Politics in school, follow on to background needed for HH

Tenshinai wrote:
[SNIP]

Oh, BTW just a small nitpick... "Americans" refer to all people in both North and South America. "americans" would be the proper way of writing it, as the name of the country is not "America" but the united states OF America.
Similar as you would write "german" about someone from the pre-unification German states.

[SNIP]

Ugh, NO! We use the term America for the country, and the world uses Americans for us. We used to use the term Yanks or Yankees, but in WW1 and WW2 when we entered the war and saved Europe's ass they called us Amercans What's with you guys we change our language to conform to your usage and you still bitch!

Poker

Tenshinai wrote:
[SNIP]

Oh, BTW just a small nitpick... "Americans" refer to all people in both North and South America. "americans" would be the proper way of writing it, as the name of the country is not "America" but the united states OF America.
Similar as you would write "german" about someone from the pre-unification German states.

[SNIP]

Call a Canadian an American and see what happens. Just let me leave the room first, please. While Mexicans would just love to be classified as Americans. The proper term might be the Americas, but America refers directly and explicitly to the USA. Every other country in the Americas prefer to think of themselves by their country of origin. And those of us who live here think of ourselves as Americans. Capitalized. We are just as chauvinistic about that as any other country on Earth. If you haven't figured out even that much about these two continents, it is not surprising that you can't figure out the dichotomy in American politics.

KNick wrote:
Call a Canadian an American and see what happens. Just let me leave the room first, please. While Mexicans would just love to be classified as Americans. The proper term might be the Americas, but America refers directly and explicitly to the USA. Every other country in the Americas prefer to think of themselves by their country of origin. And those of us who live here think of ourselves as Americans. Capitalized. We are just as chauvinistic about that as any other country on Earth. If you haven't figured out even that much about these two continents, it is not surprising that you can't figure out the dichotomy in American politics.

Try telling that to writers of serious dictionaries.
I actually looked it up very thoroughly once when it became an issue in a translation work i did.

Lowend dictionaries often didn´t bother, but the good stuff, they noted that "Americans" in regards to people in USA, is incorrect usage because it isn´t the name of the people there. It´s a colloquialism. Common, but still not correct.

"Americans" is the same as "Europeans" or "Africans" etc...
"America" refers to the continent(s)...

Why do you think the proper way to say it in official matters is "citizens of the United States" and not "americans"?


*****

Ugh, NO! We use the term America for the country, and the world uses Americans for us. We used to use the term Yanks or Yankees, but in WW1 and WW2 when we entered the war and saved Europe's ass they called us Amercans

How do you know that what was said was capitalized?

And while journalism tends to be sloppy, if you look at newspaper articles from the 40s, you will find "american(s)" without a capital "a" used a lot when referring to USA and people from there.

It is actually the degradation of proper use of language since then(especially since the 80s) that has made capitalised use of the word common.

Hmm, WWI, USA takes part in about a year of fighting out of a total of around four years... The French did at least 5 times more of the "work". Hell, even Italy did more of the work.

WWII in regards to Europe, USA runs the sideshow in Italy for 2 years and fights against ghost armies (because it was considered easy to fight on the western front, the few decent units were there to rest, and which at the time consisted mostly of 3rd rate garrison units, Hitlerjugend and militia, or in many cases literally "ghost armies" whose composition might range from 1/5th of their supposed strength down to a divisional HQ, all alone) in 44-45, with USA causing less than 10% of German losses while USSR caused around 70-80% depending on how you look at it...

*hmmm* Nope, sorry not impressed.

Please note in WW2 the USA was ALSO fighting the Empire of Japan at the same time. Agree with WW1 the USA mostly just sending over lots of people after everyone else had pretty much spent themselves.

wholf359 wrote:Please note in WW2 the USA was ALSO fighting the Empire of Japan at the same time. Agree with WW1 the USA mostly just sending over lots of people after everyone else had pretty much spent themselves.

The AMF (American Expeditionary Force) ariving in France was a very welcome reinforcement, as all the German divisions which had been on the Eastern Front were now on the Western Front after the Russian surrender in 1917.
(Possibly another thing they fail to teach in history clssses these days )

Not to mention Wilson getting sick and the treaty of Vercies[? sp] that led to the Great Depression and then WW2 a Generation later.

Poker

Top wrote:The AMF (American Expeditionary Force) ariving in France was a very welcome reinforcement, as all the German divisions which had been on the Eastern Front were now on the Western Front after the Russian surrender in 1917.
(Possibly another thing they fail to teach in history clssses these days )

Oh indeed. But the main importance of the arrival was mental, because they spent several months repeating the mistakes of all sides that the others had learned through hardwon experience NOT to do during mostly 1914 and 1915.

Because they were no pansies and they KNEW how to do things... And that´s almost a quote by a US general who will remain unnamed.
And so they ignored most of what the Brits and French told them, up until they had taken sadly large losses for little or no gain, completely unnecessarily.

In a way it´s funny how it´s the French and British that often gets dissed for having their people "charging machineguns", and yet the ones who actually did that the most, despite their small part of the war, were the US troops, apparently their officers thought it was still the US civil war.

And, by late 1917, Germany was falling apart from the inside already(the naval blockade by the Brits were complete murder on Germany, especially food supplies).
And Germany already started talking about possible peace negotiations after Verdun Dec 1916.

And Russia didn´t surrender, there was a ceasefire in late 1917, that Germany broke when 53 divisions began operation Faustschlag in February 1918. At the same time as Russia was falling into civil war. Suffice to say, even with the huge concessions in the Brest-Litovsk treaty March 3, it was still wanted.
And the Russian army had actually began demobilisation in January 1918.
During the first negotiations in Dec -17 Trotski eventually decided to reject the demands of the central powers and was hoping that the unrest in Germany would force them to also quit the war soon enough. He was almost right. 6-9 months later and the German offensive could probably not have happened.

And anyway, US first real participation in WWI wasn´t until Oct 1917, and it wasn´t until May 1918 that it had half a million troops at the front.
The first offensive action taken primarily by US forces came in Sept 1918. And the armistice came 11 Nov -18.
US forces did decently well during those 3 months, but 3 months of serious fighting compared to 4 years for UK/France? Yeah, not exactly a stellar achievement.

wholf359 wrote:Please note in WW2 the USA was ALSO fighting the Empire of Japan at the same time. Agree with WW1 the USA mostly just sending over lots of people after everyone else had pretty much spent themselves.

Depending on how you look at it, USA spent about 10-20% of its war efforts on Japan.

Of course, they couldn´t effectively direct much more than that against Japan simply because there were limits that could not easily be raised.

AND they had a ridiculously huge advantage against Japan in communications, with massively better and more common radios among their own, while they had broken most of the Japanese codes and were sometimes able to read messages faster than intended recipients. And that´s before you even start to look at the linguistic problems inherent in the Japanese communications.

If not for MacArthurs(and a few other less important figures) prancing about and interfering, USA could have defeated Japan a good deal sooner with even less resources.
And considering the tremendous amount of deficiencies in the Japanese military at the time, it still should have.

But firepower based doctrines borrowed from what the French started WWI with were the ruling idea-set in US military, so that´s the way it went.

pokermind wrote:Not to mention Wilson getting sick and the treaty of Vercies[? sp] that led to the Great Depression and then WW2 a Generation later.

Poker

The dictat of Versaille was a BAD THING, but it didn´t lead to the Great Depression.
And i´ve long since stopped calling it a treaty, because it never was a treaty. France and Britain just about wrote down demands, far too many stupid and shortsighted ones, Wilson managed to moderate it slightly and then the Germans were forced to accept it, with barely even knowing what they were forced to sign.

Wilson had some very good ideas and was seriously pushing a more "good for everyone" agenda, but when his own country pretty much rejected the LoN, Wilsons own concept, it shot down his credibility and even if he had not gotten sick he would almost have been guaranteed to loose the next election.

Had Wilsons idea been followed through on, the peace would not have been as extremely harsh, and a lot of ex-colonial new nations might have come about a few decades early, possibly along with a much "nicer" overall outlook. WWII would have been much less likely to happen as well as his aims would have removed much of what brought the German extremeists to power.

Tenshinai wrote:
Oh indeed. But the main importance of the arrival was mental, because they spent several months repeating the mistakes of all sides that the others had learned through hardwon experience NOT to do during mostly 1914 and 1915.

Because they were no pansies and they KNEW how to do things... And that´s almost a quote by a US general who will remain unnamed.
And so they ignored most of what the Brits and French told them, up until they had taken sadly large losses for little or no gain, completely unnecessarily.

Correct. And then Pershing pulled many Divisions off the line, reassessed what did and did not work, took a lot of input from his Company and Regimental commanders, and put those Divisions through an intense two week tactical retraining. Then when he resumed offensive operations things went much, much better.

Tenshinai wrote:US forces did decently well during those 3 months, but 3 months of serious fighting compared to 4 years for UK/France? Yeah, not exactly a stellar achievement.

For the rookie on his first time at bat in the big leagues? I think it went pretty well, especially after reading the things that the German General Staff had to say about the performance of the US Divisions.