For hundreds of millions of avid newspaper readers during WWII, an atlas was essential to follow the conflict's global course.
Never more so because of the fact that most of the battles - yes, most of the battles - took place over, around and on islands - with some of the most heavily fought-over islands being almost incredibly tiny.
(The battle for Tarawa Atoll saw almost 10,000 casualties spread over its meagre 500 acres.)
An atlas (and a magnifying glass) was essential to make sense of it all.
Admittedly, the Eastern Front can be understood completely without once referencing a single island but no other major war front can say the same.
Consider, just for one example, why bombers were based in Yorkshire to bomb Hamburg.
It was because this maximized the amount of "Flak-free" water between the bomber base on the island of Britain and its target on the coastline of the mainland.
So, a war decided by actions involving hundreds of strategic but tiny islands scattered all over the globe in the most unlikely of places.
That isn't something easy to blend with the popular view of WWII was holds it was all about the clash of a few Titans going at it, head to head.
Only a commensal history of 1939-1945 can blend the story of the Great Powers with the stories of the tiniest of powers, to make a truly coherent account of those years.....
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Why My Urgency ?
- Michael Marshall
- Nova Scotia
- Histories of WWII all start with the presumption that it was a war raged between humans and human ideologies, with Nature’s climate and geography as side issues easily surmounted.My blog, on the contrary will only accept that it was conflict between humans and their ideology that STARTED the war but that it was the barriers thrown up by Mother Nature (geography & climate) that turned it into a war that lasted between 6 to 15 years and expanded to thoroughly involve all the world’s oceans and continents. High Modernity may have started the war convinced that Nature had been conquered and was about to be soon replaced by human Synthetic Autarky and that only human Tiger tanks and human Typhoon planes were to be feared. But by the end, more and more people had lost their naive faith in Scientism and were beginning to accept that humanity was thoroughly entangled with both the Nature of plants, animals & microbes as well as the Nature of so called “lesser” humanity. By 1965, the world was definitely entering the Age of Entanglement. Billions still believed - at least in part -with the promises of High Modernity but intellectually & emotionally, it was no longer dominant...
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