A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

© 1986, 2022 MicroProse/Atari  Back in the late 1980s, when I was in college, my father’s brother Sixto gave me my first computer, an Apple IIe with a color monitor and an ImageWriter printer. I had learned to use Apple computers at Miami-Dade Community College’s Apple Lab, so naturally, when I had an opportunity to get a computer of my own, I chose one that I was familiar with instead of what was then the less user-friendly IBM PC. I used my new computer primarily for college-related stuff; when I got it, I was already two-thirds of the way into the Spring Term at Miami-Dade and had a paper due for my Music Appreciation class. (As I recall, it wasn’t a term paper but a comparison of two recordings of a theme by John Williams from the score of The Empire Strikes Back. ) I received my Apple IIe only a few days before it was due, so it proved extremely useful to my academic endeavors right off the bat. Obviously, I also used my computer for gaming. Hell, I’m nearly 60 years old ...

Geography was not a factor in most cases. If you were living in Miami, Florida any time after the draft was reinstated in the fall of 1940 (due to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s declaration of a national emergency) and happened to get the “Greetings! The President of the United States and your neighbors…” letter from the Selective Service office, where you went while in the armed forces was pretty much determined by the needs of the service branch you were in. Thus, if you were a Floridian, you would not necessarily be sent to the Caribbean Command, North Africa, or the European Theater of Operations/ETO (including the Mediterranean Theater). You could be just as easily be sent to serve in the China-Burma-India Theater, the Philippines (before Pearl Harbor), or the South Pacific. Heck, you also had a chance to be stationed Stateside, if the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, or Coast Guard needed you there. The only major exception to this: the Japanese-American volunteers who s...

Today is Sunday, September 1, 2019. As I write this, it's hot, muggy, and cloudy in my corner of the world. And as Hurricane Dorian churns toward the northern Bahamas as a monster Category Five storm, we Floridians are keeping a wary watch. Most of the forecast tracks are predicting that Dorian will head west for a bit, then turn north and stay just off Florida's East Coast as it makes its destructive way toward Georgia and the Carolinas. I wish I could say for sure that my area is totally out of the woods; I know that my former hometown of Miami is probably not going to be affected because Dorian's eye is already almost parallel to northern Broward/southern Palm Beach Counties. But if the storm doesn't turn to the north within the next 24-36 hours, its outer bands will affect Central Florida and maybe even the Tampa Bay area in some way. Per the National Hurricane Center's 11 AM advisory: SUMMARY OF 1100 AM EDT...1500 UTC...INFORMATION ------------------...

Did only John Basilone and the Iwo Jima Marines (involved in raising the flag) sell War Bonds during World War II? No. There were thousands of people who sold war bonds during the seven or so War Bond Drives that took place between 1941 and 1945. Gunnery Sergeant John Basilone and the three surviving Iwo Jima flag raisers (John Bradley might not have been one of them, according to recent Marine Corps historical researchers, but he was believed to have been at the time) were just the tip of the war bonds iceberg. Many Americans, ranging from movie stars such as Clark Gable and Carole Lombard (she died in a plane crash while participating in a War Bond Drive) to ordinary citizens in small towns such as Luverne, Minnesota.

Did General George S. Patton retire from the military? No. George S. Patton, Jr. was still on active duty as commander of the U.S. Fifteenth Army in Germany at the time of his death on December 21, 1945, in a military hospital in Heidelberg. Patton had been only recently reassigned from the Third Army, which at the time was part of the U.S. occupation forces in western Germany. He was relieved from his most famous command on October 7, 1945; one week later, he assumed command of the Fifteenth Army, which by then was only a small establishment of military researchers and clerks charged with recording recent military history based on after-action reports and interviews with Allied and Axis military personnel and civilians. At first, Patton tried to put a positive spin on his new assignment; at one point he claimed he was thrilled because he had been enthralled with military history since he was seven years old. In reality, though, Patton was restless and soon lost interest in ...

A German language map showing the last two years of World War II in Europe. (Credit: Wikicommons Media) Why did the Western Allies take such a risk at Normandy? Why did they not just push through Italy? There were several reasons involved in the choice of invading German-occupied Europe via Northern France rather than from the Balkans or the Italian peninsula, all of which were based on geography and basic principles of military strategy, tactics, and logistics. U.S. soldiers wade toward Omaha Beach in Normandy, June 6, 1944. (Photo Credit: U.S. Coast Guard) The first basic consideration we must address is this: What was the mission of the Allied Expeditionary Force in 1944? This was the directive given to Gen. Dwight D. “Ike” Eisenhower by his superiors, the Combined Chiefs of Staff when he assumed command of the AEF in January 1944: “You will enter the continent of Europe, and undertake operations aimed at the heart of Germany and the destruction of her armed forces...

When Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower arrived in London from the Mediterranean Theater of Operations in January of 1944 to take command of the Allied Expeditionary Force and carry out Operation Overlord, the site of the invasion - Normandy - had already been selected. Planning for an eventual invasion of France was already well underway by January 15, 1944; before Eisenhower was selected as Supreme Commander, Allied Expeditionary Force, Lt. Gen. Frederick Morgan of the British Army had already crafted a preliminary invasion plan under his title of presumptive Chief of Staff, Supreme Allied Commander (Designate), or COSSAC. After taking the COSSAC assignment in March of 1943, Morgan and his planning staff looked at their maps of occupied Northwest Europe in search of possible landing sites on the northern coast of France, the likeliest target for an invasion due to its proximity to Britain and its southern ports of embarkation. The Pas de Calais was ruled out almost right away even ...

British paratroopers make a combat jump in Operation Market Garden. Photo Credit: Imperial War Museum  Someone on Quora asks: Was World War II a continuation of World War I? In many ways, yes. In fact, I’ve read (in Antony Beevor’s 2012 one-volume history,  The Second World War,  I believe it was) that some historians consider the European war of 1939–1945 to be the conclusion of a single European conflict that began in August of 1914 and, after a two-decade intermission in which both sides rearmed and reconsidered their strategies, resumed in September of 1939, ending only with the destruction of Germany and the old European world order and the rise of the Soviet Union and the United States as the dominant superpowers. There are even convincing theses floating out there that suggest that if you add the Cold War to the mix, you can connect most of the chaos and misery of the 20th Century to the yin-and-yang struggle between the Left and the Right that beg...

The answer is simple: The Axis powers consisted of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and a militaristic, aggressive, and expansionist Japan, plus various satellite nations (such as Hungary, Romania, and (for a time) Finland. The Axis nations were led by Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Hideki Tojo, three guys who would never earn the Mr. Congeniality award either in their lifetimes or in prosperity’s point of view. In essence, the Axis nations are considered to be World War II’s bad guys for many reasons, not the least of which is the fact that their war aims were: Territorial expansionism at the expense of their neighbors Deliberate genocide of entire ethnic and religious groups Totalitarian rule on a continental scale Interestingly, though Germany, Italy, and Japan were nominal allies in World War II, their military alliance was more or less cosmetic. The two major powers, Hitler’s Third Reich and Tojo’s Japanese Empire, discussed the division of their conquered lands i...

No. One of the main pillars of National Socialism was persecution of ethnic, social, and religious minorities, not only in Germany proper but in Europe on a continental level. You have to keep in mind that Adolf Hitler’s goals were not simply to establish a one-party regime, “right the wrongs” that Germany perceived had been done to her after World War I, and rearm for self-defense. As early as the mid-1920s, Hitler stated his goals of destroying Jewish-Bolshevism, creating a Greater German Reich by conquering neighboring countries, and eventually invading the Soviet Union. You also need to remember that Hitler did not “trick” ordinary Germans into following him, even when he made that leap into the abyss and invaded Poland in September of 1939. Many dedicated Nazis, including women and teenagers, were ecstatic at the outbreak of war and continued believing in  der Fuhrer  till the fortunes of war turned against their “Thousand Year Reich.” (Ordinary Germans, on the o...

Why did Nazi Germany concentrate her armed forces on the Eastern Front against the Soviet Union in World War II? Aside from the fact that to the Nazis the Soviet Union was the principal enemy? There were several reasons, really. First, you must remember that by Adolf Hitler’s calculations, Great Britain was on the ropes and unable to reverse her defeat in Western Europe a year earlier. Yes, the Royal Air Force  had  defeated Germany’s  Luftwaffe  in the Battle of Britain and the Royal Navy was still a force to be contended with. But with Britain’s army scattered hither and yon in North Africa, India, and its Imperial holdings everywhere, it would take years for Churchill to field a land force strong enough to open a Second Front in the West. (Hitler was a land-bound “strategist” and failed to recognize that if he lost the air war  and  the Battle of the Atlantic, his Reich was doomed.) Second, Hitler was counting on continued American neu...

Cover Design: Paul Smith. Photo Credit: © Lilly Library, Indiana University. © 2006 Simon & Schuster/Free Press On April 18, 1945, a 45-year-old war correspondent named Ernest Taylor Pyle was accompanying Lt. Col. Joseph B. Coolidge, commanding officer of the U.S. Army's 305th Infantry Regiment, part of the 77th Infantry Division, on a jeep with three other officers on the small island known as Ie Shima (now Iejima), off the coast of Okinawa. Pyle, who was better known to his readers and the U.S. service personnel he wrote about in a nationally-syndicated column as "Ernie," had landed ashore with the 77th Division just one day before. As the five men drove to Coolidge's new headquarters in an area that was not yet cleared of Japanese defenders, a lone enemy gunner fired his Nambu machine gun at the jeep, forcing its occupants to take cover in a nearby ditch. "After a moment," writes author James Tobin in Ernie Pyle's War: America's Eyewitn...