Why a blog on WWII?

When I was a kid, I was a sucker for the epic, the grand, the titanic battle between good and evil. That's World War II in a nutshell. Especially WWII as it's represented by most of the media right now.

As I grew up, I realized that the topic was much more complex -- even fractally complex -- and much more interesting because of it. From the sweeping strategies of world empires locked in a duel to the death to the thoughts running through the mind of the 19-year-old kid who was the first off the boat at Normandy, it's infinitely nuanced.

Alas, a lot of the scholarship on WWII these days is ... fawning. Brokaw's paeans to the "Greatest Generation" and Clint Eastwood's facile movies are unfortunate because they reduce what was a real, human, and subtle conflict to a cheap (if grand) myth.

I don't mean to demean the roles of the soldiers -- my two grandfathers both served, one in each theater. But I think that a deeper understanding of the world they lived allows me to appreciate their courage and sacrifices more thoroughly than I would if I just accepted the Hollywood gloss on the war. There are more stories than we can possibly cover in one movie -- from the purely evil (beheading contests on the streets of Nanking) to the nearly saintly (the fishermen at Dunkirk). But most of them are somewhere in between and I don't think it's demeaning to point out that it wasn't all good and evil back then. It was much more interesting.