People & events ignored in the teaching of history

As I read books or watch educational programs about history, I often learn about events or people who have been washed from history. And this happens because of how history is taught in the U.S. in grades K-12, even as far as the 1st 4 years of U.S. college. Its at times shocking to me how poorly history has been taught and how that leads people to form totally inaccurate ideas about what has happened in the past. Ignorance is not always bliss and definitely works against you in local and world events.

How often is this "washing out" of events and people intentional or happenstance? How important is it that we know about these forgotten parts of history?

Recently, I was watching Book TV (U.S./TV/Cablevision - nonfiction discussions and author interviews) and author Andrew Gordon was discussing his book "Undoing Plessy: Charles Hamilton Houston. . .". Now, it turns out that Mr. Houston (labor attorney; 1895-1950) was a highly educated and dedicated African-Amercan who was considered by Martin Luther King to be a man who's name would go down in history as a gigantic figure in U.S. Civil Rights, along with Thurgood Marshall (1st African-American, U.S. Supreme Court). Well, he has been forgotten by many, if not most.

My last point is that this doesn't just happen in history, but in many other disciplines - e.g., science, medical research, etc.

Would love to hear other people's perspectives, either in the United States or in other parts of the world.

The story of Nikola Tesla comes to mind.

Or the 1918 Influenza Epidemic/Spanish Influenza, which is studied these days in school (but not in my time), but its significance has been disregarded. I have always wondered how much the 1920s was impacted by 3, not 2 events, - end of WW I (tremendous loss of life), Prohibition and the influenza epidemic with its tremendous loss of life (50 (-100) million). In fact people wanted to forget it and did not get around to studying it, until almost 80 years later. It was the "mother of epidemics" - http://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/12/1/pdfs/05-0979.pdf

Yes, well, school is where you go to learn the secondary, (literary) basics of learning. You learn the primary basics from infancy on up to--and, sometimes, beyond--the entry into formal schooling.

One's every intellectual fault and frailty shall be exploited if it persists long enough: naïveté, sloppiness, laziness, --taking the first things one sees or hears to be the whole of a matter--and the supposition that your education is finished when your diplomas are conferred.

Curiosity and persistent reading are the first defense. People who abandon them are asking to be played for fools.

If, to get more knowledge, you have to fight for it, then fight for it.

#1
Welcome to the wonderful world of historiography.

Because you have not heard of something does not mean it has been forgotten. It's actually easier nowadays than it ever was to follow up topics that interest you, but you have to be aware that a lot of the information out there in the cybersphere is not well curated - meaning it's rubbish.

There's no shame in indulging your intellectual curiosity. Let rip, it's never too late!

Of course, learning is never ending, which is what makes life worthwhile. Every day is a learning experience, whether we realize it or not. However, there are times when an event or a person is purposefully forgotten. It is not always possible for the public to find out because the information is either hidden or destroyed. Well known figures in history do not always want to acknowledge another person's ideas or a disastrous event.

I do find fault with the educational system, especially with higher learning. Too often education is dictated by the textbook, though there are educators out there willing to share their knowledge and inspire their students to investigate. It is the extraordinary student who goes above and beyond. What I find alarming is that ideas, opinions, world views are formed by misinformation or lack of information in textbooks and these days - the digital world. And even some researchers out there have gotten lazy and will only look at what's on the web, ignoring how much can be learned by looking at original documents and not acknowledging that you cannot find everything on the internet. Yes, there is alot on the internet, if you know where to look, but it does not have everything.

How historiographers are going to deal with the digital world is beyond me, because even though there is some digital cataloging going on, it would seem impossible to me, unless you have a super computer of unimaginable speed and capacity, even then I wonder if it is possible. And who is going to make the determination about what is real and what is not? And it is so darn ephemeral.

The dependency on the digital world for information is to me sometimes alarming. Your search results are dependent on the search engine's algorithm AND the searcher's habits. Unless you are aware of the hidden internet, with its many, many databases - e.g., archive.org, you choose only what shows up in the first 3-10 pages of search results.

One thing that has always bothered me is the access or actually lack of access to information. Once upon a time there were printed annual indices for all kinds of published materials - science, history, sociology, etc., etc., etc. These were well organized, and once you learned how, easy to use, and accessible to all (e.g., Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature, Science Citation). The information does still exist, but it is contained in fee-based databases and does not necessarily include years before a certain time, e.g. 1975, 1960. Many of these indices, used by institutes of higher learning and very large public libraries, went back to c. 1900, and yet the public's access to that information has been severely curtailed because these databases are now electronic and accessible only through institutes of higher learning. So, what I am saying, is that even though there is much out there, there is also much that is unattainable for the general public.

#6
Has it been your experience that there is much demand from members of the general public for access to scholarly research tools? As a lawyer I know where to find my primary sources (and nowadays I don't have to leave my desk), but for my historical interests I rely on secondary sources and leave the hard work to the professionals.

Perhaps I should make it clear that this is Christine at the keyboard. Maybe I should turn the discussion over to Derrick, who is a librarian turned IT support person with an informed interest in the technicalities.

Knowledge is power!
If the electronic media present only a one dimensional worldview, one that is easy to access and by its availability excludes further enquiry, then we are tacitly accepting only one explanation of events. Now I speak particularly of history and the social sciences here, because that's my particular interest, but I'm sure pure science advocates will also step in for their bailiwicks. Only in the "hard" sciences can there be said to be only one cause of events, and that perhaps because in a properly conducted experiment the enquirer can change only one input at a time.
Knowledge should be regarded as a "utility" a service provided to the community and can be used by all the members of the community, like clear water, or electricity, without which the internet and conversations like this collapse.
I quote someone when I say, "Only a dullard looks up only one thing in the encyclopedia or dictionary at a time." (I admit I got into the George Carlin Quote page, that's a fun site!)
So here's a clue about yourself. Do you ever read the references at the bottom of the Wikipedia article? Do you ever check them out? One may call oneself lazy if one doesn't!
If you have to pay for information, then it's not a utility and then you are, in the quest for information, at the mercy of local lending libraries, school boards, friends who have books, your own necessarily limited experience, and that great flood of misinformation "Someone told me once....." This is the fog in which we wander and yes, I sometimes pay the fee for libraries, I buy books, maintain a community reader's card at the closest university library, and even experience things. But I would like people to have access to the truth because I believe we can extract some sense out of our world, at the least get an opportunity to access usable information.
I'm ranting, now...so I'll take break and come back in a moment. (Goes into the kitchen and gets more coffee and a bunch of grapes.)
If the internet collapses we lose the big indexes and databases, and several steps into past will happen. So, knowing in advance the apocalypse is coming, spend some cash at the local discount printer ink store (Don't pay name brand prices, you'll have to sell your body to pay this!) buy a big box of printer paper or use all the good-one-side you can scrounge and get a hard copy of the databases valuable to you and preserve them. Hard-copy everything you value!
And then we come to the question of copyright and patent versus "the Commons". So, as I'm getting tired I won't go there.
The logical response to "Who are the heroes unknown to history?" the answer is "We don't know! Nobody wrote them up!"
So, I look for the forgotten parts of history, I comb the older editions of books, I even read books "No longer in the forefront of scholarship", I try to avoid anything with the "Texas Board of Education approval" stamp, I urge everyone to obtain a copy of "Lies My Teacher Told me!"and I try to train myself in critical thinking to avoid the snake oil salesmen like Houston Stewart Chamberlain, or gasp! Shelby Foote the novelist!
But remember, not everyone who advances a wildly different theory in scholarship, will prove to be right in the end, in fact, most of those folk are wrong, but sometimes they are entertaining (Immanuel Velikovsky, where are you now?)
Do I believe that there are deliberately wide spread mis-informations out there? Like "Private enterprise will always run things better than government!"? Yes I do, and spend some time on comment lines with my list of things that governments run better than free enterprise. Health-, Automobile-, and Life insurance for instance!
Knowledge is power, and the "Powers that Be" are out there trying to limit the power of the bulk of the population, mostly for their own profit. The mass media, by making mass delusions easier to create, has helped them, but its tools can be used by all of us.

Upon reflection, the Elite always try to reinforce the idea "you can't fight City Hall", and one of the easy ways to do so is to rewrite the past so as to belittle the efforts and the victories of the "People". A belief statement like "the age of Unions is over, everything they could have done has been done, so stop organizing", is made a shibboleth, a social truth as defined by Hume, and we substitute a belief in trickle down economics instead. then realities intervene, but the angry don't know where to look for effective institutions so we have to fall back on the easy and ephemeral actions like the "Occupy Movement". And we get Demagogues like Trump rather than Reformers like Bernie. So we fall into defending status quo folk like Hillary.

Not even the "hard" sciences escape --except in certain very narrow respects-- differences of opinion on what are the facts but, even more, what those facts mean--their significance.

Has the expansion rate of "the (observed) universe" really increased or is this a misinterpretation of the significance of accepted data?

Sometimes these issues are not even open to healthy debate because virtually everyone within the field's community of specialists rejects--sometimes in a very coordinated and deliberate way--contrarian interpretation.

In history, social studies, and sciences the arguments are about both facts and their significance.

Far too many scholars don't bother to indicate when what they are presenting as an established fact is actually a disputed view.

So, if your education concerning numerous things ended in grade school or high school, you very often won't have any clue as to the varied opinions among amateur and professional specialists surrounding some topic. Sometimes even university-level scholarship is monopolized by a single point of view.

Prior to about thirteen years ago, I'd taken everything I'd been taught (from primary school through university) about Shakespeare's biography at face-value. I can't recall a single teacher ever suggesting that the facts as presented were disputed.

------------

"How historiographers are going to deal with the digital world is beyond me, because even though there is some digital cataloging going on, it would seem impossible to me, unless you have a super computer of unimaginable speed and capacity, even then I wonder if it is possible. And who is going to make the determination about what is real and what is not? "

In some fields, the amount of scholarly data surpassed what any single person could read and digest in a normal lifetime long before the Internet came to be. I think historians will do what they've long done--examine areas, portions, of a vast field of data. After all, history has always implied selection and interpretation of data.

But your latter question (in italics above) is the one I think shall be a focus of much bitter contention. Authentication of material is not a new problem for historians but the challenges which digital data present are enormous, it seems to me.

E.g. :

(New York magazine | September 16, 2016 9:00 a.m. | How Internet Trolls Won the 2016 Presidential Election By Jesse Singal

>10 proximity1::
I found a book called "Contested Will" by Shapiro, one of the most interesting pieces of Shakespeariana. Shapiro goes a bit ad Hominem, but his investigation of reasons why people try to shift the authorship away from WS are cogent and believable.
I often use the phrase, "the majority opinion is, ' in scholarly writing, and when I wish to be careful in the field of Social sciences.

I was shocked to learn about the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 late in life. When I went to read about it, I found one book (!) Flame of Freedom, in the entire Ohio library catalog. To my mind, this is important stuff.

#12
Shocked? Now if only you had an interest in Shakespeare you would have been familiar with Richard II and Cade's gang of murderous thugs. That of course was only Shakespeare's interpretation of an event which indeed has an important and much discussed place in British history.

#11
Shapiro is good stuff. Personally I think the most compelling reason for attempts to shift the authorship is snobbery. Actually, "snobbery" is not quite the right term; it's an almost unthinking function of the class system, which is at the very foundations of English society. Goodness me, Will was much too common to have written this, must have been the Earl of Oxford! You will note that the proposed candidate is never another oik.

This would not have been any surprise to Shakespeare, whose rude mechanicals (and murderous thugs) speak in prose, not blank verse. On stage or screen, even today, they tend in British productions to speak with accents that immediately place them socially as lower class.

>11 DinadansFriend: & >13 dajashby:

But, apart from Shapiro & co., have you read the other cases' arguments other than in summary form put by their adversaries? (I'm, yes, of the Oxford camp).

All Shapiro's objections have been more than amply answered. But I refuse the temptation to engage in a protracted discussion of this single matter here--for one thing, there are other LT threads where one can do that. But I can and shall point the interested reader to what are my ideas of the two best cases¹ made in favor of Oxford and leave it at that.*

-----------------

¹: In bound, printed books, Charlton Ogburn Jr.'s The Mysterious William Shakespeare.

Online : Stephanie Hopkins Hughes' blog : "politicworm.com"

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ETA :

These issues are important not only in and of themselves as historical matters, they're also interesting and useful as exercises by which one can test one's reasoning abilities.

If your reaction to not having been taught about the Peasants, Revolt of 1381 (Wat Tyler's revolt) is shock and surprise, that's an indication that you see the events as historically significant. That's a judgement on your part and it's one I happen to share with you. Others, though-- teachers, authors, editors, publishers-- chose to leave it out. If asked, they'd deny that they were trying to cover something up or to cheat you of important knowledge, information. They'd argue instead that these events weren't important enough to have included them. If you disagree, then you demonstrate having a reasoning capacity (in this case, a judgement about values--morals) in which those teachers, authors, editors and publishers were deficient.

Similarly, with the Shakespeare “Authorship Question,” (AQ) if you don't recognise it as a serious oversight to have been omitted, if, that is, on hearing of it, you aren't shocked that you weren't taught about it, then, obviously, you agree with the view of the established authorities who chose to pass over it without mention. You agree, this episode, this view, is mistaken, not worth the students' (our) time.

Thus, whatever interest you think it might hold—whether great or none at all—the case of the AQ is, for me, a Bellwether, a leading-indicator of how well or badly you reason things out, for, quite simply, if you do not “see through” it, it's an indication, in my opinion, that you're missing other important things by errors in your reasoning habits. The AQ is an historical example of a real-world conspiracy. To fail to recognise it as such means that you can miss important indications about the significance of things in the unfolding of a human drama and that, though, in this case, the details concern events of centuries ago, there are other human dramas going on now and you may be missing their significance as well for reasons which are similarly founded. That doesn't necessarily mean that it shall always concern a real conspiracy which you've failed to recognise. It means, rather, a general reasoning deficiency which can manifest itself in any sort of manner. You might, instead, “see” a conspiracy where actually there is none.

>14 proximity1:

Sigh...
Who ya gonna call?
The Three Billy-goats Gruff!

>15 Crypto-Willobie:

Yeah. You could could call them. They'd likely have better insight into Shakespeare than you do. Call the goats for help because you fucking need it, mister.

>16 proximity1:
Nice language.
Return thee to thy sophistry, as a dog returns to his vomit...

>11 DinadansFriend:, Jasper Fforde did some fun riffing on this, incidentally, in The Eyre Affair.

>12 2wonderY:, you might find it elsewhere, just not in entire volumes dedicated to it. I haven't yet read A Distant Mirror by Barbara Tuchman but I expect it will be mentioned there, for example. I encountered it in fiction, when reading the novel "London" by Edward Rutherfurd.

In terms of things I've found shocking, I read my first-year university history text cover to cover and there was no mention of the Black Death. Nothing at all, like it never happened and had no impact. Granted, any general world history text is going to leave things out, but that's a strange omission.

>12 2wonderY::
While Froissart, a contemporary, didn't cover the Peasant's Revolt very well, he was also capable of glossing over the Jacquerie, a slower-moving but widespread French phenomenon, not much dealt with by most 100 years War popularizers. Can anyone deeper into German Medievalism give Imperial 14th Century Examples? I know of the peasant's revolt in Luther's time. Old Martin was not a friend of the people he'd grown up with in a mining village, but it's a flaw in in his character IMHO.
Napoleonic War Historians have a blind eye as regards British Conditions for their 90%, while Wellington was swanning about in Spain, though a song from the Marlborough War's using the tune now popular as "waltzing Matilda" sets out the conditions of many in "the Thin Red Line" (a victorian coinage I know!)
edited from "Marching through Rochester"

``Now I,'' said the young man, ``
Have oft endured the parish queue. (Welfare office)
There is no wages or employment for me.
Salvation or danger,
That'll be my destiny.
To be a soldier for Marlboro and me (or ye!)

The tune of course is now popular as "Waltzing Matilda".

Ignored by literati, unjustly, are the novels of David Stacton. Try "People of the Book", or for 'Murricans , "Judges of the secret Court". Just to begin with..but they are like potato chips..

Then there's this book recently written about what happened between Churchill and Roosevelt in World War II - " Commander in Chief: FDR’s Battle with Churchill, 1943" by Nigel Hamilton that uncovers what really happened between Churchill and Roosevelt, especially with regard to the Invasion of Normandy.

As the review at Biografie Institut states:
Was Churchill really the architect and strategic mastermind behind the Allied winning of
the war – as Churchill painted his own performance in his great six-volume memoir,
The Second World War, which helped win him the Nobel Prize for Literature after the war?
(http://www.rug.nl/research/biografie-instituut/medewerkers/hamilton?lang=en)

Mr. Hamilton's response is "no, Roosevelt was the mastermind" and he goes on to prove it. Mr. Hamilton found an diary entry in which Churchill said he would bury his mistakes by writing how HE, not FDR, won the war. Mr. Hamilton goes on to say that after the U.S. entered WWII, the U.S. took over direction of WWII, but you would never know it if you depended on Churchill's memoirs. Mr. H. wants people to look at the past differently and interpret it differently. Roosevelt stated he would only accept unconditional surrender and to achieve that it would take a battle with the Wehrmacht, and that could only happen once the U.S. army was battle ready, in 1944. Churchill fought against this decision repeatedly, visiting the U.S. twice, to convince the President and high-ranking members of Congress to try to provide troops to the British effort. All of this has been covered up, claims Mr. Hamilton. Roosevelt, of course, needed Churchill's cooperation to make D-Day happen and needed to bring Churchill around to his thinking.

Mr. Roosevelt died before writing his memoirs, while Mr. Churchill was able to write his memoirs so that his mistakes could be written out.

For more see:
https://www.c-span.org/video/?410236-1/nigel-hamilton-discusses-commander-chief

P.S.

I am not disparaging Churchill - he kept his country going in a time of unbelievable pain. This is just an example of what was hidden and has now re-emerged.

About public accessibility to past periodcials, information about modern history. I, as a former reference librarian in a public library, have watched as access to knowledge about past periodicals, recent history, has slowly gone the way of the dodo. First, online aggregated periodical databases were to replace all those enormous print volumes of hierarchical indices. So, the volumes were thrown out. Only the databases did not cover as many periodicals,nor dd they cover as extensive time period; most only going as far back as 1975, if you were lucky. And, of course, the indexing on these indices was of suspicious quality. Then the quality of databases degraded, due to expensive annual fees. Libraries just could not afford the fees. Meanwhile, the print indices did not cost more than an annual update. As, public libraries can afford less and less, public access to information because imperiled.

Final point: how can anyone in the general public begin to be informed? I do believe that ignorance will get us in deep hot water.

(Yes, yes, we have the internet, but that is a swayable and undependable source. There is more confusion, than actual dependable information).

#20
Mr Churchill? MISTER Churchill? That's Sir Winston to you, if you don't mind, though his admirers some times refer to him as Winnie ;-D

>22 dajashby::
I agree that the polite approach is to refer to those bearing a royal preferment by the highest honour attained. But during World War Two, Sir Winston Churchill had not yet been knighted, (having rejected a higher title, as he very likely could have bagged a Dukedom!), and thus, a pedant could refer to him as Mr. Churchill. People usually refer to him in this period as Prime Minister Churchill, a title he did enjoy, in both uses of the verb. :-)
>20 triciareads55::
Nigel Hamilton? A competent biographer of Montgomery I believe. I will have to read the present book, of course, certainly.
But to dismiss the entire Mediterranean strategy post-Sicily, as a dead end, is in my opinion a very narrow view. The American Chiefs of staff, in spite of the lessons drawn from the clearly disastrous Dieppe raid of August, 1942, were very, very desirous of launching the Overlord operation in 1943, which would have been a repeat of the Dieppe experience. Given the performance of the US Army on the Omaha Beach, they were not particularly "Battle Ready" even by June 1944. Points to FDR for restraining them, certainly.
" Mr. H. wants people to look at the past differently and interpret it differently. Roosevelt stated he would only accept unconditional surrender and to achieve that it would take a battle with the Wehrmacht, and that could only happen once the U.S. army was battle ready, in 1944. Churchill fought against this decision repeatedly, visiting the U.S. twice, to convince the President and high-ranking members of Congress to try to provide troops to the British effort."
Churchill was also on record as being in favour of the unconditional surrender of the Axis powers. And let us be not so offended by Churchill's remark about the advantage of the literary skills he deployed in the defence of his own reputation. In context, it is just, and amusing. But Churchill's memoirs are kind to FDR, who is not shown to be in direct conflict with the governments of his allies very often in Churchill's account. This book might well have benefitted from the reminder that the devil is in the details. Perhaps the desire to have a big book with lots of Controversy on the Market at Christmas seduced the publishers, and Mr. Hamilton, to strain a case?
To sit on one's hands for nine months while the Russians (who killed nine German soldiers for every one the western allies killed!) ground their way steadily Westward, might have taken a bit of the urgency of the Eastern Front, at least during that period.
The fruits of further involvement in Italy post Sicily, were large, actually. Italy surrendered its navy and the route to the Far east became much quicker, with an effect on the Japanese war. Italy surrendered its army, and that forced the Germans to take up the slack in conducting the very expensive counter-guerilla in Greece, and Yugoslavia. The Allies rolled up the peninsula to the Gates of Rome, and were engaged in "Blooding" a number of Allied soldiers all the way. Their experience in Normandy was very useful, according to such historians as Rick Atkinson.
The Allies were not so successful in the Med, later, as units were withdrawn to reinforce the North-western Europe Campaign, and to launch the strategically dubious(to say the Least!) Dragoon Landings in Provence. Even so, had the American General Mark Clark not tried to steal headlines from the Normandy landings by his accelerated Capture of Rome, (he got be a hero from the 4th to the 5th of June) the Allied forces in Italy could well have surrounded 40%of the German Army in Italy in June 1944, thus leading to the Germans losing the agricultural and manufacturing Areas of the Po valley by winter that year. The rebuilding of the German Army for the 1945 campaign was aided a good deal by Italian inputs.
the effect on the attitude of the Balkan governments could have been considerably more pro-western when the Russian Army arrived that spring...Had Mark been able to climb over his own ego, (and that wasn't a British construction!)?
But, if I encounter Mr. Hamilton's book, I'll see what he's got.

#23
I'm not being pedantic, Churchill had been knighted by the time he wrote his memoirs, it's a matter of correct form. If you're going to use an honorific - really no more necessary for Roosevelt than for Churchill in this context - get it right.

I'm afraid you have have confirmed my view that military history is mind-numbingly boring. Dead babies all the way down. Derrick actually finds it interesting, but I cannot help feeling that it's in some way connected to his interest in sport - wars, Test matches, football games, they're all strategy, tactics and sometimes the weather.

I heartily endorse Cecrow's recommendation of The Eyre Affair, not to mention all the subsequent adventures of Thursday Next, which eventually lead to the introduction of armed librarians, not afraid to use extreme prejudice to preserve their books (which are of course all the books ever written)!

This is Derrick (the real dajashby...) Yes, I do have an interest in military history. I don't know whether it has any connection with my interest in cricket... The controversy about who really won the war is hardly new. The struggle for Europe is one of my favourite WWII books, and was published in the early 1950's. Wilmot was an Australian war correspondent, who was embedded with the British Airborne troops that were the first Allied troops to go into battle on D-Day. He was killed in an aircrash not long after the book was published. There was a lot of argy bargy about how to defeat Hitler after the US came into the war. Wilmot's line is that Roosevelt wanted to get the war over with as quickly as possible, and not being a deep thinker, his idea was to assault across the Channel with as much strength as possible because that was the shortest route to Berlin. The fact that Hitler, thinking the same, was concentrating his defence in the same place, made this policy a little questionable. The US used the frontal assault technique quite a lot during the war, and lost a lot of men in the process. Churchill wanted to attack Hitler at his weakest point - the Mediterranean. Roosevelt won the argument, not because he was right, but because the US had the industrial and military muscle that Britain lacked, so he could call the shots. The Anglo Saxon powers won the war, but pretty much lost the peace. Had Churchill's view predominated it's highly likely that a much smaller area of Europe would have been dominated by communism after it.

According to Wilmot Roosevelt completely failed to deal successfully with Stalin, most notably at Yalta, which also more or less directly led to the Cold War.

There was also conflict within the US High Command as to whether to tackle Germany first, or Japan. Roosevelt's decision to tackle Hitler first clearly was clearly the correct strategy, so he did get that right.

It seems to me that heavy Mediterranean combat preceeded the Normandy campaign:

(Photos and details from WikipediA® pages)

Caen or Anzio/Casino-- you decide :



Royal Engineers move through the ruins of Caen, looking for mines and booby-traps, 10 July 1944.

Battle for Caen

6 June – 6 August 1944
(61 days)

Allied forces (combined U.K. & Commonwealth units):
3 armoured divisions
11 infantry divisions
5 Armoured Brigades
3 Tank Brigades

German forces:
7 infantry divisions
8 Panzer divisions
3 heavy tank battalions

Casualties and losses
U.K. : c. 50,539 casualties

German : Unknown ; 550 tanks


(Anzio)
Men of the U.S. 3rd Infantry Division landing in late January 1944.

22 January – 5 June 1944 (136 days)

Initially:

Allied (U.S. / U.K./ Canadian)

36,000 soldiers and 2,300 vehicles
Breakout: 150,000 soldiers and 1,500 guns

German:
Initially: 20,000 German soldiers + five Italian battalions (4,600 soldiers)
Breakout: 135,000 German soldiers + two Italian battalions

Casualties and losses:

Allied:
43,000 casualties
(7,000 killed, 36,000 wounded or missing)1

German:
40,000 casualties
(5,000 killed, 30,500 wounded or missing, 4,500 prisoner)



Ruins of the town of Cassino after the battle

17 January – 18 May1944
(123 days)

Units involved:

U.S. Fifth Army
British Eighth Army
Strength:
240,000 men
1,900 tanks
4,000 planes

German 10th Army
Strength:
~140,000 men (citation needed)
unknown tanks and aircraft

Casualties and losses

Allied : 55,000
casualties

German : ~20,000 casualties


From Normandy landings to the liberation of Paris : 6 June - 25 August 1944

From Anzio/Casino to the capture of Rome :
mid-January - 5 June 1944

"Mr. Hamilton's response is "no, Roosevelt was the mastermind" and he goes on to prove it. Mr. Hamilton found an diary entry in which Churchill said he would bury his mistakes by writing how HE, not FDR, won the war. Mr. Hamilton goes on to say that after the U.S. entered WWII, the U.S. took over direction of WWII, but you would never know it if you depended on Churchill's memoirs."

;^ )

That's a rather strange (and amusing) note to leave, isn't it? If Churchill meant to "bury his mistakes" by writing a tendentious account of the war, you'd think he'd have kept that admission out of the writings he left behind. In short, the "burial" wasn't a huge success. I'd prefer to have those diary notes in full to better see what that was all about.

as they say, (paraphras.) Victory has many fathers while defeat is an orphan.

------

Speaking of little-known history--I saw a fascinating BBC (?) documdntary about a British intelligence agent who, practically single-handedly was responsible for supplying Japan with everything required to establish a naval air force--through the repeated transfer of highly classified British aeronautical engineering details. The most amazing part is that his activities were discovered but not treated seriously snd he carried on after being told politely not to give away such sensitive information.

I'll have to look up the reference to the story.

In brief, this man's acts were essential to Japan's naval air capacities between 1918 and 1939.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01j73yv

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Forbes-Sempill,_19th_Lord_Sempill

https://warandsecurity.com/2012/06/07/the-fall-of-singapore-the-great-betrayal-b...

Going a bit further back to the war's beginning, Has anyone read A.J.P. Taylor's The Origins of the Second World War? All I can gather about it from my ancient copy is that it was controversial at time of publication.

>28 Cecrow:

(again, cited at WikipediA® )

Origins of the Second World War : (Reception)

...

"I have said enough to show why I think Mr. Taylor's book utterly erroneous. In spite of his statements about 'historical discipline,' he selects, suppresses, and arranges evidence on no principle other than the needs of his thesis; and that thesis, that Hitler was a traditional statesman, of limited aims, merely responding to a given situation," ...

-- Hugh Trevor-Roper, Book Review Encounter magazine, July 1961.

>14 proximity1: On the significance of the Peasants Revolt, I suppose it was only a minor incident in world history and was snuffed out fairly thoroughly; but I was examining it from the perspective of Church history, and measuring just how far practice had veered from Christ's teachings. I was glad to see that it was inspired by a priest's radical sermons. Someone got it right, eh? Those concepts of personal freedom and appropriate taxation are now foundational in western culture. We've all heard of the Magna Carta because it was an action by rulers in the interest of rulers, but it too was bandied and suppressed and renewed over time. Since I'm a plebe, my interest in history is in the little man. I know where I would have existed if I'd been born in prior centuries, and that common life is what fascinates me.

>18 Cecrow: That IS altogether shocking that the Black Death wasn't mentioned. How could they tell a cogent story of the next century without it's context?

>24 dajashby::
(spoiler alert!) Pedantry wars continue! sorta. Sir Winston Churchill had written the first five volumes of his WWII memoirs, (he had a set of WWI memoirs, expansively entitled "The World Crisis", on the market by 1928!) by September 1, 1951 (the publication date was November, 1951. The sixth volume, Covering the war from Overlord, June 6th, 1944 to its end, the one most filled with contentions about the conduct of the war by an ailing FDR, was not finally completed until September 30th, 1953. The author's preface contains this statement "The original text was completed two years ago (September 1951 DF.). Other duties have since confined me to the general supervision of the processes of checking the statements of fact contained in these pages and obtaining the necessary consents to the publication of the original documents." Churchill was knighted April 24th, 1953, six months before the publication of Volume VI, but a year and a half after completing the writing of Volume VI. In a sense we are both right, me on the Writing, and you on the publication date. Still friends I hope?
.....and I hope some third party has been enlightened by our discussion, as this is an example of historical disagreement, conducted by the rules. :-).

>24 dajashby::
I also enjoy Mr. Fforde's work, Eyre Affair being a favoured book. A thing that some USA readers might be unaware of the UK form of Monopoly. It uses Park Lane as one of the final Blue squares instead of Park Place. So Thursday's guy, Landen Park-lane, well it's a pun..
To return to the Pedantry wars for hopefully, a closer...."The other Duties" that WSC refers to in his preface included his second stint as PM that began October 26th 1951.
>20 triciareads55::
Yet another bonus of the Invasion of the Italian mainland was that the Germans had to put at least 16 more divisions some say 22 , into Italy that otherwise would have been divided between the Russian Front and France, to resist Overlord. If the Allies had stopped at Sicily....It would have been harder in France.