World War II, The anti-US version Options

When will Oberiko and his group stop?

He's won just about every argument he's had, and still keeps going.

He's got the article under constant semi-protection.
He's deleted the American picture from the lead montage, and now there are 2 Soviet, 2 Commonwealth, and 2 Japanese.
The Intro and infobox refuse to say that the war started in 1939, and the 1937/39 debate continues.
The Intro and infobox don't list the major combatants
The major commanders aren't listed anywhere in the article. (For fun, try to find "Eisenhower" or "Zhukov" anywhere on the page using Edit --> Find on this Page.)

The entire article is written in Oberiko's weird wiki-summary style where the proper names of events are hidden within Wiki-links. See the Normandy Invasion coverage, in its entirety:

In June, 1944, the Western Allies invaded northern France

And check my favorite passage:

The Soviets decided to make their stand at Stalingrad which was in the path of the advancing German armies and by mid-November the Germans had nearly taken Stalingrad in bitter street fighting when the Soviets began their second winter counter-offensive, starting with an encirclement of German forces at Stalingrad[94] and an assault on the Rzhev salient near Moscow, though the latter failed disastrously.[95

I've been following the article for years now, and seen people come and go but basically anyone who doesn't agree with Oberiko gets frustrated and leaves. He's not afraid to swing his administrator status and have people blocked who edit war with him or Parsecboy.

I could go through line by line and point out not only anti-Western and anti-American bias, but also outright errors. Take the first line of the Background section:

In the aftermath of World War I, the defeated German Empire signed the Treaty of Versailles.[7]

How does anyone not notice this for months and months? I've been watching it as an experiment to see if Wikipedians will ever get a clue, but, well, you see. Later in the background you'll find out that Germany's goal with Austria was to make it a "satellite state". Both of these statements are referenced too?

Insult to injury: the Holocaust is described as "the systematic purging of Jews in Europe". Well I'm pretty sure English isn't Oberiko's first language, but then why doesn't anyone help him? Oh right, because it's so obvious that the article is Owned that you'd be an idiot to try to help.

I know this breaks my rule of thumb not to help Wikipedia myself, but it is the number one search result and I'm feeling a bit of remorse just letting it fester, with it being around D-Day this week and having just recently talked to guy who was a B-29 pilot based in Saipan. I can't believe a generation of kids might be seeing their first encyclopedia article about WWII on Wikipedia.

This post has been edited by Emperor: Tue 10th June 2008, 9:40pm

This article does have a non-American POV, but I did not read anything that would be in my opinion be an error.

It was the Soviets who defeated the Germans. Before June, 1944 that vast majority of the allied forces fighting against Germany were from the Soviet Union and before the Allies opened up another front in Normandy in June, 1944 it was already certain that the Germans were going to be defeated.

This article does have a non-American POV, but I did not read anything that would be in my opinion be an error.

It was the Soviets who defeated the Germans. Before June, 1944 that vast majority of the allied forces fighting against Germany were from the Soviet Union and before the Allies opened up another front in Normandy in June, 1944 it was already certain that the Germans were going to be defeated.

Is it not equally obvious that had the war involved only Germany and Russia, leaving Germany access to world trade, that Russia would have been soundly defeated?

This post has been edited by Proabivouac: Tue 10th June 2008, 9:48pm

This article does have a non-American POV, but I did not read anything that would be in my opinion be an error.

It was the Soviets who defeated the Germans. Before June, 1944 that vast majority of the allied forces fighting against Germany were from the Soviet Union and before the Allies opened up another front in Normandy in June, 1944 it was already certain that the Germans were going to be defeated.

Is it not equally obvious that had the war involved only Germany and Russia, leaving Germany access to world trade, that Russia would have been soundly defeated?

The Russians get the credit for doing a large fraction of the fighting and most of the military dying in the European theater of WW II. But yes, if the Germans had captured Moscow and the oil fields, it would have been all over for the USSR, and with those oil fields, the Germans would have (temporarily) won the game of RISK.

Until we atom bombed them sometime after August 1945, that is. But that was a wild joker nobody really knew would or could be played, until the previous month.

As it was, the USSR came within a hair's breadth of losing it. And that's with massive Allied material aid, and a fair amount of Allied pin-down of German armies in Africa and Italy, which otherwise would have been decisive in the East. Much as in WW I, it really did take everybody to beat the Germans in "conventional" war.

Unlike WW I, however, if everybody had not been able to win conventionally, the US still would have atom bombed the Germans into glowing embers, no matter how well they'd done, sometime in 1946. The Germans just could not reach the US with anything damaging, and would not have been able to, for some years. They had no aircraft carriers, and their plans for ultralong-range bombers were going to carry what? Nothing of consequence can be carried 3000 miles, except a nuke. But with an atom bomb, you can reach a long way and touch someone. If we assume Germany had totally won in Europe (including against the UK), we could not have used the B-29 against them (no place to base it), and the bombs of 1945 couldn't be dropped from anything else. But smaller bombs dropable from carrier-launched B-25s would have been available within another year, and that would have been it, for Germany. It's well that it didn't end that way, but it could have. And certainly would have.

This post has been edited by Milton Roe: Tue 10th June 2008, 10:11pm

If we assume Germany had totally won in Europe (including against the UK), we could not have used the B-29 against them (no place to base it), and the bombs of 1945 couldn't be dropped from anything else. But smaller bombs dropable from carrier-launched B-25s would have been available within another year, and that would have been it, for Germany. It's well that it didn't end that way, but it could have. And certainly would have.

The fire-bombing of Dresden was pretty awful, and as close to atomic weaponry as conventional bombs can be. I drove through there right after the wall fell, and it was still pretty much of a mess, as were the highways which didn't see repairs the entire 50 year period.

Is it not equally obvious that had the war involved only Germany and Russia, leaving Germany access to world trade, that Russia would have been soundly defeated?

You mean if they were the only two countries in the world? Really, you cannot conjecture thus, or you have an entire new framework to add to ex post facto history. The US entry to the war was incredibly important. This was the frame of reference for the first 50 years after the war's end.

If there are anti-American, or US-minimization elements on those articles, my guess is that they are twenty-somethings. There seems to be a sort of generational Euro-youth backlash against the pro-American gratitude of their parents. I've seen that myriad in the past 10 or so years.

The fire-bombing of Dresden was pretty awful, and as close to atomic weaponry as conventional bombs can be.

The death toll was substantially greater than Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The death toll was substantially greater than Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Yes. That doesn't get a lot of historical attention as it is somehow overshadowed by other events (Normandy, atom bombs, etc). I saw a documentary on it for the first time when living in Europe, and I thought I'd read tons on WW2 and seen tons of biopics when back in the US. I had no idea what the firebombing did there. Apparently anyone in some certain radius got fried. There was simply no place to hide. If you were in a bomb shelter underground, that wasn't safe. The only way to survive was to not be there, period.

When I drove through there immediately post wall-came-down, the town was so undeveloped that there was only one hotel for like 400 dollars a night, and really nothing else in terms of small hotels. And the city was still a mess. I've been back and it's totally different. The post-unification German government poured millions into reconstruction in the past 10 years.

Here, editors from ex-Soviet states still stick to the near 50-year USSR doctrine that the Pact never existed and was a Western fabrication.

Thats strange. I wonder what is the editor demographic of that ilk. I've never met an Eastern European who had that position. Maybe a Russian or two, but they were hooked in to the old appararichnik system by family (usually parents), and they were somehow obligated to speak so, and so arguing with them would have been almost rude. You know, those just-nod-and-smile-why-argue conversations.

This post has been edited by Disillusioned Lackey: Wed 11th June 2008, 7:10am

The death toll was substantially greater than Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Yes. That doesn't get a lot of historical attention as it is somehow overshadowed by other events (Normandy, atom bombs, etc). I saw a documentary on it for the first time when living in Europe, and I thought I'd read tons on WW2 and seen tons of biopics when back in the US. I had no idea what the firebombing did there. Apparently anyone in some certain radius got fried. There was simply no place to hide. If you were in a bomb shelter underground, that wasn't safe. The only way to survive was to not be there, period.

The most horrifying feature was that Dresden had no military significance. The bombing was carried out as a macabre experiment in psychological warfare, by the Strategic Bombing Survey (see this article.)

A major reason why there is little attention to this in the Allied countries is because it was a deliberate attack on a civilian population, and widespread recognition of that would sully the idea that our side was always fighting the good fight.

Yes, but by that metric, Hiroshima and Nagasaki should also be unmentionables. I had the impression that at that point, strategic attacks such as the three aforementioned were not politically-incorrect, given the vast desire to end the war. Or.... if that's true, then why were N and H ok, but D not?

Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not "OK," either. The emperor of Japan had already made a back-channel offer of surrender, under the same terms that were later agreed to on the USS Missouri. His overture was rebuffed, because a faction in the civilian leadership of the US was eager to try out atomic weapons, on civilian targets, in order to create a certain psychological effect on the rest of the world.

The most horrifying feature was that Dresden had no military significance. The bombing was carried out as a macabre experiment in psychological warfare, by the Strategic Bombing Survey (see this article.)

Sorry, I stopped reading that article when I saw this: "hit the nation's that might sponsor them". What motivates writers to put in a possessive apostrophe when they simply mean to construct a plural noun?

Not so fast on Dresden. It all depends on what you consider "military significance". That is disputed. I'm not trying to gloss over the human disgraces that took place at Allied hands during World War II -- quite the contrary. But it is also worth considering that some portion of the Dresden story is based on a heap of post-war mythology.

That being said, my undergraduate honors thesis on the broader subject is available for reading if you're ever in the stacks at Woodruff Library at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. (U4.5 .K65) Maybe you can get it through inter-library loan. It's only "magna" cum laude quality, though. Don't knock yourself out.

Not so fast on Dresden. It all depends on what you consider "military significance". That is disputed. I'm not trying to gloss over the human disgraces that took place at Allied hands during World War II -- quite the contrary. But it is also worth considering that some portion of the Dresden story is based on a heap of post-war mythology.

All cities almost everywhere during the war had some military significance. It's a question of proportion.

From that link: He also notes that Dresden was a hotbed of Nazi sympathy and anti-Semitism. Is that really a good enough excuse to firebomb it? Going only from that article, the whole thing sounds too apologetic to me.

There is some post-war mythology involved, for sure. But don't forget that some of it comes from the Allied side, who excuse Dresden with "well, they deserved it"