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75 years ago today...


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.... Barbarossa was launched. Leading to the biggest and bloodiest land war in human history. A terrible tragedy and event of note.

Btw for my 'cousins' in the UK - there must be a lot of winding up and red poppies for July 1 for the Somme centennial eh?

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1 hour ago, Sublime said:

Btw for my 'cousins' in the UK - there must be a lot of winding up and red poppies for July 1 for the Somme centennial eh?

No, we don't wind up for July 1st. The poppy is traditionally only worn around November 11th. Although in some towns and cities there are wreath laying ceremonies at other times of the year if a local regiment suffered particularly heavy casualties. 

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1 hour ago, IanL said:

Not sure what operation you are talking about @JoMc67 :) but I think @Sublime is talking about the Barbarossa that was launched on June 22, 1941: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Barbarossa

At a guess he is confusing operation Barbarossa with operation Bagration, which also started on June 22 (although 72 years ago,  rather than 75).

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June 22nd 1941? Operation barbarossa?

I didnt confuse it with Bagration at all im not an idiot. However as this is the only ost front forum thats used with any regularity on the bfc forum it seemed the most appropriate.

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1 hour ago, Sublime said:

June 22nd 1941? Operation barbarossa?

I didnt confuse it with Bagration at all im not an idiot. However as this is the only ost front forum thats used with any regularity on the bfc forum it seemed the most appropriate.

I didn't mean that you confused the two - I meant that maybe @JoMc67 did (I know I've got the two the wrong way round before now) and was 'correcting' you when you were in fact right in the first place.

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Doesnt matter anyways man. Back to the topic... does it 'feel' weird to anyone now that ww2 is 75 yrs old? Like somehow much more distant? It just seems so much further away and of course it is than any other period of my life i was concious of it - but somehow it just feels a million miles further away. Then again i guess its just as far away as 5 min ago for me anyways - thats to say its the past and its gone.

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13 minutes ago, Abbasid111 said:

Hell, for most youngsters out there WW2 is ancient history and has about as much relevance to them as Alexander the Great.

My grandparents fought in the war.  My parents were born during the war and grew up in the aftermath. And for my kids, it is as distant from them as the Boer war was from me. Weird.

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1 hour ago, TheVulture said:

I didn't mean that you confused the two - I meant that maybe @JoMc67 did (I know I've got the two the wrong way round before now) and was 'correcting' you when you were in fact right in the first place.

Actually, Sublime, your fine, and I was just being slightly sarcastic with my first post...The Vulture is Correct in asserting my intention :-) 

Edited by JoMc67
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52 minutes ago, Sublime said:

does it 'feel' weird to anyone now that ww2 is 75 yrs old? Like somehow much more distant?

Yep.  Mind you it also feels pretty weird that my son drives and that I am working late tonight and no one is going to be sad that daddy is not home to tuck them in.  Heck they'll probably be up when I get home anyway :D

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2 hours ago, Sublime said:

Warts I guess wind up implies the wrong tone. But I thought because of the anniversery of the Somme and remembering a lot of events happening in Europe in Aug '14 over the centennial for ww1s beginning.

No problem mate... Given last week's murder of a Member of Parliament by a Neo-Nazi I think maybe any preparations for July 1st have not made the news this week. There were some ceremonies and TV documentaries about the Battle of Jutland, so I'm sure the Somme will be marked as well.

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18 minutes ago, TheVulture said:

My grandparents fought in the war.  My parents were born during the war and grew up in the aftermath. And for my kids, it is as distant from them as the Boer war was from me. Weird.

My father was drafted before the war started and served in both Europe and the Pacific. One uncle went ashore on D-day and fought in Europe until the war ended, another uncle was in the Navy in the Pacific.

My mother's brother was killed in Holland in October, '44 and my father lost 3 cousins in Italy, France, and Germany.

So for me the war was and is very real and relevant. 

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Whooa that didnt make the news i read here in the states i gotta read about that warts n all.

My grandfather was on the USS Leyte in Korea. He was 1 of 14 Irish kids in Boston. Some of his older brothers fought. A couple were killed. I wish i knew more but i really dont. He barely missed WW2.  On my fathers side his father was in the USAAF in the Pacific, as ground crew for planes.

Mind you Abbasid Im not saying the war isnt real, just an alarming (to me) sense that its slipping from recent events and memory as history thats within our grasp to history thats out of our grasp. As in the last vets are leaving us, and many relics and marks of the war are leaving us as well. In many ways this is really good. I dont see how anyone could see German reunification and many other things such as eastern europe essentially being freed any other way. Well.. I take that back Im sure I can think of some people who probably arent happy with events since the late 80s but Im not going there in this thread.

My parents were very late Vietnam era - my dad coming of age by 71/72 my mom a few years later. I was born in 85. Yes to kids who dont like history it may as well be Rome. However I was a kid not too long ago and always was very acutely aware of history. I remember very well all the 50th anniversery commemorations for pearl harbor when i was 6 and dday when i was 9.  Then it really didnt seem that far away - i wasnt aware at all of the situation when i was born and lived in W Germany until I was six but the fact did have a marked impression on my life - my whole poimt of being born there as an American is because of the second world war, and the whole situation of Germany being split and all that was a direct result of WW2. It just didnt seem that long ago and as a young young kid Vietnam seemed like yesterday. I guess Im just becoming an old fart like michael emrys,  and all of you, bemoaning the march of time ;)

Edited by Sublime
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Maybe. We.re all losing the same race though. Perhaps Emrys is the real winner here as he perhaps was of age to actually enjoy the free love period and the wild stuff going on before AIDs and reality shut that gig down. My generation gets dubya and 2 middle east wars. Weeee.

Warts n all I just read about the murder. Very sad stuff.

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14 hours ago, Sublime said:

...does it 'feel' weird to anyone now that ww2 is 75 yrs old? Like somehow much more distant? It just seems so much further away...

Yeah, a little. Let me tell you about distance. In August, 1964, when I was in college, Life magazine ran a special issue on the outbreak of WW I. Military technology and life in many other ways had changed so much in the ensuing 50 years that it did seem very, very far away. Well, it has been just about 50 years since Johnson committed the US to fighting a serious war in Southeast Asia. Again, much has changed since then, but somehow it does not seem that far away.

WW II for me falls somewhere in the middle. I was born during that war, and I grew up in an atmosphere of triumphal examination of its history. Most of you probably can't even imagine how many tv shows there were devoted to one aspect or another produced both in this country and others. We were saturated in its retelling. So WW II was with us long after it was over, a phenomenon that was preserved by the wargame hobby that became huge in the '70s just as the tv shows were starting to peter out and were largely devoted to WW II. Not just the games and the gaming companies, but magazines including fanzines sprang up like toadstools after a rain. Most of them short-lived, and most of them largely devoted to the war. And there were other magazines not specifically devoted to wargaming, but to the war. After the Battle and World War II Journal are but two of the more successful and best known examples. And then there was the amazing proliferation of paperback reprints of scholarly texts that placed affordable copies in the hands of eager young amateurs like me.

But now, that war too is not so much fading out, but is in a way receding into its proper dimensions as a thing of the past. Still dramatic and consequential, still an interesting bit of historiography, but maybe not so overawing as it once was.

Michael

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That is how things work. As the generation that fought for that war becomes less and less familiar to us through old age and death the war itself becomes pages in a book.

To those of us with an interest in history we keep the past alive. I see the relevance in all history. History shapes who we are, as people and nations. 

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Christ emrys took you long enough to grace us with your prescence  i was annoyed, but not annoyed enough, that when i typed your name in it didnt give me the hyperlink text that it normally would that also would have notified you :P

But i figured mikey reads these boards like you old timers read newspapers. All of it.

;)

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3 hours ago, Abbasid111 said:

To those of us with an interest in history we keep the past alive. I see the relevance in all history. History shapes who we are, as people and nations. 

I think even more than that. People who have lost all connection to the past seem to be adrift in some kind of existential fog, like sheep who can't find their way. But it's a tricky thing. People can cling to the wrong aspects of the past and/or draw the wrong conclusions about it. They too can go astray.

Michael

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On 6/22/2016 at 8:00 PM, Sublime said:

Warts I guess wind up implies the wrong tone. But I thought because of the anniversery of the Somme and remembering a lot of events happening in Europe in Aug '14 over the centennial for ww1s beginning.

Just to update you mate. The BBC will being broadcasting extensive live coverage of the centenary events. Beginning on the evening of June 30th when vigils will be held both in Westminster and on The Somme itself. And then from early morning on July 1st all through the day. 

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