, he had no trouble coming up with a roster of honorary members that included prominent politicians, actors, artists, and writers, as well as such raffish personalities as George F. Train (the ex-millionaire former Union Pacific Railroad promoter and Crédit Mobilier manipulator who passed through phases of dissolution and bohemianism before ending up busted and living at the Mills Hotel shelter on Bleecker Street), plus the mayors of the Bowery, Avenue C, Poverty Hollow, and Chinatown. The first ball, held like its eventual successors at Tammany Hall on Fourteenth Street, featured music by two bands, Professor Wolf’s Orchestra and Professor Yee Wah Lung’s Chinese Orchestra. It drew representatives from clubs uptown—the Princeton, the New York Athletic, the Knickerbocker, the Hasty Pudding (imported from Cambridge), the Racquet and Tennis—and downtown—the Knickerbocker Icemen, the Lady Truckers, the Desperate Seven, the Bartenders’ Club, the Lee Hung Fat Club, the Stuffed Club, the Sweet Sixteen Club, the French Cooks, the Girl Getters. His 1903 ball is noted for having been raided by Carry Nation, the temperance agitator, who was in town on one of her East Coast swings. She swept bottles and glasses off tables, snatched cigars and cigarettes from lips, and made her way to the podium, where she began reading a letter from a disconsolate mother whose daughter was alleged to be lost in the wilderness of the Bowery. At this point a wild local girl called Pickles threw a bottle and some epithets at the crusader, who retaliated by unsheathing her ever-present hatchet and chasing Pickles around the room with it. The ball exploded into a pandemonium of police whistles, shouts, screams, and fistfights among the guests, which stopped when Connors collared the reformer and personally ejected her from the building.

Connors’s scheme launched a thousand imitations. Before long, the Bowery was thick with associations and clubs of one or two or ten or a hundred, all of which gave annual balls, so many that in the winter there was usually at least one every night. At Tammany Hall, the Walhalla, the Everett, the New Irving, the Arlington, such bodies as the Limburger Roarers, the Soup Greens, the Lady Locusts, the Lady Barkers, the Lady Flashers, the Crescent Coterie, the Bowery Indians, the East Side Crashers, the Plug Hats, the jolly 48 held forth, their officers’ names poetic in the period style: Mixed-Ale this and Bug that, Slimmy and Fatty and Peg-Leg and Limpy. The balls at first inspired great decorum. Prostitutes would wait patiently at the door for unaccompanied gentlemen to escort them in. Fights did break out every now and then, usually of a gallant nature, seldom at first anything very serious. Besides being surefire profit-making schemes in the area of ticket sales, the balls were also a way to beat the excise laws prohibiting after-hours liquor vending, and saloonkeepers were not slow to realize it. The Arbor Dance Hall on Fifty-second Street near Seventh Avenue, formerly the Eldorado, formed its own club, the Dave Hyson Association, and all its waiters held balls one after the other, making it a de facto after-hours night spot.

By this time the late Bowery Boy style had been established: the pearl-gray or brown derby tilted over one ear, the suit in loud checks with a tight coat, worn over a pink striped shirt, with a flaring box overcoat thrown on top in winter. The “mug,” who might refer to himself as “me steady,” would clinch his female partner—“me rag” or “me bundle”—herself clad in a tight jacket with a corseted waist, a long, somewhat bedraggled skirt, a nondescript hat perched on top and perhaps ornamented with a feather, typically a broken one. The two had a swagger that became a routine, known as the “hard walk,” and it became a promenading dance at the balls and its execution the subject of contests that sometimes ended in riots. Dancing became known as “spieling” and it was practiced at private affairs or on the liners that sailed to Coney Island. The men all smoked Sweet Caporal cigarettes—the ones that came with baseball cards or pictures of actresses—and the women all chewed gum.

The language and the accent were what became thought of as New York talk by the rest of the country after being circulated in novels like Edward Townsend’s Chimmie Fadden and Stephen Crane’s Maggie, as well as in the testimony given by the hapless Chinatown crook Georgie Appo to the Lexow Committee in 1894, which was widely reported in the newspapers. Appo’s speech and body language could be found reproduced almost note for note in any Warner Brothers B-movie of the 1930s: the “dese, dem, and dose,” expressions like “youse guys,” “dead game sport,” “chase yerself,” “wot t’hell,” “hully gee” (or “chee”), the refrain of “see?,” the lateral slicing motion made with the hand palm down, the crook talk of come-ons and come-backs, of “easy marks,” the admission “he trun a scare into ‘im.”

The balls became known as rackets and became increasingly institutionalized and politicized. The ball of the saloonkeeper and bagman Harry Oxford was an inevitability on Washington’s Birthday, and Larry Mulligan’s was likewise on the eve of St. Patrick’s; they held their affairs at the Terrace Garden or Tammany Hall. The gangster and dive owner Biff Ellison formed the Biff Ellison Association right on the heels of Connors’s innovation, and before long he was so formidable he could command as many as three annual balls at the Tammany Wigwam. The affairs were very quickly controlled by politicians, and attendance at some of them was de rigueur for anyone seeking to obtain or keep a license or a piece of turf for liquor sales or gambling or a contract for city work. Connors died in 1913, having in his last years lost his grip, due to a combination of alcohol and ill health, and become a mere loafer. He was made to endure the combined tribute and indignity of seeing a young Italian bootblack, Frank Salvatore, formerly known as Mike the Dago, rename himself Young Chuck Connors (as boxers would style themselves after their models) and form the Young Chuck Connors Association. What made this more poisonous was that the ball committee listed the original Connors second only in rank, the first position being reserved for Jim Jeffries, even if he did outrank Jim Corbett.11

Some of the balls kept going for years, even after Bowery culture had been damaged by the shoot-’em-up outside the Lenny & Dyke Association ball at Arlington Hall in January 1914, after it had been all but destroyed by the subsequent reform sweep and finished off by World War I. The New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell found a character called Commodore Dutch in the 1940s who was up to his fortieth annual ball, the “Annual Party Affair, Soiree and Gala Naval Ball of the Original Commodore Dutch Association.” The breakdown Mitchell gives of this event provides a glimpse into ball mechanics as refined over the decades. The card advertising the gala listed such names as Al Smith, Herbert Lehman, and Robert Wagner, Sr., as well as monikers on the order of Big Yaffie, Little Yaffie, Gin Buck, Senator Gut, Eddie the Plague, Johnny Basketball, and Swiss Cheese, most of which were borne by professional horseplayers, although also in attendance were saloonkeepers, fight managers, nightclub proprietors, tip-sheet publishers, bail bondsmen, and Turkish-bath attendants. These worthies were all given titles: Dutch himself was Founder and Standard Bearer; others were Head President, Assistant Head President, Second Assistant Head President, Admiral, Rear Admiral, Front Admiral, Judge Advocate, Field Marshal, Overseer, Master of Fox Hounds. Dutch, who was sixty-two years old at the time of the interview, had refined this sort of racketeering into a métier, and earned most of his living from it. He claimed to have been instructed by Connors and Silver Dollar Smith (in the 1940s those names were still legendary on the Lower East Side), to have apprenticed as a lobbygow and worked as a steerer for McGurk’s, and to have been awarded the racket franchise by Tammany strongman Big Tim Sullivan in lieu of a requested loan. His rackets had been held at Everett Hall on East Fourth Street until 1912, when they outgrew the house and moved to Tammany Hall, upon which occasion the free beer was discontinued. The Fourteenth Street Tammany Hall was torn down in 1928, so the affair was transferred to the back rooms of various Third Avenue speakeasies and then their legal equivalents after Repeal. By the time the piece was written, few people actually bothered to attend the balls, but a large number bought tickets nevertheless.12

Commodore Dutch inherited the scene by outliving it. At the height of the Bowery as an institution he would have been lost in the crowd of characters. Connors and Brodie inspired hundreds of imitators; a forgotten showman named Charles B. Ward attempted to corner the market, calling himself the Original Bowery Boy, and singing “Only a Bowery Boy,” a fair success even if he himself wasn’t, in a show called McFadden’s Elopement Company. There were famous panhandlers: Tennyson, so called because he was said to resemble the laureate; Shakespeare, who quoted the Bard at all occasions and is not to be confused with the murdered female Shakespeare mentioned earlier; his boon companion Daddy Ward, who claimed to have been ruined on Wall Street and who was always aiming curses at the captains of industry, and was known, too, for his costume of collar, cuffs, frock coat buttoned high, and no shirt. There was Doc Shuffield, said to have once been a fellow of the Royal Medical Society, who ministered to the penniless on the Bowery and died in a blizzard on his way to a call.

Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:

Here's a very long and very fun slice of the book "Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York" by Lucy Sante

quote:

drat that's a fine StuG.

E: real life StuG IIIs from the Finnish Armoured Regiment.



The StuG, or Sturmgeschütz (Assault Gun) was Germany's workhorse during World War II, and its various models saw heavy use on all fronts throughout the war. Many of them were also sold to Finland to aid us in our war against the Soviet Union.

Raskolnikov38 posted:

the continuation war

Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:

Re: that quote from Nimitz, the "Hero of Midway":

Black people don't automatically like other black people just because they're black. They're human beings. Imagine being a "mess boy" on a navy ship in WW2 where you live in a tiny floating metal box that you can't get off of for weeks or months and you aren't allowed to hang out with anyone other than the other 3-10 black people and you don't particularly like any of them and there's combat situations going on and you can't serve a gun or do anything other than make ham sandwiches and coffee.

Ardennes posted:

Yeah, there is plenty of love for the Winter War…everything after that until now it politely completely forgotten about.

Some Guy TT posted:

so im curious about something at about what time does hitlers kill count exceeds churchills kill count in terms of the competition for historys greatest monster

Some Guy TT posted:

so im curious about something at about what time does hitlers kill count exceeds churchills kill count in terms of the competition for historys greatest monster

quote:

The Secretary for India was Leo Amery, who has been described as a ‘passionate advocate of British imperialism [and] right-wing politics’.17 His reaction to the first reports of starvation was expressed in a letter to the retiring Viceroy, Lord Linlithgow. Amery welcomed this distraction from the movement for independence. The public were ‘now absorbed in questions of food and cost-of-living’ which might ‘infuse a tinge of realism into politics ...’.18

However, when the seriousness of the crisis became clear Amery also backed urgent food imports. The minimum necessary was calculated as the equivalent of one million tons of grain over the year.19 Was it pure coincidence that this was exactly the same amount as the army’s annual consumption in India?20 Amery’s appeals fell on deaf ears. London insisted that ‘Defence Services demand must be first charge on indigenous or imported grain’.21

The wording of the War Cabinet’s response to Amery’s frantic appeals was shocking: "After the requirements of Ceylon and the Middle East had been met, it would be extremely difficult to find further ships which could be sent to Australia to fetch grain [for India]. If however the War Cabinet decided that some action should be taken ... arrangements should now be made to import not more than 50,000 tons as a token shipment. This should, however, not be earmarked for India but should be ordered to Colombo to await instructions there."22

Those who dared accuse the Government of wishing ‘deliberately to starve the people by acquiring the whole crop for the Army’ would be pursued and prosecuted.23

Field Marshall Wavell, who replaced Linlithgow as Viceroy, was also exasperated: ‘It is scandalous that we are making no progress about food imports after about six months’ discussion ... .’24 He pointed out the ‘very different attitude towards feeding a starving population when there is starvation in Europe’.25

Churchill was unabashed. British rule would be seen as a ‘Golden Age as time passes’26 and sending food amounted to ‘appeasement’ of the Congress Party.27 The official record notes that the Canadian PM had 100,000 tons of grain loaded on a ship bound for India, but was ‘dissuaded by a strong personal appeal from Winston’ from sending it.28 When the British military commander in the South East Asia offered to use 10 per cent of his shipping capacity to assist Bengal, Churchill cut his allocation by 10 per cent.29 Finally, no help would come from Britain itself because, said Churchill, to divert ships to India might affect ‘imports of food into this country’.30

Underlying this was deep-seated racism. Amery, for example, thought the country needed ‘an increasing infusion of stronger nordic blood, whether by settlement or intermarriage or otherwise ... and so breed a more virile type of native ruler.’31 Yet the Secretary for India’s prejudice was nothing compared to the PM’s. The latter complained Indians were ‘breeding like rabbits’ and said: ‘I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.’ Amery told him to his face that he took a ‘Hitler-like attitude’.32

Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:

For further reading I suggest "Churchill's Secret War"

quote:

After three years of great loss and suffering on the Eastern Front, Imperial Russia was in crisis and on the verge of revolution. In November 1917, Lenin’s Bolsheviks (later known as ‘Soviets’) seized power, signed a peace treaty with the Central Powers, and brutally murdered Tsar Nicholas (British King George’s first cousin) and his children so there could be no return to the old order.

As Russia fractured into loyalist ‘White’ and revolutionary ‘Red’ factions, the British government became increasingly drawn into the escalating Russian Civil War after hundreds of thousands of German troops transferred from the Eastern Front to France were used in the 1918 ‘Spring Offensive’ which threatened Paris.

What began with the landing of a small number of Royal Marines at Murmansk in March 1918 to protect Allied-donated war stores quickly escalated, with the British government actively pursuing an undeclared war against the Bolsheviks on a number of fronts in support of British trained and equipped ‘White Russian’ Allies. At the height of British military intervention in mid-1919, British troops were fighting the Soviets far into the Russian interior in the Baltic, North Russia, Siberia, Caspian and Crimea simultaneously. The full range of weapons in the British arsenal were deployed including the most modern aircraft, tanks and even poison gas. British forces were also drawn into peripheral conflicts against ‘White’ Finnish troops in North Russia and the German ‘Iron Division’ in the Baltic.

It remains a little known fact that the last British troops killed by the German Army in the First World War were killed in the Baltic in late 1919, nor that the last Canadian and Australian soldiers to die in the First World War suffered their fate in North Russia in 1919 many months after the Armistice. Despite the award of five Victoria Crosses (including one posthumous) and the loss of hundreds of British and Commonwealth soldiers, sailors and airmen, most of whom remain buried in Russia, the campaign remains virtually unknown in Britain today.

After the withdrawal of all British forces in mid-1920, the British government attempted to cover up its military involvement in Russia by classifying all official documents. By the time files relating to the campaign were quietly released decades later there was little public interest. Few people in Britain today know that their nation ever fought a war against the Soviet Union. The culmination of more than 15 years of painstaking and exhaustive research with access to many previously classified official documents, unpublished diaries, manuscripts and personal accounts, author Damien Wright has written the first comprehensive campaign history of British and Commonwealth military intervention in the Russian Civil War 1918–20.

Fish of hemp posted:

This Churchill guy seems a bit of a poo poo.

gradenko_2000 posted:

I was looking for this and "A People's History..." (and I did find them) and I stumbled across



I'm excited to dig into it

Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:

Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War is insane and so very swept under the rug. There were like 10,000 American troops in Russia at one point. The Japanese conquered the whole Russian Far East and half of Siberia and hung around for years.

Some Guy TT posted:

so did zinoviev actually plot to murder stalin im hearing it very taken for granted that of course he didnt and its tankie talk to suggest that he did but the main source i can find for this is stephen kotkin which is uhhh well id just like another source is all

J. Arch Getty and Oleg Naumov, The Road to Terror, 249-250 posted:

There are persistent rumors that Zinoviev and Kamenev agreed to confess to the scenario in return for promises that their lives would be spared, but no documentary evidence or firsthand testimony has been found to support this. Others argue that they may have confessed out of loyalty to the party, which needed their confessions as negative examples.7 This explanation of the confessions of Old Bolsheviks in the show trials of the 1930s is supported by Bukharin's last letter to Stalin from prison (see Document 198).

ibid, 256 posted:

Like other public accusations and show trials of this period, the 1936 trial scenario was based on a kernel of truth that had been embellished and exaggerated. We know that in the fall of 1932 a single bloc of oppositionists uniting Trotskyists and Zinovievists had in fact been formed at Trotsky's initiative.14 But there is no evidence that this bloc was oriented toward organizing "terrorist acts" or anything other than political conspiracy. In the hands of the Stalinists, though, this event was magnified into a terrorist conspiracy aimed at killing the Soviet leaders.

During 19-24 August 1936, Zinoviev, Kamenev, I. N. Smirnov, and thirteen other former oppositionists were tried for treason in Moscow. With the exception of Smirnov, who retracted his confession, all of the accused admitted to having organized a "terrorist center" at Trotsky's instructions and to having planned the assassinations of Kirov, Stalin, Kaganovich, and other members of the Politburo. Although Yagoda and Vyshinsky assembled the scenario, we now know that Stalin (as with all the major show trials) played an active role in rewording the indictment, selecting the final slate of defendants, and prescribing the sentences. 15

ibid, 259-260 posted:

The official face of the enemy had been reconstructed in the summer of 1936: he was a former left oppositionist who had taken the path of terror. He was an agent of Trotsky, a spy, an assassin. This version had advantages for several segments of the party. For Stalin and his circle, it provided a rationale for finally destroying personal and political enemies whose opposition went back more than a decade, and it created a climate in which future opposition obviously carried life-and-death risks. For the nomenklatura at all levels, it justified the obliteration of and final victory over a possible alternative leadership whose leaders had argued for years that the Stalinist faction should be removed. This definition-or attribution-of the enemy also benefited the ruling elite as a whole insofar as it presented a clearly defined evil and opposite "other": the groups behind Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Trotsky. They had for years stood for an alternative leadership, an alternative team to lead the country. If they won, however unlikely that might seem, the current team would be replaced in quick order. Although there seemed little chance that Zinoviev or Trotsky would return to power in the mid-1930s, the possibility always existed. Memories of nomenklatura members told them that stranger things had happened. Lenin's ascension to power in 1917 must have seemed at least as far-fetched in 1915. This evil force could be conveniently blamed for a variety of sins of the moment, including industrial failure, agricultural shortfalls, and other policy shortcomings more properly attributable to the nomenklatura itself.21 The left opposition made perfect scapegoats.

But they were scapegoats of a particularly believable kind, given the prevailing mentalities of the time. The 1917 revolutions, civil war, and party struggles of the 1920s had created a kind of conspiracy mentality among the Bolsheviks. The vicious and violent civil war, which was rich with real conspiracies and constant, nagging insecurity, was the formative experience for this generation of nomenklatura and party members. In their view of reality, politics was conspiracy, and it was not very hard for them to believe that professional revolutionaries and skilled conspirators like Zinoviev and Trotsky had been up to no good on some level. Similarly, for the Russian populace, with its cultural legacies of good vs. evil, belief in the machinations of dark forces of all kinds, and a traditional suspicion of educated intellectuals, it was not too difficult to accept the notion that Jewish Bolshevik intellectuals probably were involved in some sort of clandestine business.

There seem to have been no protests or questions raised in party leadership circles about executing these former oppositionists. Fear was one deterrent: knowing that police investigations were ongoing, who would question Stalin's leadership on such a serious matter and risk being regarded as a defender of enemies? Party discipline provides a further answer. In the crisis atmosphere of the times, which was perceived as a continuation of the "new situation" following the Riutin affair, there was strong incentive in the party to close ranks against the perceived threat.

The Zinoviev and Trotsky oppositions had broken the rules of the nomenklatura. In the 1920s (and as recently as the Riutin Platform) they had threatened to organize politically outside the party elite. Their strategy had been to agitate among the party's rank and file to gain support for their platforms against the ruling group. This was the unpardonable sin. By threatening to split the party-the Bolsheviks' worst nightmare since the civil war-the oppositionists threatened the survival of the regime and thus the Revolution.

They also threatened to turn the membership against the ruling stratum. This could not be tolerated. The opposition, therefore, represented a continuing menace to the corporate interests of the Stalinist nomenklatura that outweighed any nostalgia that the Old Bolshevik oppositionist comrades-in-arms may otherwise have inspired. The party elite did not regard the annihilation of Zinoviev and Kamenev as threatening to itself. It was not hard for the serving party leadership to support the final decimation of the left opposition out of political and personal self-interest. Once again, Stalin and the nomenklatura had common interests.

Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:

Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War is insane and so very swept under the rug. There were like 10,000 American troops in Russia at one point. The Japanese conquered the whole Russian Far East and half of Siberia and hung around for years.