Comments by "" (@TheDavidlloydjones) on "Imperial War Museums" channel.

It's a lucky thing that Japan surrendered the day it did: when I moved to Japan in 1972 I found the bars of Yotsuya, Marunouchi, Kabuto-cho and elsewhere full of men who had been scheduled to fly their kamikaze mission the very next day.
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The Aeronautical building of the Smithsonian, on the National Mall, has a Zero splayed out on a wall, and an American fighter of the period, perhaps a Hellcat, hanging in the stairwell, ominously in its range. The Zero is delicate, even beautiful. It carried no armour. The American fighter is a lumbering hulk -- and it's clear that the Zero was out of its class
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No explanation of why and how the Germans had been allowed to evacuate Sicily. With the Italian Navy silent, why were the Straits of Messina left safe for Kesselring's crossing?
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Attaturk was one of the greats of the Twentieth Century -- and it's a damn shame that the country he built out of the Ottoman wreckage is now becoming embittered by the Europeans', chiefly the French, refusal to let them "in to" Europe. For that matter, how come the sainted Chancellor Merkel didn't get around to fixing the citizenship of Germans of Turkish ancestry?
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@dovetonsturdee7033 Churchill was First Lord of the Admiralty at the time, you halfwit. Gallipoli was Churchill's show, first, last, and forever -- and he was demoted to "Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster," a fate worse than life itself -- your normal average punishment for an upper-class twit who has just managed to kill off a few thousand troops under his command.
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@stephengrimmer35 Anzio was another example of Churchill's nonsensical ideas about "the soft underbelly of Europe." Nobody ever told the fool about the Alps.
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Very a propos. I think part of our fascination with the suicide pilots is a desperate effort to blind ourselves to the fact that almost all methods of attack are suicidal. The reason Rommel lost the battles of Alamein is he had only a pitiful few dozen tanks left out of the thousands he had brought with him to Africa.
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@Caratacus1 "“History will be kind to me for I am going to write it”. -- Winston, uh, Churchill. You read very well, Chief.
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@OutspokenSeeker Gold medal to Alex P for stupidest post of the day.
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Hunh? And here I thought the point of atom bombs was that you could destroy a city while only risking a single plane's crew. Silly me. Furtunately you confirm for us all, the value of the olde rule that anything beginning with the word "actually" is certain to be true.
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British forces would not have "grown" if they had delayed the invasion of Germany. Churchill just wanted to bleed the soviets for a while longer. In England the Communists were part of the short-lived Commonwealth Party (which won every by-election during the war, but dissolved in 1945). Commonwealth opposed the government. In the United States the Communist Party had a marginal sort of public existence, but very realistically supported the Democrats. (Later, contrary to Republican propaganda, Truman fired just over 1,000 Communists from the senior and Executive Level civil service.)
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@bobbybeard1497 You miss that Thatcher privatized many of those council houses, a tremendously popular move all around.
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All through WWII, the senior military guys had to stay up all night, undoing by night the maps and plans that Churchill had forced upon them during the day. Churchill was a great inspirational figure. Rather like Trotsky, he was always full of brilliant ideas, all of them attractive to his followers, most of them wrong. At Exchequer he was wrong about the gold standard. In this early post, as First Lord, he was wrong about the Dardanelles. (They were just one of the soft underbellies he was wrong about: In talking about the soft underbelly of Europe he somehow seems to have missed the Alps.) He was right about only one thing, don't negotiate with Hitler, just hang on until the Americans come in.
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There had been seven by-elections during the war -- all of them, whether the National candidate was Conservative or Labour, won by Commonwealth, the Communist-Independent-Labour alliance. In 1945 that alliance dissolved and the Communists evaporated. Ebbw Vale, 90+% Chapel Methodist but 99% Communist in the 1920s ("Thank God for Methodists," is somewhat dubiously attributed to Lenin), elected the left-wing but strongly anti-Communist Aneurin Bevan. This video makes no mention of the Empire. Long story short: Churchill favoured it, the British peoples opposed it. The economic analysis that the Empire ran at a loss, a machine through which the British upper class milked the workers, was widely accepted.
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It was a side-show. "World" War Two took place in Poland, Ukraine, and Manchuria. The deaths were mostly Chinese and Soviet civilians, the military deaths mainly Russian.
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@lordpolish2727 The Empire never had a heart. The Empire was a vicious and destructive machine which sent illiterate English soldiers to winkle rubies out of the walls of the Taj Mahal with their bayonets, and to subdue more civilized peoples in the Gold Coast and East Africa. It ran at a loss, British workers subsidizing British toffs. "The winds of change," MacMillan's admission that the Empire was dead, was 1960.
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@geraldperyman6535 Churchill was certainly a bold and inspiring voice as Prime Minister, and if you read the history, I think you'll agree with me that he was one of the few on the English right who understood Hitler early and correctly. He was never much of a strategist, though, and many of his ideas on the subject, if we are to be charitable, quaint. I'm sorry your grandfathers got caught up in WWI, an exercise in futility and stupidity, and even sorrier about the cost to the one who was killed by his politicians' folly.
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'Course they both arrived at Moscow with the same amount of gasoline: none. Um, minor difference was, Hitler's stuff ran on gasoline -- and 600,000 horses needed to be fed. (Your transport rule of thumb: a team of horses can pull a team of horses' fodder from London to Bristol -- arriving at Bristol with none left。） Hitler's Wehrmacht learned to love horsemeat.
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@josephteller9715 "Churchill was pretty much not involved in the election and his party's line was the failure, not any specific action by him" Utter nonsense. Exactly 180 degrees incorrect. Churchill campaigned actively right up to Potsdam and tried to claim credit for the Beveridge Report. The 1945 defeat was a referendum on his fatuity.
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@medievalcatguy6776 Without the entire Commonwealth paying for American "lend-lease," the Depression would have carried on regardless in the USA.
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@thereareantsbehindyoureyes7529 China fought Japan from 1931 onward, India and Indo-China from 1937. America fought only after it was forced to.
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Memo to video producers: the person rescued in the life-belt at 1:37 seems to have escaped from the video. Please send somebody to bring him back as he is an essential part of the narrative. Sheesh, I don't know what we pay you editors *for*, you go missing all the important points.
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Hitler's supposedly "unpublished" second book has been published: I saw it and read a few pages -- tugid, enlessly unparagraphed, dull thudd nonsense, identified as "Mein Kampf Vol II" -- in my local Toronto Public Library branch, between ten and fifteen years ago. I haven't seen it on the shelves since, so there may have been some protest...
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Matt, Your "history" "teacher" is a fool and a half-wit.
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