I posted this in the politics thread originally, but then figured it was better take for here. Iwo Jima was a Pyrrhic victory at best. Tactical and propaganda victory, strategic defeat. It was the only major WW2 battle where the US had more overall casualties than the opposing force. The Japanese garrison's goal was not to stop the assault on the island, but to die while inflicting the highest death toll on the Americans they could; they absolutely succeeded in that. Waiting for the Marines to fill up the beach before unloading everything on them at once was fucking genius. 7K Americans died for a tiny island that didn't turn out even that strategically important in the end, all we got out of it was a famous propaganda photo. It's so funny to see people keeping up the myth that US getting successfully baited into a deathtrap was some massive American victory. It was no different than Peleliu (another high US casualty meatgrinder that had little strategic value) in outcome really.
I just got pushed an IG account that does William McKinley edits lol…ran by a great nephew of his according to the profile
Ok I'm gonna gonna add an * for my "Iwo wasn't strategically important" take. There are some historians that argue that Iwo Jima's use as an emergency landing base saved the lives of nearly 20K airmen, but besides that yeah it didn't do much for attacking mainland Japan.
Found a PBS docuseries about the history of Muslims in America that is really good. Like that they point out that accounting for African slaves that Muslims have been in America the entire time, since before it was even America.
Also I think it's so cool that a dude named Muhammad Khan from Afghanistan fought for the Union as a private in the Civil War.
Current history rabbithole is the War Of Jenkin's Ear. Which was a war between Britain and Spain in the New World between 1739 to 1748. Battles were fought across the Caribbean and SE coast. British raided Cuba and Panama. The colonies of British Georgia and Spanish Florida went to war with eachother. The British attempted to invade was is now Colombia and the Royal Navy suffered one of their worst defeats ever. It preceded and eventually merged with the War Of Austrian Succession. I have been to St Augustine as a kid and seen the forts from this war so it has some connection to me. The war started because some British sea captain got his ear chopped off by the Spanish. At the same time Britain was also fighting King George's War, another New World frontier conflict with France around what is now New York, New England, and Quebec.
Learning about how France post-war had a penal battalion of former French Nazi SS veterans that they sent to Indochina to fight the communists in exchange for a clean slate. Also I already knew about Lauri Torni, a Finnish Nazi SS veteran (who remained loyal to Germany after Finland backed out in 1944) that immigrated to America, joined the newly created Special Forces, and, died fighting as a Green Beret in Vietnam. He has a headstone at Arlington.
I gave the white Cuban BJJ coach at my gym my copy of A’da Ferrer’s “Cuba An American Story.” I hope he likes it
Carr is good but (understandably) woefully out of date; he died well before Western (or otherwise) historians could look at any of the Soviet archives. One of the greats in that field for sure. I read What is History? in grad school. Shelia Fitzpatrick and Vladislav Zubok are two great ones who are still alive. Judging from the tone of Collpase (by the latter), he views the fall of the Soviet Union as a (national) tragedy. Only read parts of it tho!
cross posting this here from Gen pol Reading for one of my summer classes and reading a military intelligence report about white/black riots and relations post WW1 and the Red summer of 1919, just got to an interesting part where the intel officer talks about how real estate agents would sell a white man’s house in a mostly white neighborhood to a black man, then rouse up racial resentment in the rest of the neighborhood and even hire “hoodlums” to use violence, which would then get the black man to use the same real estate agent to sell the house again back to a white man. What a con.