Why are people so obsessed with WW2?

[BAYLOR]

It was the first war driven by technology. World wide communications, Radar detection and weapons control, mechanized armor, landing craft, rockets, strategic bombers, and the ultimate weapon, the atomic bomb. WW2 ignited a technology upheaval that still drives the world today.

Jet airplanes too.

 

[Extollager]

One reason the Second World War exercises continuing fascination, for some people, is that it was that colossal war that had happened not really very long ago (when we were kids). When I was old enough to have some sense of history, that war was only 25 years or so ago. It was part of my dad's biography in that he served in the army of occupation in Japan, and when I was a kid he wasn't an old man. Mom remembered the Portland newspaper with the headline about the "Sun Bomb" that had been dropped on Hiroshima. A lot of the people of that generation have died, but they were alive and robust in our most impressionable years, when people my age were kids.

 

[hitmouse]

My parents are still alive and healthy and were born during the war. My mother's family was pretty comprehensively destroyed in a single night of the blitz, and it is fair to say that it has affected the family ever since. WW2 was clearly the major defining factor in the lives of my grandparents and their generation, and it continues to define European politics.
Living memory, impossible to ignore.

 

[J Riff]

Whe I was a hospital orderly, early 70s, we had a woman from Auschwitz there. She was not so obsessed with it, but could never escape it.

 

[CupofJoe]

It was the first war driven by technology. World wide communications, Radar detection and weapons control, mechanized armor, landing craft, rockets, strategic bombers, and the ultimate weapon, the atomic bomb. WW2 ignited a technology upheaval that still drives the world today.

I'll give you all the above, but I think many wars are driven by technology. Look at the first world war. Aircraft were barely useable a flying machines at the start, by the end they could fly many times faster and were just about to cross the Atlantic. Submarines were interesting toys more than weapons at the start, by the end they were very effective tools. Machine guns, assault rifles weapons of mass destructions and combined arms tactics were all perfected in WW1. There even mobile x-ray vans helping treatment at the western front.
For me Why WW2 still holds sway... There is a lot of source material that was never available before. and then there is the Bad Guys. The Nazis have become the go-to villains. If you wrote a group like this, you'd probably be told they were unbelievable...

 

[Venusian Broon]

One reason the Second World War exercises continuing fascination, for some people, is that it was that colossal war that had happened not really very long ago (when we were kids). When I was old enough to have some sense of history, that war was only 25 years or so ago. It was part of my dad's biography in that he served in the army of occupation in Japan, and when I was a kid he wasn't an old man. Mom remembered the Portland newspaper with the headline about the "Sun Bomb" that had been dropped on Hiroshima. A lot of the people of that generation have died, but they were alive and robust in our most impressionable years, when people my age were kids.

Exactly Extollager, I was born in 1971 only 26 years after the end of war, but actually we were still in the midst of the aftershocks of that war - especially the superpower contest that was the cold war. Remember that places like Vietnam had been fighting more or less continously since during WW2 to try and get independence from the Japanese, French and then US intervention.

Frankly it didn't feel that we were starting to properly heal from it until the Berlin wall fell in 1989. (Actually in an specific official sense, from the Potsdam agreement, the second world war didn't end until Germany reunified and provided a 'government adequate for the purpose of concluding a full peace treaty.')

So in that respect I did feel it was definitely still part of living memory.

But one wonders how long something like the Napoleanonic wars was fascinating for people in the 19th Century. I suspect it was similar.

 

[Caledfwlch]

There have also always been "purges" of those deemed undesirable by the people and or powers that be, but ww2 saw the first ever systematic, mechanised extermination of people considered to be enemies of the state or simply because of their religion or race. There are many reasons why ww2 captured the public imagination so.

Another big reason I suspect is that ww2 was a conflict that was utterly clearcut, in morality and so on. The Axis powers were genuinely bad guys, evil doing evil stuff and whilst the Allies made the odd difficult to forgive or understand mistake such as the carpet bombing of a dresden out of revenge, we were still generally the good guys on the side of light.

 

[psikeyhackr]

TV was flooded with WWII series when I was a kid, Combat, 12 O'Clock High, Hogan's Heros.

"I know nothing, nothing!"

And of course ENIAC was financed to compute ballistics tables. Since it was not completed until the war ended I do not know if it was ever used for that. It did computations for the H-bomb instead.

WWII is also used as justification for the economic theories of John Maynard Keynes. The Depression and WWII are like a turning point in history.

 

[Extollager]

Caledfwlch, it's arguable that "the first ever systematic, mechanised extermination of people considered to be enemies of the state or simply because of their religion or race" was that of the Armenians in Turkey during 1915-1923. A young adult book that could introduce the Armenian genocide to many readers is David Kherdian's The Road from Home. For the diligent adult reader, there's Raymond Kevorkian's The Armenian Genocide: A Complete History.

The Armenian Genocide: A Complete History, by Raymond Kévorkian

In this monumental work on the Armenian Genocide, the subtitle underlines that what is presented here is a complete history, thereby subtly recognising tha

academic.oup.com

More accessible is David Balakian's Black Dog of Fate, and there's Philip Marsden's account of the Armenian diaspora, The Crossing Place.

My understanding is that when Raphael Lemkin coined the term "genocide," he used the Armenian holocaust to exemplify what he meant by it.

 

[Caledfwlch]

I know the Armenian genocide happened but I didn't realise it involved people rounded up and systematically murdered by the state, thanks for the info I will do some googling.

The Germans often get the credit for inventing the "concentration camp" so I have found it comes as a shock to British people to discover it was the British empire who invented them in South Africa during the Boer War.

 

[psikeyhackr]

20 Slang Terms From World War I

20 Slang Terms From World War I

One of the subtlest and most surprising legacies of the First World War is its effect on our language.

getpocket.com

Wonder how many from WWII?

One I have heard a lot is, "The whole nine yards!" It means all of whatever is is you are talking about but I read some WWII American plane had an ammunition belt that was 9 yards long. So shooting the whole belt into something was "giving them the whole 9 yards".

 

[Caledfwlch]

Psikey - one of my fave British slang terms from this era was "piece of cake" meaning it will be easy.
Soldiers on all sides and nationalities devised a huge amount of slang to describe the reality they were living in.