Notes from Ken Burns' The War (World War II)
read moreAt dark, people in cities we’re supposed to turn off all their lights. This was to prevent pilots from seeing large structures to bomb, and from submarines from seeing boats on shore backlit by the city. New York for example.
In 1940, the US Army was tiny. 170,000 people. They were totally not equipped. They were using rifles designed in 1903, they still had tens of thousands of horses, etc.
The American military required you to read and write at first, but then they dropped the requirement because they had to turn away hundreds of thousands. They also turned away people for the “wrong” answer to “do you like girls?” On what they called “moral grounds”.
The Japanese were allied with Germany, it seems.
It seems like Americans were really motivated to join the army because of Pearl Harbor. More so than Germany.
German submarine hit a oil tanker right next to Manhattan, used the lights of Manhattan to see his target.
The Japanese really took over the pacific. They took over Hong Kong for instance.
The Japanese horribly treated a collection of 80,000 surrendered US and Filipino soldiers in the Philippines, the biggest surrender in US history. They forced marching for miles which killed 6-11k men.
The Japanese Americans on the West Coast were given one weeks notice, and they were ordered by the president to move what amounted to concentration camps. They could only take what they could carry. Very few Italians and German American citizens had the same fate, the Japanese were singled out. Nobody protested these acts. These camps were further inland lake in Colorado, where it could get -25°.
The Japanese had plans to take over Hawaii and hold its people hostage. Cryptographers deciphered their messages, and the navy intercepted and destroyed them.
US needed money to pay for the war, taxes could t do it, so they went crazy asking people to buy bonds.
It seems like the two very important battles, Normandy and Guadalcanal were both the first landing spots of the US on the two fronts of war.
Fun fact, the first American casualty on Guadalcanal was a marine who cut his hand with a machete trying to open a coconut.
The government kept the numbers private for how many people or ships were destroyed in Pearl Harbor.
The allies really started fighting back the Nazis by landing in northern Africa, which Hitler had started to take over.
In 1941, more than 3 million cars were made in the US. During the entire war, only 100 would be made.
Americans were terrible at war but they made up for it in manufacturing they sat out a B-52 bomber at the Ford motor station every 63 minutes and by the end of the war more than 50% of all manufacturing was done in the United States for all industrial manufacturing that just shows how good they were how strong the economy was.
The British bomb to Germany by night to destroy the will of the people because they couldn’t bomb during the day because there were too many anti-aircraft gun‘s and they just killed so many civilians one time it was 40,000 in one week
From northern Africa the US troops took Sicily.
Seems like anti-aircraft gun shoot up into the air in them certain altitude explode and release essentially grenade so lots of pellets that fly into the planes.
Civilians were asked to save everything. Scrap metal and other things to be collected to use in the war effort. Even the fat from bacon grease that was left in the pan was supposed to be saved by civilians and given over to us over center because this could be used to make explosives
US Army was still segregated so all the black served in the same unit. The commanders never really referred to them as troops, they referred to them as “you people“. That could’ve been the words out but I’m not sure. They resented being called “you people“.
The invasion of Normandy was three phases the first was parachuters getting in behind the lines to confuse the enemy the second was planes bombing the coastline which is heavily fortified to create to also create holes that the people lady on the beach could take cover in and then finally the landing at Normandy. This was the invasion of France that was necessary to open another front of the war. Because previously they were just fighting from Africa and up through Italy but they needed something coming from the west. They also had Russia fighting from the east so they were starting to close in on all sides.
Japanese civilians were told to commit suicide rather than be captured by the allied forces. Which was one of the calculations that the Americans made when deciding how to try to end the war. They knew invading the Japanese home and would mean so many civilian deaths.
Also, because the Japanese believed so strongly encouraging suicide rather than being captured, they treated the American prisoners of war really terribly because they didn’t give their lives for their country and surrendered.
When people had to relocate to other places to work on manufacturing the planes and that such thing in the world my friend they very warily had enough space for them in the stones so they had to literally the government put them in jail cells to sleep and things like that where they had space for us they were in jail though and libraries and things like that.
The Japanese unit of American soldiers mainly consisted you read of Japanese recruited from internment camps. Originally they were not desired by the RV. But then after they showed how good they were, they were actually getting specially requested for missions that others failed to complete.
The Alan’s Mom Dresden to reduce help Joseph Stalin with the Eastern front of the war and reduce troops and supplies going to that front. When they drop bombs on Dresden over the course of two nights they killed 35,000 civilians through incendiary bombs burning in hours a six-ish and burning or us fixie Asian.
Over the course of the next month after Dresden over 500,000 civilian Jared residence would die. Hundred thousand for children. Most for women.
You would Jima and really the capturing of most of the Pacific Islands was just trying to get them closer to Tokyo so they could bomb it.
Some of the artillery fire sounds exactly like the laser is the use in Star Wars sure they got it from that.
After the second atomic bomb on Nagasaki they Americans had no more bombs and it would take them another seven months to produce them. So that was there last bomb for a while.