Grandpa was an RAF fighter shot down over Nazi-occupied France and was held for four years as a Prisoner of War in a German internment labor camp, the best of the three options if you had to choose. Think North Korea. Other’s were not so relatively lucky. While he was surrounded by hunger and death, the constant rumors that the Vichy Government would hand over Jewish POW’s to the Gestapo were true. Many were transported to a nearby internment camp (Drancy) before being sent to the Third Reich’s concentration camps or extermination camps, mostly in Germany or Poland.
From 1939 to 1945 (from a build up in 1936) on average 10,000 innocent people were killed daily. Families were ripped apart, women and girls were beaten and raped, men and boys were tortured, and many served as guinea pigs in horrendous and grotesque experiments by Nazi doctors. For those not shot, electrocuted, or gassed many died from malnutrition, disease and being worked to death.
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If North Korea starts another major war or major conflict then it seems we have every reason to agree with Douglas MacArthur that we should have gone in against the Chinese and settled things permanently. I’m not belittling the risks with that nor do I know enough to authoritatively criticize what the leaders were up against but I really do think that the Chinese Communists couldn’t stand up to us and Mao needed to be slapped down. It’s clear also that the Soviets were behind the whole thing, too — that definitely makes one wonder what to do. However, giving Mao a defeat and uniting Korea into a western-oriented government could well have been better.
Princes at War: The Bitter Battle Inside Britain’s Royal Family in the Darkest Days of World War II, by Deborah Cadbury, PublicAffairs, 2015, 400 pages, $28.99 (Hardcover)
Operation Barbarossa was the name given to Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June 22, 1941. The battle aims of the German forces under the command of Adolf Hitler were the following: the complete annihilation of the Soviet Union’s armed forces, the collapse of communism, and primarily the conquest of lebensraum (living space) for the Third Reich and its people.