Today, I got to thinking about World War II, in my post-Band-of-Brothers way.
(speaking of Band of Brothers, did you guys know that Spielberg and Hanks are at it again? They're planning another mega-miniseries like BoB, but about the Pacific theater)
I know the basic stuff about the war. Third Reich, post WWI reparations, economic ruin, Hitler, Austria, Poland, Allies, blah blah Pearl Harborcakes.
What I don't understand is this...what was Hitler thinking? I mean, seriously. Aside from the genocide (not that one can put that aside), did he think he could win? He might have had delusions of Fuhrerdom while things were going okay for him during the war and he was invading everybody, but did he really think he could win against an Allied force drawing resources from the US, the Soviet Union, the UK, Canada, France and everybody else? Was he just that deluded and that convinced of the superiority of the Master Race?
Eddie Izzard once said that Hitler clearly never played Risk as a child, or he would have known that you can never hang on to Russia. And hey, Napoleon couldn't do it either, and wasn't he one of the greatest military geniuses the world has ever seen?
And perhaps this is very bad of me, but I hadn't realized that Allied losses were so...one sided. US losses? Half a million. British losses? Half a million. Soviet losses? 25 million. That's military deaths plus civilian deaths, which we were almost entirely spared by virtue of being on the other side of the world from the fighting How do you come back from that? Wikipedia informs me that the total USSR losses took about 13.5% of their total population. That means that after WWII, one in seven Soviet citizens had been killed.
Only Poland, Latvia and Lithuania lost a comparable percentage, and those three countries' losses were almost entirely civilian deaths.
I got these figures from
this barchart. Check out the teeny tiny weensy little bars for the United States losses.
Yeah. We lost people in the war. It's a nosebleed compared to the losses sustained by most eastern European countries, China and the Soviet Union.
Here's another Bad Me, I Should Have Known This moment...I didn't even realize China was in World War II. I thought they were fighting the Sino-Japanese War at that time, and then there were civil wars in China, weren't they? I guess fighting Japan in the early 1940s could be considered part of World War II.
I need a book. I know, that's my answer to everything, read a book, but...hey, it works.