What war fascinates/interests you the most?

[mix]

For me, it's the First World War: the collapse of ancient empires and the inhumanity of industrial warfare.

[liquid diamond]

1. The Civil War

We kicked the South's ass, crippled their economy, and ended slavery. They got what they deserved and still pay a price today. Fuckers.

[Are_grits_groceries]

61. "Still pay a price today"

And you wonder why the region is still different?

There are a lot of people here who have changed. We are still pushing.

The loudmouths get all the airtime.

It is a 2-way street. The cycle of hate isn't just from one side. Every time somebody bashes the South in terms that you have just used, people remember the war.

Except for the goofball secessionists & Confederacy freaks, people don't dwell on the Civil War 24/7.

How can we forget the war when it is constantly thrown at us all the time?

If people can't discuss the issues in modern terms, then it will never go away. I am not saying it should be forgotten. The horrendous nature of the war and slavery should still be a lesson never forgotten.

However, when every issue involving the South somehow circles back to that time, then the whole issue erupts again. It happens on DU with South bashing comments and threads.

I am so liberal my family and friends are gone. I keep pushing back so that the region will eventually change, and they will too.

DU can be a sanctuary. It can also be just another place to get bashed, and this time from another side. When you broadbrush the South with your comments, you hit me too.

Do you realize the toll that pushing back down here takes mentally and physically? Sometimes DU can just add to it.

Somebody will probably tell me to just leave DU.

{and no, I am not trying to claim that what I face is nearly as bad as the problems minorities still face. Unfortunately, there is till too long a way to go yet.)

[TransitJohn]

81. USA!! USA!! USA!!

[rockymountaindem]

2. World War Two

The massive clash of the 20th century's three ideologies, and the biggest war of all time with the highest stakes.

[lumberjack_jeff]

3. "I think World War II was my favorite war"

- Phil Fimple (Small Soldiers)

[Captain Hilts]

4. Yes, that first chapter in Guns of August about all the royalty really sucks you in...

'cause they're not there at the end.

I never tire of reading about WWII. LOVE FDR, Churchill, Eleanor, fleet boats, kids from nowheres Tennessee being in units with kids from Brooklyn, women and blacks getting a piece of the pie, Stalingrad, P-51s, FDR and Churchill and the ship crews all singing hymns together - that should have been Hitler's clue NOT to bring the US into the fight, etc.

[1620rock]

6. The civil war....may be time to kick the fucker's asses again.

[proteus_lives]

35. Oh, I love Guns of August.

One of my all-time favorite books.

[Merchant Marine]

40. Reading about the heroism of WW2 Merchant Mariners

got me into the industry. The story of the SS Stephen Hopkins always chokes me up, especially the cadet manning the 4" gun until he's killed.

The SS Stephen Hopkins was a United States Merchant Marine Liberty ship that served in World War II. She was the first US ship to sink a German surface combatant during the war.

She was built at the Permanente Metals Corporation (Kaiser) shipyards in Richmond, California. Her namesake was Stephen Hopkins, a signer of the Declaration of Independence from Rhode Island.

She completed her first cargo run, but never made it home. On September 27, 1942, en route from Cape Town to Dutch Guiana, she encountered the German commerce raider Stier (German for 'bull') and her tender the Tannenfels. Because of fog, the ships were only two miles (3 km) apart when they sighted each other.

Ordered to stop, the Stephen Hopkins refused to surrender, and the Stier opened fire. Although greatly outgunned, the crew of the Hopkins fought back, replacing the crew of the ship's lone 4 inch (102 mm) gun with volunteers as they fell. The fight was fierce and short, and by its end both ships were wrecks.

The Stephen Hopkins sank at 10:00. The Stier, too heavily damaged to continue its voyage, was scuttled by its crew less than two hours later. Most of the crew of the Hopkins died, including captain Paul Buck. The survivors drifted on a lifeboat for a month before reaching shore in Brazil.

Captain Buck was posthumously awarded the Merchant Marine Distinguished Service Medal for his actions. So was Merchant Marine Academy cadet Edwin Joseph O'Hara, who single-handedly fired the last shots from the ship's 4-inch gun. O'Hara was the second cadet to win this award, and the first to win it posthumously. Navy reservist Lt. (j.g.) Kenneth Martin Willett, gun boss for the 4-inch gun, was posthumously awarded the Navy Cross.

[mix]

41. that is a story i will not forget, thanks nt

[Captain Hilts]

58. As a submariner's kid and afficianado, being in a liberty ship was pretty sobering.

That HUGE compartment and no water tight door!

[Merchant Marine]

92. Oil and Gas tankers were the worst.

They'd go up like roman candles when hit, usually with 100% casualties. Those old sailors were a different breed. There's a story about one old salt who had four ships torpedoed out from under him in a 4 week period. He kept signing up for another voyage.

[givemebackmycountry]

5. Viet Nam - because I had a number for that one...

It was the first rock and roll war, and the one I grew up in.
And we didn't learn a freaking thing from it.

[nadinbrzezinski]

7. WW II but that is because dad went thorugh it

and our modern crap since hubby went through it.

Kind of personal...

[BuyingThyme]

8. The holocaust in Iraq.

[rug]

9. The Third Punic War

Carthago delenda est.

[Cant trust em]

10. WWII. Particularly from the British perspective.

I think about living in London and being bombed by the Nazis.

[Electric Monk]

11. The war on abstract nouns

Terror. Drugs. Poverty. Grammar.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1364012/Why-grammar-is-the-first-casualty-of-war.html


/Let's go bomb murder

[Libertas1776]

12. I'd have to go with WWI

for its far reaching effects, which included, of course, WWII. Not to mention its absolute absurdity. Anyone can argue that all wars are absurd, but WWI was truly a special kind of absurd IMHO.

[rockymountaindem]

15. Yeah, WWI was a special kind of absurd

It's difficult to quantify, but WWI really took it to the next level in terms of total senselessness.

[ZombieHorde]

13. World War Z of course. nt

[proteus_lives]

37. "Organize before They rise!"

Think the movie will be any good?

[ZombieHorde]

45. I really hope so. If the movie blows, I am going to pout and bitch. nt

[proteus_lives]

49. Right there with you.

I'll be happy to contribute to an epic bitch-fest if it's disappointing.

I hope it's good. After Zombieland, I'm jonesing for more Zombie Apocalypse on the big screen.

[LuvNewcastle]

14. Civil War

Shelby Foote's books are the best.

[whoneedstickets]

16. The War on Poverty...

..since it seems to be the only one in which we surrendered.

[Confusious]

17. World War 2

The end of innocence. The end of one age, and the beginning of another.

[dysfunctional press]

18. the next world war.

it's coming.

[tkarolewics711]

19. Definitely the Civil War

[XemaSab]

20. World War II has so many facets...

The Pacific, France, Russia, North Africa... all the way back to the Japanese, Native Americans, Blacks, and women who contributed at home.

[Captain Hilts]

21. There's something for everybody.

[XemaSab]

23. I forgot Nazis

:banghead:

[KillCapitalism]

38. Those Soviet soldiers had balls of steel.

You'd never catch me perched in a place like that holding a flag...that's just f*ckin scary.

[nadinbrzezinski]

39. It helps when the Komisar is in the rear with a maxim

aimed at you.

:-)

[Thothmes]

51. That was a reenactment

The first Soviet soldiers on top of the Reichstag did not have a soviet flag. The soldier in this photo die about two years ago.

[Captain Hilts]

57. Yes, I read that. nt

[daleo]

22. The War on Christmas

I love a good phony war.

[Vickers]

43. Har!

:thumbsup:

[Kaleva]

24. The Civil War

Where Napoleonic tactics and strategy crashed into modern technology.

[exman]

25. French Revolution

The economic causes of that war and their parallels in America today are hard to ignore. When the rich have ALL of the wealth and the rest have nothing....I'd sure like to replace that Wall St. bull statue with a guillotine, just as a reminder of the consequences of unrestrained greed/corruption....

[nolabear]

26. I hate war.

[mix]

32. me too

[ddeclue]

27. The Hundred Years War...

I mean why did it go on so long anyways?

:shrug:

[TygrBright]

29. Because (essentially) you had the same situation we have today, except with no voters.

So you had the French royalty, clergy and nobility; versus the English royalty, clergy and nobility.

The war allowed the royalty to consolidate power to a centralized, state-oriented entity (as opposed to a bunch of feudal mini-states with nearly equal power.)

The war allowed the nobility to gain plunder, ransoms, fame, and fun.

The war allowed the clergy to keep playing powerful factions off against each other to preserve both sides of a divided Papacy, not to mention oodles of loot gained via the wills of knights killed in battle for saying perpetual masses for their souls.

The war allowed peasants to get killed, robbed, raped, starved, taxed, dispossessed, burned out, and otherwise devastated.

So the people with all the power had, essentially, NO incentive to give up the war. They just kept right on fighting until neither side had much in the way of a working economy and they had to break it off because there simply weren't any resources left to fight with.

Read Tuchman's "A Distant Mirror" if you want the detailed version.

helpfully,
Bright

[Monk06]

64. Because back in the olden days they couldn't print money. They needed gold and a trustworthy banker.

Which meant they had to take a rest every once
in a while to save up for the next round.

[jotsy]

28. That age old, on going battle between man and the worst of own nature that makes war.

Adversarial relationships seem to be an axiomatic byproduct of interaction, whether close up near or far flung, they tend try and apply themselves as a political structure of some kind in just about every imaginable setting. Spent too much time lately thinking about why it is that any value found in open ended peaceful coexistence pales in comparison to man's need to conquer. The tools now are so much more diverse and lots of damage being done before a single drop of blood is spilled. The US is a battle zone dealing with the wake of economic warfare. One might think with all the other ways to engage in conflict, it might serve to quench any thirst to kill one another, but that doesn't seem to be the case, does it?

[yasmina27]

30. The Hundred Years War

and Jean d'Arc's role in it.

[SIMPLYB1980]

31. I would have to say the war between

Lagash and Umma in 2525 B.C.

http://joseph_berrigan.tripod.com/ancientbabylon/id46.html

"Around 4000 B.C. city-states began to develope  in ancient Mesopotamia. With their growth, conflicts developed among them.Warfare often arose as the result of wealth, control of the Tigris and Euphrates for transportation and irrigation, boundary disputes, and the need to acquire luxury goods such as timber, stone and metals. The almost constant occurrence of war among the city-states of Sumer for two thousand years spurred the development of military technology and technique far beyond that found elsewhere at the time. Although it is not the earliest conflict, the first war for which there is any detailed evidence occurred between Lagash and Umma in 2525 B.C., two Sumerian cities located eighteen miles apart."

[mix]

33. thanks for that nt

[Throd]

34. Spanish Civil War

I used to live where they had some major battles. I would go hunting for artifacts. I did find a few bullets.

[proteus_lives]

36. WWII.

So many good books on it. I have read hundreds and there will always be more for me to read.

Plus I had several older relatives that fought and I grew up with their stories.

[Kaleva]

42. The most interesting story I heard related to WWII was...

about a group of Koreans who were drafted to serve in the Japanese Army and they were captured by the Russians in a border skirmish. They were later captured by the Germans on the Eastern Front who sent them to work in France where they were captured by Americans after D-Day.

[Thothmes]

52. I liked the story of the American in the 82nd AB division

captured at Normandy, escaped from a German prison camp in Poland. Stumbled across a Soviet tank column of one of Marshall Zukov's armies. Asked where they were going, the column commander said "Berlin". The American asked if he could come along. The Soviets gave him a weapon and put him on the back of a tank. He spent the next six weeks as a tank rider in the Soviet Army. He was eventually wounded. Marshall Zukov paid him visit in the field hospital. The American asked him when could he return to his unit. The Marshal thought he ment to his American unit. The GI answered, no, his Soviet tank outfit. Marshal Zukov then told him that his service in the Soviet Army was over and he would be sent back to Moscow to the American embassy.

[Zomby Woof]

44. The War Between The States

As Shelby Foote called it, "the crossroads of our being".

[politicat]

46. Napoleonic Wars.

Between the cult of personalities, the underlying causes (the failure of the French Revolution, the preceding century's caloric increase due to the widespread adoption of potatoes and maize and the resultant population growth, the growth of information technologies and globalization and transportation), the political bait-and-switches that all sides used, the invention of modern spycraft... what's not to find fascinating?

ETA: Also, the Regency period is an amazing sociological experiment, being the end of the Enlightenment and the beginning of the Romantic period, marking the birth of some of the conflicts we are still fighting -- empiricism versus romanticism, logic versus feeling, industrialization versus romantic environmentalism, the beginnings of the conflict between economic determinism and social welfare, the beginnings of feminism and women's rights...

[armyowalgreens]

47. The war on the planet is pretty fascinating.

And god damn are we winning it well.

[virginia mountainman]

48. US Civil War, till the Vietnam War, special emphasis on WWII..

I love all facets of Military history, and I have quite a collection of functional, and historically significant military firearms, from all over the world, and dating from 1880 till present day.

[Mimosa]

50. ITA, Mix

It seemed a war for no real cause save power grabbing and to get control of resources. I've a friend who says all wars are really about 'the stuff.'

[Undercurrent]

53. The Revolutionary War

n/t

[Thothmes]

54. The American Civil War and WWII

particularly the Soviet side of the war in Europe. My favorite photos of the war (besides the Iwo photo) are pictures of Soviet Army tanks laden with Untermensch rummbling down the streets of the capital of the Herrenvolk.

[Ichingcarpenter]

55. The Peloponnesian War

the Peloponnesian War marked the dramatic end to the fifth-century-B.C. golden age of Greece.

[Sinti]

56. War is a Racket

http://warisaracket.org/ They are all fail.

[Captain Hilts]

60. Gee, I'm glad we didn't "fail" in 1945. nt

[Sinti]

63. Yes, I understand the good guys won "the good war"

but just think if we (and I mean the world) had read Mein Kampf, and paid attention to what he was saying. They would have known what he was about, and could have not sold him arms - given money for arms, etc? Do you think they didn't believe what he was saying? WWII was preventable, like every other conflict. I'd much rather prevent a war than win it - that's just me though.

[Captain Hilts]

66. WWII might have been preventable had folks listened to that shit, Wilson, OR

if we'd lost the First World War.

Everything socialists told us about the First World War ended up being true. Ain't history ironic?

[Sinti]

67. It's just so sad - so much loss

We learn the wrong lessons. At least they got it right after WWII and did the Marshall Plan, giving the regular people back something to build on. They sell war to you now on TV, like it's a product you might enjoy. F'd up.

[Captain Hilts]

68. My great uncle Richard was killed at the Somme. Since then, we've been awfully lucky.

I was at Bethesda Naval two years ago and there was a guy there who had lost his leg and had been in the hospital for a year. He was about to go to Walter Reed to learn to use a new leg. His mother was pushing his wheelchair. She looked at me and said, "His brother is scheduled to go to Iraq in two weeks." Not fair.

[Sinti]

69. Ouch! Really not fair. We've got to learn to use our minds more n/t

[jonnyblitz]

59. lately the Spanish Civil War but usually WW II. nt

[Captain Hilts]

65. The Spanish Civil War is VERY interesting!

In the novel, "Mr. Roberts," - and it isn't in the movie - Doug Roberts is put on a supply ship and not a combatant because it's on his record he applied to the Lincoln Brigade.

[YouTakeTheSkyway]

86. Have You Read "Homage to Catalonia"?

It's George Orwell's book on his time fighting in the Spanish Civil War. Very interesting.

[wuvuj]

62. Fuck wars...they are for fools.

...

[JBoy]

70. The Anglo-Zanzibar War. It lasted 38 minutes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Zanzibar_War

[philly_bob]

71. History buffs: this is a very interesting threads. Why UNREC?

I understand UNRECs from those who oppose war. I oppose war too. But lighten up. Where are you going to learn about the 38-minute Anglo-Zanzibar war or the first recorded war in 2500 B.C.?

[mix]

72. Hobsbawm on the recent past:

"The 20th century was the most murderous in recorded history. The total number of deaths caused by or associated with its wars has been estimated at 187m, the equivalent of more than 10% of the world's population in 1913. Taken as having begun in 1914, it was a century of almost unbroken war, with few and brief periods without organised armed conflict somewhere. It was dominated by world wars: that is to say, by wars between territorial states or alliances of states.

The period from 1914 to 1945 can be regarded as a single "30 years' war" interrupted only by a pause in the 1920s - between the final withdrawal of the Japanese from the Soviet Far East in 1922 and the attack on Manchuria in 1931. This was followed, almost immediately, by some 40 years of cold war, which conformed to Hobbes's definition of war as consisting "not in battle only or the act of fighting, but in a tract of time wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known".

http://www.counterpunch.org/hobsbawm1.html

[Tsar_Bomba]

73. The clone wars

Just kidding... WW1 is fascinating history and the lead up to the start of the Soviet Union. I still don't understand really why it started and why the US got involved, guess I have to live it at the time to understand.

[Tsar_Bomba]

75. I was also a navigator on a spice freighter at that time

[TwilightGardener]

74. Civil War.

[Lilith Velkor]

76. The American Revolution.

[TransitJohn]

77. The War on Drugs

and it's continuing tragedy.

[One_Life_To_Give]

78. WW2 Pacific Theater, Naval engagements

Battles such as fought by the Anglo-British-Dutch-Austrailian command, Battles of Savo Island, etc.

[HamdenRice]

79. The hundred years of war that gave birth to South Africa, from the Zulu Wars to the Boer War

There are so many fascinating characters, and various hybrid cultures emerging.

It's completely not what one would expect. It's certainly not "white versus black."

Zulus versus almost all other African kingdoms;

British versus Cape Dutch empire (part of Napleonic wars which gave SA to Britain);

British versus Xhosa;

British plus Coloured versus Boers;

Moshoeshoe building the defensive kingdom of Lesotho on the basis of forgivenesss and peacefulness;

"Bastaards" (frontier Coloured) versus Tswana;

Matebele versus Tswana;

Boers plus Coloured versus Zulus;

Boers plus Tswana plus Coloured versus Matebele;

Boers versus Lesotho;

Tswana with help of British freelancers, like Livingstone, versus Boers;

Boers versus British (First Boer War);

British and Swazi versus BaPedi;

British versus Zulus;

It just kind of goes on and on and reaches a crescendo with the British (with numerous African allies, especially the Tswana) versus the Boers in the Second Boer War.

The end result is this giant country that no one power seemed to have intentionally wanted to create -- not even really the British Empire.

[AngryAmish]

80. TekWar

on edit, Tamerlane
s campaigns always have a special place in my heart -- and it is very hard to learn about them nowadays.

[NeedleCast]

82. Probably World War II

While horrible, it led to many of the modern marvels we have today.

[Posteritatis]

83. I'd love to see the answers to this asked in different places..

DU's heavily American-focused - and rightly so, obviously - but I wonder what the answers would be in a hypothetical DU-scale forum mainly populated by Canadians, or Russians, or Indians, or Turks. It's interesting seeing different societies' takes on What The Important Big Events Were, which ones each group thought the others were overlooking entirely.

For instance, as a Canadian WWI and WWII - particularly WWI - resonate far more with me than Vietnam or (despite our participation there) Korea, and not simply due to the scales involved. I've also got an on-again-off-again interest in the Boer War, which was really something of a Vietnam for the British Empire, not to mention Canada's first foreign war.

Overall though, I'd say the First World War, for the combination of the scope and madness of it, the extent of the effects of it (our history's still being defined by things that happened then), and some of the events that wound up kicking it off. Princip's shot was kind of a "for want of a nail" run spectacularly in reverse...

[mix]

84. That's a great point about different perspectives. nt

[laststeamtrain]

85. The War Between The Imbeciles & The Morons.

The fate of idiots everywhere depends on the outcome.

[ceile]

87. Don't know if you'd call it a "war"

But "modern" Irish history. Ireland totally fascinates me. Wrote my graduating thesis on the Good Friday Agreement.

[H2O Man]

88. The war on poverty.

[Fuzz]

89. Any war that is successfully avoided.

[Posteritatis]

90. You may be being flippant, but those close calls and diplomatic successes really are interesting. nt

[Fuzz]

95. Not being flippant at all actually.

[Posteritatis]

96. In that case, I agree entirely without reservation!

I've had Stanislav Petrov in my head the last couple of weeks, seeing as it was recently the anniversary of his not getting us all nuked.

[slackmaster]

91. World War II - It had been over for less than 13 years when I was born

When I was a child in the '60s, when members of my parents' generation referred "The War" there was no ambiguity about which war they were talking about, even during the worst of the Vietnam War and with the Korean "conflict" only recently brought to a stalemate.

The War provided jobs for many people I have known. It kept my stepfather in the Navy several years longer than he had planned on serving, and provided a path from his wartime duties as a Radioman and later as a rifle instructor, to the one and only job he had in civilian life - Electronic design engineer for a major defense contractor. He had lied about his age to enter the service at 15 to get out of desperate poverty, and never attended high school.

My mother has many stories about the people in her small town in Iowa accumulating scrap metal and meat drippings to contribute to the war effort. There was rationing of gasoline, shortages of just about everything, but her father's monthly allotment checks from the Navy were the most income her family had ever seen.

The War transformed our country into the dominant world power, and for better and worse led to the development of nuclear weapons and computers. The protracted pissing match known as the Cold War was a direct result of the conditions that existed at the end of World War II, and that has shaped the lives of Americans and others in many ways. In the mid-1960s we still had weekly tests of air raid sirens near my home, and I remember duck-and-cover drills at school.

You can still see remnants of World War II all over San Diego. I find it very interesting to sit down with people who served in it or lived through it and just let them talk.

[a la izquierda]

93. Mexican Revolution

Who can possibly say they don't like Emiliano Zapata?

[HamdenRice]

97. "Zapata and the Mexican Revolution" had a huge effect on me when I read it!

Not just the story, but the historian being such a fanatic for detail. Iirc, and it was over 30 years ago, the book starts out with the historian, Womack, telling the color of Zapata's pancho as he decides to join the revolution!

That was an era of micro history detail!

[a la izquierda]

99. I had to read it for my PhD exams...

loved it.

You might like Pancho Villa, by Friedrich Katz. It's 1100 pages, but it's really good.

[kwassa]

94. East Coast vs. West Coast hiphop artistes.

[change_notfinetuning]

98. The current wars interest me most, today, because they are the only ones

we can still do anything about. If only we had leaders who learned the lessons from previous wars. I'm guessing the Vietnam War had still not made the history books when President Obama was in school and he was too young to appreciate the lessons as it occurred.

Then again, Obama's idol, President Lincoln, got us into a miserable war when the best thing he could have done was let the South secede. Is it too late for that? I, for one, am ready to wave the white flag.

[Mudoria]

100. The War of the Roses

York vs Lancaster. Armies clashing, beheadings, intrigue, double dealing... it had it all.