Ten Things Every American Student Should Know About Our Army in WWII by Rick Atkinson.
Rick Atkinson is author of The Army at Dawn and The Day of Battle, and is currently at work on the third volume in his trilogy on the role of the U.S. military in the liberation of Europe in World War II. He joined the Washington Post, from which he is now on book leave, in 1983, where he has served as reporter, foreign correspondent, and editor. He has won the Pulitzer Prize three times.
I’ve read both of the books cited above and recommend both, especially the Pulitzer-winning The Army at Dawn.
Atkinson begins his talk (which he gave in May 2009):
The U.S. Army in World War II is obviously a big subject. It was a big war with a lot going on. For example, on this very date, May 2, in 1945, Berlin fell to the Red Army, and, in Italy, the war ended, as the surrender of German forces there took effect. That’s just one day, in a war that lasted 2,174 days and claimed an average of 27,600 lives every day, or 1,150 an hour, or 19 a minute, or one death every three seconds. One, two, three, snap. One, two, three, snap.
In an effort to get our arms around this stupendous catastrophe, the greatest calamity in human history, let’s examine ten points every American student ought to know about the U.S. Army in the Second World War. This is a malleable list, and we can probably all agree that we’d like students to know more than only ten things. But let’s give it a shot.
Good stuff.
Thanks for finding and posting this.
6 hours of WWII deaths > # of US deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq.
That’s a bit of a perspective changer.
1, 2, 3, snap…
Fascinating article. Thanks for posting it. Doing the basic math with the numbers given, that would be over 60 million people who died in a war that lasted just under 6 years… 10 million [mostly] men a year!
One part, from the end of section #9 especially got my attention, because it’s a point I’ve belabored for years [regarding one enemy or another]:
“One residue of WWII is a tendency to narrowly define power in military terms, and to define threats in terms of traditional human enemies bent on doing ill. Climate change and our addiction to foreign oil have the potential to do more damage to American sovereignty and our way of life than anything al Qaeda can pull off.”