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Brad De Long is always worth a read, but yesterday I found out that he has started a new series--Liveblogging WWII. What he's doing is posting complete documents from major historical figures on the 70th anniveraries of their issuance. His latest is Senator Burton Wheeler on "the Meanace of Lend-Lease". He also has writings from Churchill and Hitler, along with Japanese intelligence reports. Unfortunately, De Long doesn't use tags, so one has to dig through his archives manually, but it's worth doing.
It's fascinating reading what people were writing in what amounts to "real time." The closest I've ever come to this experience before was a series of emails reporting WWII 50 years later. The eeriest part was reading dispatches about the Battle of Stalingrad. While I knew how the battle turned out, I couldn't imagine how that happened based on the reproduced dispatches for the first few weeks of emails; the Germans came off so much better than the Soviets. However, the Germans weren't alone; they had many allies in their war against the USSR. It turned out this wasn't as good an idea as it seemed at the time. The USSR was able to stem the advance of the Axis by turning back the Romanians. That was a "plot twist" I couldn't have predicted!
Crossposted to darksumomo on LJ.
It's fascinating reading what people were writing in what amounts to "real time." The closest I've ever come to this experience before was a series of emails reporting WWII 50 years later. The eeriest part was reading dispatches about the Battle of Stalingrad. While I knew how the battle turned out, I couldn't imagine how that happened based on the reproduced dispatches for the first few weeks of emails; the Germans came off so much better than the Soviets. However, the Germans weren't alone; they had many allies in their war against the USSR. It turned out this wasn't as good an idea as it seemed at the time. The USSR was able to stem the advance of the Axis by turning back the Romanians. That was a "plot twist" I couldn't have predicted!
Crossposted to darksumomo on LJ.
