WWII : more troops , longer war, but only 1/3 number of VCs

Canada had almost twice as many troops in WWII as in WWI, and it was a world-wide war that lasted 50% longer than the first war, but despite all this, Canada had less than 1/3 as many VC winners.

It is only given for bravery in face of the enemy, so the fact that  combat was far more mechanized in WWII ( ie fought at long distances from the enemy)  is often offered up as the excuse.

Dropping bombs from 20,000 ft might seem then to eliminate you from ever receiving a VC in theory --- but not in practise.

Bomber crews actually did get VCs ---- for trying to save fellow crew members  high up in the flak-filled skies.

The other view - mine anyway - is that people were less selflessly brave, over all,  in WWII than in the earlier war.

The character of virtually all the world's western-influenced population changed - for the worse - after WWI .

But not as a result of WWI , merely as the result of death carrying off the holders of older Victorian views on selflessness, replaced by the young bearers of the up-to-date, modernist , scientific, view of the proper morality:

"Be quick to defend your own national group to the death (and beyond) - but ignore or despise all others' cries for help."

In the 1930s and early 1940s, Philip Marlowe's mean streets were world wide......

UK made sure others died in WWII, rather than her own citizens

More people died in WII than in WWI, but not every combatant nation of WWII suffered worse (or even as badly) as they had in WWI.

The UK was the first in and last out of WWII, the only nation at war continuously the whole world war.

It was a far more deadly war and lasted for the UK, six years rather than four.

Its population during the last war was slightly larger than it was in WWI.

Yet, surprisingly, only about one third as many people died.

Dividing the total number of deaths (divided by the total number of war years) into the total wartime population , I get a figure for what I call the intensity of war deaths, one that is about one fifth as great for WWII as it was for WWI.

(Producing the percentage of total population who died in the war each year ---- admitably a very crude indice ---indicating one person in 200 died each year of WWI, versus one person in 1000 died per year in WWII.)

Put another way, in WWI the UK experienced a lot more total deaths over a slightly smaller population over only two thirds as many years of war.

Put yet another way, I am saying that 60,000 deaths spread over 10 years of war in a population of 250 million people (USA/Vietnam War) feels much less bad than to have a population of 2.5 million experience 800 deaths over a one week period (Israeli Jews/Six Day War).

The number of dead the UK experienced in head to head clashes between the Germany Army and the British Army in North West Europe for one month in 1940 and again for 11 months in 1944-1945, was very tiny set against the total of people dead as result of WWII.

Yet in a way, it was the key death-toll event of the entire war.

Because defeating the German Army upon German soil was the only way to end WWII quickly and at a minimum loss of life upon all sides.

It took six years for the UK to do to the German Army what it should have done in six weeks in 1939.

With Germany out of the war in 1939, Italy and Japan would never have gone on their quests for world wide conquest.

The French and British empires in combination in 1939 had a far far far far larger manpower pool to draw upon that the Germans so any land army war would have gone to the Allies in the end.

But a vast conscripted infantry/artillery-based army of British and Dominion working class enlisted men, in combination with millions of conscripted darkie soldiers from the colonies, all demanding benefits for having saved the Empire, was totally unacceptable to the British elite.

They wanted a war won by a few big very expensive machines, driven by a few well educated middle class very white British men : bombers, battleships and tanks.

In the event, they got their 'middle class war' and lost the support of their Dominions and Colonies in the process : hoisted on their own high tech petards in the end......

Seventy Five years later, has Death and Il-Health finally allowed a post-Modernist look at WWII to receive a fair hearing ?

Does Hamburg '43 still sizzle ?

All the grownup men who made the decisions to send tens of thousands of teenage boys off to die on German city bombing runs have long since gone to their rewards.


But the teenager bomber crew members still alive today seem resolute to go on defending the decisions of people like Bomber Harris, if only in order to preserve their own role in the bombing as something history and their grandchildren will still judge as honourable and worthy.

But every week more fall silent , due to death or il-health and one can hope a person can begin to ask probing questions without powerful media publishers and loud political senators baying for one's hide.

In Canada ,in 1982 and 1992, major controversies broke out over histories that questioned the received version of the roles of WWII Canadian war ace Billy Bishop and of Canada's bombing efforts over German cities, such as Hamburg in 1943.

 These protests were led in 1982 by WWI veterans in their eighties and in 1992 by WWII veterans in their seventies and eighties.

Now very few civilian children are left anywhere in the world who can remember anything of WWI firsthand.

Soon protest over the Allied actions at Hamburg will have to be led by a handful of surviving veterans of the raid in their frail nineties.

Eight years worth of 75th anniversaries of WWII...

The 75th anniversaries of the Munich Agreement , of Kristallnacht and of all the tense months leading up to WWII are coming up in a few months and a lot of modernist histories will be newly published, basically ringing variations on a theme that has been playing steadily since September 1945.

But I think it it is long past due time that a post Modernist take on both the least contested and the most controversial events of WWII
receive some publishing space.

I plan to publish some myself  in the years between September 2013 and September 2020 , as the 75th anniversary of WWII events slowly unfolds over the next 8 years.......

"The Children of HIGH MODERNITY" (1870 -1970)

     The generation of The Children of  High Modernity was born after 1870 and before the death of Queen Victoria in 1901.
     'Their War' was the Great War, WWI.
   They had children, usually when they were between 20 and 40.
    For their kids, 'their war' was WWII and they were flattered by being called "The Greatest Generation" by younger authors who wanted to sell lots of books to them.
    Their grandchildren were usually born between 1940 and 1960, the (Atomic) Boom Generation : 'their war' was Vietnam.
    For example, my grandfathers were born in the 1890s and served in WWI. Their kids were born in the 1920s and served in WWII.
     I, like virtually all their grandkids was born in the 1950s.
    While, as a Canadian, I wasn't expected to serve in Vietnam, some kids at my two high schools did volunteer to go do so.

     The possibility that a right wing government might send Canadian kids off, as right wing governments did in Australia and New Zealand ,was always on the minds of kids like me who were of prime draft age at the height of the Vietnam war.
   By the late 1960s, as one generation largely defended the Vietnam war and another one largely opposed it, The Children of High Modernity faded from the public discourse - through death or ill health.
   I wonder if they died angry, as they saw all that their High Modernity generation had done for (and to) the world, was beginning to come under sustained attack from their own grandchildren.....