“One of two Victoria crosses awarded during the battle of Kohima went to Lance Corporal John Harmon of the Royal West Kents for his brave exploits. Sniper Harman – who spent much of his boyhood on the remote Lundy Island in the Bristol Channel owned by his millionaire father Martin – sprang into action when he spotted a Japanese light machine gun team taking over a nearby trench. Without hesitation he sprinted some 35 yards towards the trench, flung a grenade which killed the two Japanese inside and returned to his line bearing a captured gun. Two days later on 9 April in cold, wet weather he repeated this astonishing performance, only this time there were five men in the trench armed with automatic weapons and he himself used a fixed bayonet rather than a grenade. ‘When all the enemies were dead he walked back to his lines ignoring his comrades’ pleas to run for cover. He was killed by a burst of fire and died, saying “I've got to go. It was worth it – I got the lot.”’ His actions kept the hill in British hands for the time being at least.”

Karen Farrington Victory in the Pacific: Pearl Harbor to the Fall of Okinawa [she does not footnote this or any quotation].

“Our motive may be taken to be the desire to serve our day and generation in the way that seems nearest to our hand. The battle is not always to the strong nor the race to the swift. Victory in war cannot be counted upon but what can be counted upon is that we should go forward determined to do what we can to bring this war to the end which we believe best for our friends and comrades in arms, without boastfulness or forgetting our duty, resolved to do the right so far as we can see the right.”

Part of Orde Wingate’s words to the Chindits as they set out into Burma in February 1943, quoted in Karen Farrington Victory in the Pacific: Pearl Harbor to the Fall of Okinawa [and note the contrast with the tone and content of totalitarian wartime or for that matter peacetime rhetoric].

“To avert a vast, indefinite butchery, to bring the war to an end, to give peace to the world, to lay healing hands upon its tortured peoples by a manifestation of overwhelming power at the cost of a few explosions, seemed, after all our toils and perils, the miracle of development.”

Winston Churchill explaining why he approved use of the atomic bomb before it had even been successfully tested, quoted by Karen Farrington Victory in the Pacific: Pearl Harbor to the Fall of Okinawa [again, sadly, she does not footnote this or any quotation]

“Troops departing from Japan in the heady days of December 1941 were given a booklet to enlighten them as to the nature of their enemies: ‘Westerners – being very superior people, very effeminate and very cowardly – have an intense dislike of fighting in the rain or the mist or at night. Night in particular (although it is excellent for dancing), they cannot conceive to be a proper time for war. In this, if we seize upon it, lies our great opportunity.’”

Quoted by Karen Farrington Victory in the Pacific: Pearl Harbor to the Fall of Okinawa [she does not footnote this or any quotation].

“The whole motif of liberation, which has become so central to our century – be it the emancipation of women, homosexuals, proletariat, youth, appetites, peoples – comes into view at the turn of the century. The term avant-garde has usually been applied simply to artists and writers who promoted experimental techniques in their work and urged rebellion against established academies. The notion of modernism has been used to subsume both this avant-garde and the intellectual impulses behind the quest for liberation and the act of rebellion. Very few critics have ventured to extend these notions of the avant-garde and modernism to the social and political as well as artistic agents of revolt and to the act of rebellion in general in order to identify a broad wave of sentiment and endeavour. This book attempts to do so. Culture is regarded as a social phenomenon and modernism as the principle urge of our time. The book argues in the process that Germany has been the modernist nation par excellence of our century. Like the avant-garde in the arts, Germany was swept by a reformist zeal at the fin-de-siècle and by 1914 she had come to represent both to herself and to the international community the idea of spirit at war. After the trauma of military defeat in 1918, the radicalism of Germany, rather than being subdued, was accentuated. The Weimar period, 1918 to 1933, and the Third Reich, 1933 to 1945, were stages in a process. Avant-garde has for us a positive ring, storm troops a frightening connotation. This book suggests that there may be a sibling relationship between these two terms that extends beyond their military origins. Introspection, primitivism, abstraction, and mythmaking in the arts, and introspection, primitivism, abstraction, and mythmaking in politics, may be related manifestations. Nazi kitsch may bear a blood relationship to the highbrow religion of art proclaimed by many moderns. Our century is one in which life and art have blended, in which existence has become aestheticized. History, as one theme of this study will try to show, has surrendered much of its former authority to fiction. In our postmodern age a compromised may, however, be possible and necessary. In search of this compromise our historical account proceeds in the form of a drama, with acts and scenes, in the full and diverse sense of those words. In the beginning was the event. Only later came consequences.”

End of Author’s “Preface” in Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era.

“‘There is nothing particular about man. He is but a part of this world.’ Today, in the West, there are many who would agree with [the just-quoted Heinrich] Himmler that, for humanity to claim a special status for itself, to imagine itself as somehow superior to the rest of creation, is an unwarrantable conceit. Homo sapiens is just another species.”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World

On the 9th Hour podcast I joined theatre artist Breanna Doyle and host Charley to discuss heroes and villains in history, finding truth among shifting interpretations, and what it means for us today.

“From an early age, then, Hitler certainly had the temperament, exacerbated by his social circumstances, to become an artist of the ‘adversary culture.’ What he lacked was any exceptional talent as a painter or draughtsman.... Yet in spirit an artist was what he was and, as he would insist to the end, what he always remained.... He would, so he claimed, turn politics and life into art. It was the war, the Great War, that broadened his canvas so immeasurably. Like many in the artistic, intellectual, and radical community, he saw the outbreak of the war in August 1914 as a sudden liberation from stultifying bourgeois constraints, as an opportunity for a new beginning, as a means of bringing about a revolution of one sort or turn another. The remarkable picture we have of Hitler as a part of the crowd in the Odeonsplatz in Munich cheering the announcement of war speaks volumes. He is standing in one of the front rows, this misfit, without friends, without women in his life, without a job, without a future. And yet his face is ecstatic, radiant. The eyes seemed to sparkle. He looked as if – suddenly and as a complete surprise – he had just been informed that all those rejections from the Vienna Academy of arts have been a terrible mistake, and that he, Adolf Hitler, has in fact submitted, with his applications, the finest samples of work the academy has ever received. ‘To me those hours,’ he declared later, ‘seemed like a release from the painful feelings of my youth. Even today I am not ashamed to say that, overpowered by a mighty enthusiasm, I sank to my knees and thanked heaven from an overflowing heart that it had granted me the good fortune to be alive at such a time.’.... ‘It was,’ he said, ‘with feelings of pure idealism that I set out for the front in 1914.’”

Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era