My maternal grandfather was in the Japanese Army, and while I do not know the details, spent six years in the mines in Russia.

I could never get myself to ask what his time was like. Even when he was diagnosed with cancer and I knew that he didn't have much more time to live, I still felt that I could not do him the cruelty of digging up those memories from him.

:(

That is very sad. A lot of prisoners of war and internal political prisoners were sent to mine uranium. It was basically a slow death sentence.

My ex-wife's grandfather fought on the other side (as part of the Romanian Army), and after he came back from the Eastern Front he tried as best as he could to support and tell the story of his "comrades" (he would always call them with that name, even in his 90s). Of course he, like almost all the soldiers involved in that war, had nothing personal against the soldiers they were fighting against, they were just small pawns in a greater, horrible game. He once told the story of a Russian old couple who had received him in their house as the Romanian Army was retreating from outside Stalingrad, in a -30 degrees winter. Without this couple helping him he wouldn't have made it back to his wife.

Although he came from a traditional, rural background, the horrors he had seen in the war scarred him for life, turning him into an atheist. Even in his old age he was saying that there could be no God that would allow happening the stuff that he had seen.

War is hell.

It seems many people who experienced the full brunt of war (like having killed people up close or witness close friends get knocked out again and again) don't even want to remember or talk about it because the it's just too painful.

Most likely there was a huge difference in that regard in navy vs army...

I'm guessing that the reason this was downvoted was that I communicated poorly. Here is a better wording of what I was trying to say:

In the Navy you sink a ship from far away. It's more abstract; you don't see the enemy up close.

In the Army you fight battles face to face with the enemy, and it must be correspondingly more horrible.

So I would guess that Navy people (like my grandpa) had a generally more positive memory of the war than Army people.

I don't know - naval warfare in WW2 could be pretty grim.

I can recommend Nicholas Monsarrat's "Three Corvettes" on his wartime naval experiences - I happened to buy this without knowing much about the book in Heathrow before a flight over the North Atlantic to the US. One of the relatively small number of books that has moved me to tears.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Monsarrat

He also wrote the novel "The Cruel Sea" which was made into one of the best naval war movies of WW2.

It could be because pretty much all branches have ground deploy-able forces so it isn't necessarily true that they aren't exposed to the horrors of war on a person to person level.

I know this outs me as a cloistered american, but my mental narrative of WWII is woefully bereft of accounts outside of the US Britain, and Germany. The thought of your Pop Pop slogging through the countryside towards Berlin gave me goosebumps. Where is that movie, i ask you.

Thanks.

There's a movie released in 2001, called Enemy at the Gates, but it's kind of cheesy. But since you asked, it qualifies as the ever-so-rare Hollywood movie about a WWII scenario, involving a Russian protagonist, as told from a Soviet perspective.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0215750/

It's the only English-language movie I can think of that fits those criteria.

In no way did i imply that english language only was a parameter, bro.

Way to thank someone for doing work on your behalf.

The scale of the War in the Soviet Union was vast. 26,000,000 is the commonly agreed on estimate of USSR deaths from the war. The theatre contained hundreds of divisions - many times those in which the US and Britain fought.

A book on Stalingrad I recently enjoyed:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0140284583/ref=redir_mdp_mobil...

"26,000,000 is the commonly agreed on estimate of USSR deaths from the war."

At one level you should temper this appalling statistic: a whole lot of it was "self-inflicted", by the games and machinations Stalin played. Mass slaughter of the USSR's own people was a policy long before the war---that the people who did their 1939 census were sent to the Gulag should be sufficient telling: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Census_(1937) ---and the war just enabled a continuation if not increase in this.

Note also how the continuous purges of Army officers left the Red Army in a crippled state prior to the invasion.

Understand, I am well aware of the facts and figures of the East's struggle. I have sat and talked with nearly 50 WWII vets at length, and not one of them from anywhere but the US, Britain, and Germany. The road to victory that Mother Russia took is informative when considering the events of the present.

As I was writing, I refrained from referring to the the theatre as 'Eastern'. The term tends to turn encourage us to turn our backs on the way in which the Second World War shapes the politics of China and Korea [or Koreas] and the way in which the US interprets them.

China was the first of 'the Allies'. It went to war with Japan in July 1937 - more than two years before France and Britain against Germany and four years before the rest of the Allies engaged Japan, i.e. China fought against Japan alone for longer than as one of 'The Allies'. Rana Mintner's Forgotten Ally was on the new shelf a few months ago at the public library:

http://www.amazon.com/Forgotten-Ally-China%C2%92s-World-1937...

More recently I read Bruce Cummings The Korean War: A History. Now I no longer write North Korea's actions off as crazy. That's the country whose founders fought Japanese imperialism before and throughout the war. The American military maintained Japan's administrative structure in the South when it 'established itself' their following Japan's defeat. South Korea has had foreign troops in it continuously since 1895. North Korea sees that as problematic.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Korean-War-History-Chronicles/dp/0...

I can completely recommend Blood Red Snow, an autobiography and memoir of the evens from a German machine gunner - absolutely fascinating:

http://www.amazon.com/Blood-Red-Snow-Memoirs-Soldier/dp/0760...

If you are interested in a very good (and long) writeup about world war II from a perspective you probably didn't hear about in school:

When we try to imagine what happened when the Japanese imperial navy approached Midway Island we're likely to get an image out of Star Wars -- daring attack planes, as graceful as swallows, darting among the ponderously churning cannons of some behemoth of a Death Star. But the sci-fi trappings of Star Wars disguise an archaic and sluggish idea of battle.

What happened instead was this: the American squadron commander gave the order to attack, the planes came hurtling down from around 12,000 feet and released their bombs, and then they pulled out of their dives and were gone. That was all. Most of the Japanese sailors didn't even see them.

One bomb fell on the flight deck of the Akagi, the flagship of the fleet, and exploded amidships near the elevator. The concussion wave of the blast roared through the open shaft to the hangar deck below, where it detonated a stack of torpedoes. The explosion that followed was so powerful it ruptured the flight deck; a fireball flashed like a volcano through the blast crater and swallowed up the midsection of the ship.

Sailors were killed instantly by the fierce heat, by hydrostatic shock from the concussion wave, by flying shards of steel; they were hurled overboard unconscious and drowned. The sailors in the engine room were killed by flames drawn through the ventilating system. Two hundred died in all. Then came more explosions rumbling up from below decks as the fuel reserves ignited. That was when the captain, still frozen in shock and disbelief, collected his wits sufficiently to recognize that the ship had to be abandoned.

The last of the carriers, the Hiryu, managed to escape untouched, but later that afternoon it was located and attacked by another flight of American bombers. One bomb set off an explosion so strong it blew the elevator assembly into the bridge. More than 400 died, and the crippled ship had to be scuttled a few hours later to keep it from being captured.

Now there was nothing left of the Japanese attack force except a scattering of escort ships and the planes still in the air. The pilots were the final casualties of the battle; with the aircraft carriers gone, and with Midway still in American hands, they had nowhere to land. They were doomed to circle helplessly above the sinking debris, the floating bodies, and the burning oil slicks until their fuel ran out.

This was the Battle of Midway. As John Keegan writes, it was "the most stunning and decisive blow in the history of naval warfare." Its consequences were instant, permanent and devastating.

It gutted Japan's navy and broke its strategy for the Pacific war. The Japanese would never complete their perimeter around their new empire; instead they were thrown back on the defensive, against an increasingly large and better-organized American force, which grew surgingly confident after its spectacular victory.

After Midway, as the Japanese scrambled to rebuild their shattered fleet, the Americans went on the attack. From Midway till the end of the war the Japanese didn't win a single substantial engagement against the Americans.

They had "lost the initiative," as the bland military saying goes, and they never got it back.

http://www.leesandlin.com/articles/LosingTheWar.htm

This overstates what Midway accomplished by a bit.

For the Japanese you might say "Midway was an island too far", like Arnhem. It was beyond the parameter they were establishing, and was prompted by Doolittle's raid and their ceaseless attempts to engage the US Navy in a "decisive battle". It resulted in something like temporary parity in naval power (i.e. carriers), and due to institutional failures they never recovered from their losses in trained pilots, Midway, before, and after (e.g. they didn't rotate experienced airmen back home to train new ones, they for the most part fought until they died).

Our landing in Guadalcanal and their failure to quickly snuff it is where they lost the initiative, that attacked and started to unravel their real parameter. Otherwise we'd have stayed on the defensive until enough new carriers and supporting ships and planes were built, then we would have done a much bloodier and somewhat more prolonged sole advance through the Central Pacific, which would no doubt have had even more adverse consequences.

Instead, they and we got into a knife fight in the Southwest Pacific, the Solomons and New Guinea, where both our carrier forces were essentially used up (of our serious fleet carriers only the Enterprise and Saratoga survived, and during this campaign the Saratoga got torpedoed and had to retire for a while for repairs, the Enterprise required serious stateside maintenance and refit while a British carrier covered for her).

Japan and the Allies were pretty evenly matched on paper, and this campaign was brutal in every way, we lost 40+ ships (and two Real Admirals (2 stars) in one night action), they lost 50+, and a slow war of attrition was waged in the skies. I'm reading Fire in the Sky (http://www.amazon.com/Fire-In-The-Sky-Pacific/dp/0813338697/) right now, which covers that in immense detail, e.g. one of the many reasons the Japanese lost was subpar civil engineering (in general their non-combat specialties didn't get any respect, this critically included intelligence), they didn't keep the taxiways between revetments and runways free of soft spots, resulting in lots of operational losses at critical time (on both sides, this operational losses destroyed more planes than combat)).

Industrially and institutionally they couldn't complete well, and when our 2nd generation of planes and ships came on-line, with adequately trained air crews, maintenance staff, the Japanese in comparison were "used up", and were never a serious threat in the air until they resorted to kamikaze attacks.