King Donald's War, Part 2. Just a few Marines. . .

 

U.S. Marines land at Da Nang, March 8, 1965.  It was just a few. . and then some airmen. . . and then the perimeter had to be protected. . . and soon, 50,000 U.S. troops were dead.

March 31, 2026

King Donny can't figure out how to get out of his war. The Iranians can't and won't surrender.  The Iranians won't leave the Straits of Hormuz  alone.  The NATO countries, several of which have been threatened by King Donny with the use of military force, have replied to his request for naval assistance with variants of "fuck you and the horse you rode in on" and are perfectly happy to watch the US, which they don't like under Trump, and Israel, which they generally don't like, stew in the fat of Donald's juices.

Faced with this, the more rah rah, let's engage in a Protestant Crusade against Islam crowed, and the more sober military minds who have read history, are causing Marines to be deployed.  Chances are, they aren't equally enthusiastic about deploying them, as the results of that will be a full scale and even more illegal war than the one we're currently in.

The economy, meanwhile, is turning to a steaming pile of shit, like everything else Donald touches.  The stock market is supposedly the only thing the legacy seeking King Donny pays attention to, which probably means that his oligarchic connections are being hurt and calling him up on his cell phone telling him to get out before the wreckage matches that of the East Wing.  King Donny, meanwhile, probably doesn't want to be remembered as the idiot who got 20,000 ground troops or more killed.  So, as of yesterday, he's thinking of surrendering by simply pulling out.

Overnight, the Iranians targeted Diego Garcia with missiles but not reached their targets for one reason or another, including their being intercepted.  Diego Garcia was not previously thought to be within range of Iranian missiles, and it still might not be, given that they didn't hit.  Or it may be, or it may be that Iran has improved the capabilities of their missiles over the last couple of weeks.

Iran is busy destroying Middle Eastern oil infrastructure.  The economic impacts will last for years.

March 21, 2026, cont:

Iran and the US/Israel exchanged attack nuclear facilities today.

March 22, 2026

Trump announced that if Iran does not open the Straits of Hormuz within 48 hours the US will commit a war crime and start to destroy power plants.

This would be flat out an illegal at, it serves no military purpose whatsoever.

March 23, 2026

King Donny claimed this morning that the US and Iran were in productive talks, so he was suspending offensive operations for several day.

Iran called BS on the claim.

Nobody really knows what's going on, but my guess, and it would guess, is that King Donny is going to claim there was a secret deal to end the war and call it over.  My additional guess is that somebody got to him.  Maybe the military, maybe the top (lap) dogs in the GOP, or maybe another oligarch, but somebody.

cont:

Israel Thought It Could Spur Rebellion Inside Iran. That Hasn’t Happened.

President Trump’s hopes that an Israeli plan to ignite an internal uprising against Iran’s theocratic government could bring the war to a swift end have so far been dashed.

cont:

Listening to the weekend shows makes it plaint how much trouble Trump is really in.  None of the people you'd expect to be present on all three were present on the two I listened to.  Scott Bessant was on Meet the Press sounding like a complete fool.  Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy drew the short stick for This Week and sounded like he regretted it.

Bessant was downright insulting to the host, even if he sounded like a buffoon doing it.

What's increasingly clear is that sometime yesterday somebody or something got to Trump.  The war isn't going the way he believed it would, and now he want out.  He's just looking for a cover story to get out.  The problem he faces is that none of the cover stories for getting into it will square with that, so he's in a bind.  The strategy being tested is the claim that he made a deal, even if the Iranians are denying  that they're close to making a deal.

Believing that lie won't be too much to ask diehard Trump fans to do.  They'll believe anything.  But it is too much for independents and some not wholly convinced Republicans to do.  The next part of the problem will be that petroleum prices will take months or even years to go down.  That showed up on Meet the Press in which a Trump voter called Trump "a worthless piece of shit".

cont:

Pete, I think you were the first one to speak up. You said, 'Let's do it.'

Trump.

Pete is now the designated fall guy.  He better start looking for a new job.

March 24, 2026

In spite of King Donny's declaration that the United States was in talks with Iran, which Iran denies, as Donny is an outrageous liar, the war continued on yesterday, unabated.

Cont:

According to the NYT, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia is pushing Trump to continue the war.

We seem to just be regional suckers to the Middle East.

March 25, 2026

In addition to the Marines already deployed to the Middle East, 1,000 troops of the 82nd Airborne are being deployed to the region, all for a war that King Donny claims was won several days ago.

Pakistan, which it self as been at war recently with Afghanistan, volunteered to host talks between the U.S. and Iran.  The U.S. has agreed to attend, Iran, has not.

Trump claimed yesterday that Iran gave the United States a very big oil related present, but he wasn't going to say what it is.

Um. . . . 

March 27, 2026

King Donny extended his deadline in which for the US to commit an additional war crime by destroying electrical power sites.  He claims negotiations are going well.

Some negotiations probably really are occurring, but it's not clear at all what they are.  As they won't result in an end to an Iranian nuclear program, effectively what the US is doing is looking for a way out a la Paris Peace Accords.

On the other hand, Tehran increased its grip on the Straits of Hormuz yesterday, so the entire story of Iran negotiating may just be another Trump lie.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a real president, visited the Middle East yesterday as his country is helping several Middle Eastern countries counter Iranian drones.

March 28, 2026

The Houthis entered the war by firing ballistic missiles at Israel.

Donald Trump is now babbling on this topic nearly every day, and not making a lick of sense any time he does so.  As if that's not enough, his cabinet lavishes praise on him in a way that will quite frankly be used against their reputations, and that of the country that they purport to serve, forever.

March 30, 2026

The illegitimate administration sent Iran the same list of 15 demands in the form of demands to be accepted to end the war.  Iran told the U.S. to stuff it, and presented its own demands, also pointing out that it doesn't trust the US enough to enter negotiations.

Listening to the weekend shows and other soundings out there, it's increasingly clear that Republicans feel uneasy about the situation developing with King Donny.  A common theme now is, "well, we should have done this years ago, um, and are now, um, and well, we have to see it through".

None of those things are anywhere near true and they know it.

We are getting increasingly close to the commitment of ground troops.  Even some of the stalwarts that apologize for Trump's dementia on a nearly daily basis re now saying that requires Congressional approval.  Well, Trump isn't going to ask for approval.  He's just going to do it, if he does, and he probably is going to.

This is an election season, and those in Congress in the GOP should be made to answer for this illegal delegation of force to a demented octogenarian.

cont:

Reports hold that Russia shared satellite images of Prince Sultan US base in Saudi Arabia with Iran right before their attack that injured our troops. Ukrainian intelligence has confirmed it.

And Trump. . . well he's letting a ship of Russian oil offload in Cuba, which is otherwise being embargoed (blockaded?) by the U.S.

Odd, eh?

March 31, 2026

Iran hit a fully laden Kuwait oil tanker in port in Dubai.

Trump yesterday indicated that he might just abandon the Persian Gulf with the Straits of Hormuz closed.

Republicans desperate to excuse a war that's not going to end soon, and which right now looks as if it'll either require a decades long American ground presence in an illegal war, or an inglorious American retreat, either of which feature a major recession, if not depression, in the near term, are parading a series of bs excuses for what demented Don did.

The reality of it is quite simple.  Bibi wanted to take Iran out while the US could be duped into going along with it.  Only Bibi and Vlad seem to have any pull over King Donny, although for different unknown reasons.  Anyhow, this is a war for Israel, that's what it's for.

The current line is that we've been fighting Iran for 47 years.  No, we haven't been.  Iran has been a bad actor for 47 years, but we haven't been fighting them for nearly five decades.  Moreover, most of Iran's anger with us, as illegitimate and wrong as it is, is vicarious anger over US support for Israel.

I'm not saying that US support for Israel is wholly wrong, but it has frankly been often beyond what it likely should have been, and that's been the case since Israel became a country.  It has a right to exist, but it doesn't have a right to unqualified US support, and support that has not involved American Allies that are in the region, to the the extent which it has.  Anyhow, Iran's hatred of the US is largely due to US support of Israel, which is 100% what this war is about.  Netanyahu saw a chance to take out, he thought, a decades long enemy, and took it.  Unfortunately for him, he forgot about what an unreliable ally the US really is and that Trump's thoughts tend to be farts in windstorms.

The other major claim is that Iran was going to turn into a nuclear power and we needed to stop it.  If that's the case, that was clearly going to involve a ground invasion.  You can't bomb nuclear material into non existence.  Trump may stupidly have thought he could cause the Iranian regime to fall in this fashion, which if so was flat out dumb, but he's not a very advanced thinker and his experience is in real estate, not realpolitik.  He didn't cause an Iranian uprising and he didn't even get the Kurds to move on the government.  

So here we are.

Concluding this war successfully will require a Vietnam War level of military participation and two decades to complete.  At some point Congress will have to get involved.  As Americans have no stomach for such an enterprise, what's much more likely to happen is a largescale conventional invasion of the country after a series of aerial war crimes, followed by substantial US troop deaths, followed by an inglorious withdrawal and retreat.

In other words, we're likely to lose the war.

Not before it expands into the US however.

We have every reason to believe that Iran has sleeper cells in the US. What hasn't happened that much yet, however, are proxy attacks here.  That's coming, and it'll come in more than one form.  We aren't ready for it, and we're not going to get ready for it.  Further, both China and Russia will assist Iran on this where they can get away with it.

Along with that, we're going to see inflation and a recession within the next few months at a level we have no experienced since the 1970s.  We'll be lucky, quite frankly, if we don't experience a depression.

So, welcome to King Donald's Forever War.

cont:

The maximum level of outright stupidity that is constantly demonstrated by this illegitimate administration is really on display today with Pete Hegseth. For example:

The president was clear this morning in his Truth that there are countries around the world who ought to be prepared to step up on this critical waterway as well. Last time I checked there was supposed to be a big bad Royal Navy that could be prepared to do things like that.

This is an illegal war on the part of the US, dumbass, and you don't get to declare war for other countries.

As far as President Trump and boots on the ground, I don't understand why the base wouldn't have faith in his ability to execute on this. Look at his track record.

Seriously? Where to begin.  Cutting spending. . . nope, didn't happen.  Avoid wars. . . nope, didn't happen.  Make America Great Again. . . more like sending it into the dumpster.

What he's shown himself to be really good at is not getting the Epstein files released, although even there, there are enough cracks to raise the question if he was one of the rich men raping teenagers.  It's not proven, but there's enough there to wonder.

cont:

I have a suggestion for you: Number 1, buy from the US, we have plenty, and Number 2, build up some delayed courage, go to the Strait, and just TAKE IT,'

'You'll have to start learning how to fight for yourself, the USA won't be there to help you anymore, just like you weren't there for us.'

And so, the TACO signals he's retreating.  

Iran, apparently, will be the victor.  People died for nothing whatsoever.  Those serving in the military were made suckers.

As we all were. Everything is more expensive, people are dead.

Cont:

A really sober analysis by Adam Kingzinger

One Chokepoint, $120 Oil, and a Broken Alliance System: What Comes Next in Iran

A breakdown of the economic, diplomatic, and military dimensions of a crisis with no clean exit.

To put it bluntly, we are really up shit creek without a paddle.  At no point since the end of the Cold War have we been in this dire of situation, and it's all due to one demented billionaire.

This is going to end very badly.

Last edition:

Wars and Rumors of War, 2026. Part 5. Trump's forever war. King Donald's War, Part 1.

Monday, December 31, 1945. The end of a historical episode and the dawn of a new one.*

Ad from the Sheridan newspaper, December 31, 1945.

December 31, 1945, marked the first peacetime New Years in much of the world, although not all of the world was at peace.

1945 marked the end of what we consider the oddly nostalgically recalled, but undeniably bloody, 1940s.  It's the operation of Yeoman's Eleventh Law of History, which provides:

Yeoman's Eleventh Law of History:  There are decades, but they are not decadal.

In common histories, people often reference the "40s", or the "50s", or the like.

The references are useful, but very imprecise.  Decades, as people recall them, really reflect eras, and the ears themselves do not device up so neatly.

The 1940s, for example, are heavily associated with World War Two.  The Second World War, however, in Asia really broke out in 1937 and in Europe in 1939.  Because the slide of one era into another is not precise, it's hard to say when the 1940s started, but 1938 would be a good place to begin it.  They clearly ended, however, in 1945.

The 1950s, in contrast, the way we remember them, started in 1955, with the end of the Korean War.  The period from 1945 to 1955 is really its own separate decade, and is nearly a forgotten one . It's sort of the Proto 1950s.  The 1950s we recall ended in 1964, at which time the 1960s, as we remember them, commenced.  The 60s lasted until about 1972, when the US was really pulling out of Vietnam, or perhaps to 1973.

And so on.  While this makes sense, as we do not tend to think of things in this fashion, we often miss that the flow of history works in this fashion, rather than in neat ten year groups.

1945 was the end of World War Two, and the beginning of the post war era, and era which we still live in.  It was the penultimate year of the 1940s, and to some degree, the penultimate year of the long 20th Century.¹  It was the year that the Second World War ended  with a massive technological nuclear flash, but it was also the year that featured the bloodiest fighting in a unified war that began as a series of wars in 1937 and 1939.

The end of the Second World War determined, or seemed to determine, questions that had arisen with the end of the Great War in 1918.  World War One had caused the death of the old order in much of Europe, an order that saw aristocracies dominate in varying degrees in many of the European, and indeed international, states.  The strain on the old order was obvious even before World War One, but it remained strong nonetheless.  The Great War killed it.

The death of the old order did not answer the question of what would replace it. Every nation that fought in the war, however, would see immediate political evolution due to the war, with all  of it reflecting forces that had been at work before the war.  In functioning democratic countries with stable governments, that resulted in an expanded franchise.  The UK extended the vote to entire classes that had not had it before the war, allowed Ireland to go independent, more or less, allowed its dominions to be actually independent, and extended the vote to women.  The US extended the vote to women and soon made Native Americans citizens, with new states being admitted to the union prior to the Second World War.  Canada and Australia obtained true political independence.

In countries that had strong aristocracies that opposed democracy, however, radical elements of the far left that had been underground to some degree leaped forward, the prime example being Imperial Russia, which became the Soviet Union.  As forces of the far left advanced, finding a great deal of support in in the formerly disenfranchised working class, forces of the far right appealed to the same base and to conservative aristocratic classes, crushing democratic forces in between, as in Germany, where the Nazis gained power.  In unstable democracies without long histories of democratic behavior, forces of the left and the right contested for total control, as in France, Italy, Spain, Japan, and Mexico, with democracy faltering in many to some degree, sometimes totally.

World War Two was not, as some like to claim, a continuation of World War One, but rather a violent sorting out of the democratic, anti democratic, and populist forces it had unleashed.  Starting in the late 1920s it seemed that the question the world was faced with was whether the future was democratic, fascist or communist.  The Second World War determined, at least it seemed, that the world would not be fascist, but left the question of whether it would be communists or democratic undetermined.

Determining the question was bloody on a scale that we can no longer even imagine, although in terms of human history it was not all that long ago.  The expenditure of lives in the war by all contestants was enormous, with the fascist and the communists states freely willing to waste the lives of men, and the democratic ones emphasizing technology where they could.  All the combatants, however, acclimated themselves to conduct that at least the democratic ones would not have tolerated prior to the war, with mass bombing of urban targets being the most notable.  By 1945 the US, arguably the most moralistic of the combatants, was willing to engage in fire bombing and ultimately the atomic bomb to bring the war to a conclusion.

Truman as Time's Man of the Year, posted under fair use exception.

The significance of the atomic age, contrary to the way things are currently remembered, was appreciated immediately.  Truman was Time magazine's Man of the Year, pictured in front of a fist grasping nuclear firebolts.  Newspapers, even by late 1945, were pondering what atomic warfare would mean.

The war not only determined that fascism would not be the future of Europe, or Asia, but it it changed everything about everything, and much of that not for the good.

We've argued it here before, but the Second World War created the modern United States, and more than that, modern American culture, in both good, and bad, ways.

Tire rationing came to an end on this day in 1945.

The most oblivious, at first was the change to the economy, which was little understood.  Pent up consumer demand dating back to the start of the Great Depression  meant that the country did not slide back into the depression as nearly all Western economist had feared.  Adding to this, however, was the fact that none of the European industrial powers, along with Japan, had not suffered some level of industrial destruction. The U.S.'s industrial base was not only left intact, it had expanded.  Only Canada could claim to enjoy the same situation, although its economy was much smaller.  American workers took advantage of the situation nearly immediately with a wave of strikes demanding higher wages, strikes that were in fact largely successful.  The economic golden age that current Republican populists imagine to have existed in the past reached its most pronounced form in the 1950s which is still looked back upon fondly, if inaccurately, in the same way that singer Billy Joel imagined it to have been in his lamet Allentown

Well our fathers fought the Second World War

Spent their weekends on the Jersey Shore

Met our mothers in the USO

Asked them to dance

Danced with them slow

And we're living here in Allentown

The obliteration of European industry created the illusion of some sort of American economic uniqueness that remains to this day and which the country is presently attempting to sort out by restoring it, which will not and cannot work.  Part of that also involves an imagined domestic perfection that doesn't' reflect what was going on in reality either.

Prior to the Second World War the domestic culture of the United States was different in nearly every fashion.  Even the horrors of World War One had not changes that.  Most Americans lived closer to the poverty line than they do today, even if most Americans lived in families.  Most Americans did not attend college or university, and most men didn't graduate from high school.  There was a minimum of surplus wealth on the part of the average, although that had started to change by imd 1920s, only to be retarded by the Great Depression.  Most people did not move far from home.  Most men and women married people who grew up near them and were part of the same class and religion, although a surprisingly large lifelong bachelor class existed, particularly in certain occupations.

The war changed nearly all of that, and even during the war itself.

The first peacetime Federal draft in the nation's history took thousands of young men away from their homes starting in 1940 and 41, and of course became the major wartime draft that continued on until after the war, and with some hiatus, basically until 1973.  The country would not have tolerated a peacetime draft prior to 1940, and barely did in 1940 and 1941.  The country's views on the military, which prior to the war was sort of a type of disdain but acceptance of it as necessary, as long as it was small, completely changed during the war so that by the war's end the concept of a large peacetime military was fully accepted, and even admired, although that would be disrupted again due to the Vietnam War for a time.  

Prior to the war, soldiering was, for enlisted men and junior officers, a bachelor occupation with servicemen largely looked down upon as lazy. The enlisted ranks often contained large numbers of immigrants, although that is still true.  After the war, the view of servicemen, many of whom for decades were conscripts on relatively short enlistments changed radically.

The expectation of marriage changed as well, even at a time that wartime marriages came into periods of great stress.  Prior to the war a fair number of blue collar workers and nearly all non owner agricultural workers were lifelong bachelors.

Cowboys Out Our Way from December 31, 1945.  The two working hands are discussing "Sugar", their former ranch cook, who just married a rich widow, and Stiffy, the oldest cowhand on the ranch.

This ended after the war for a variety of reasons, one simple one being that entire classes of men who had never really lived any other life now had seen at least much of the country, and some large sections of the globe.  Men who had planned on a life of working on the farm or ranch and living in a bunkhouse no longer found that appealing and no longer believed they had to do that.  For those who returned to their states of origin, and huge number of them did not, this often meant taking up a job in towns and cities, rather than in fields.  Quite a few used the GI Bill to advance an education that benefited them at a time in which a university education guaranteed a white collar job.  Regions that had large reservations found that many returning Native American veterans chose to live in towns and cities near the reservations they were from, rather than on them where living conditions remained comparatively primitive.  Lots of men married who would not have otherwise.  The average marriage age notably dropped for the first time in decades and remained depressed in the 1950s.

Lots of couples got divorced in fairly quick order as well.

This was because of a "marry in haste" situation that had broken out during the war.  Couples who figured that the male's chances of surviving the great blood letting were fairly slim and were willing to accordingly gamble, where as previously they would not have been.  Moreover, many of the couples that married were of different backgrounds and different regions of the country, and not the literal "girl next door" so often portrayed.  A really good portrayal of the this sort of situation was given in the brilliant 1946 film The Best Years of Their Lives, which gave a dramatic, but fairly accurate, examination of the domestic situation of the post war years.  Of note, 1946 also gave the country It's a Wonderful Life, which really portrayed the prewar, not the wartime or postwar, domestic ideal.

The amazing film The Best Years of Our Lives which captured the immediate impact of World War Two on Americans.

It's a Wonderful Life, also released in 1946, but which really portrayed the nature of American life from the 1910s until the late 1930s, although it was set in 1946.  It's gone on to be a sentimental Christmas classic.

One of the things The Best Years of Their Lives examined was divorce, which had been disdained, with good reason, prior to the war.  Now it was becoming rapidly accepted, which was a major evolution in American domestic culture, and not a good one.  And of course it wasn't just this.  Divorce became common post war in a way that it never had been before, and the concept of divorce without fault was introduced.  First introduced by a modern nation in 1917 in Russia, and codified by the Communist in 1926, it was introduced into the United States in California in 1969 where it was signed into law by the divorced (1949) and remarried (1952) Governor Ronald Reagan.

Final scene in The Best Years of Our Lives, 1946.  It's emblematic that the film concludes with a recently divorced central character proposing, over the objection of her father, to a young woman who had vowed to break up that characters marriage (she doesn't).

The Best Years of Their Lives also depicts fairly heavy drinking, and not in an accepting fashion, but in a relatively realistic one .That was also something that the war really brought in.  Returning veterans were often very broken men, and alcohol abuse was an enduring feature of their lives, along with chronic cigarette smoking.  This bled over into the culture in general and an increased acceptance of heavy alcohol use became common, and indeed is something often featured in post war films in a routine fashion.  Men who had endured killing on a mass scale often never really adjusted back to a normal life, and resorted to the bottle in varying degrees.

At least by my observation, some of these men became downright mean.  We hate to say that about "The Greatest Generation", but it's an enduring theme of the recollections of many of their children.  Alcoholic fathers who were extremely demanding on their male children seems to have been routine.  Again, by my observation, many of the same children, who went on to rebel during the 1960s, returned to their childhood roots and became mean demanding fathers to their own children, making World War Two the domestic abuse gift that keeps on giving.

While certainly most returning veterans did not become mean, or abusive, it has to be noted that the Second World War started the country off on a destruction of the natural relationship between men and women we're also still dealing with.

Not since the American Civil War had so many young men been taken away from their homes and never in the country's history had so many young men been kept in the company of young men overseas.  War involves the ultimate vice, the killing of other human beings, and all other vices naturally come along with it, in varying degrees by personality, and by military culture.

All wars involve the abuse of women, the most spectacular example during the Second World War being the mass rapes, often accompanied by murder of the victims, by the Red Army late in the Second World War.  There are some examples by Western armies as well, but they are much smaller in scale.  Also notable, however, was the largescale outbreak of prostitution in Europe, some of which was conducted nearly publicly in places that would never have tolerated it before the war.  Economic desperation caused much of it in some areas, which included underaged European women prostituting themselves in some instances and the military simply accepting it.² 

Bill Mauldin in 1945.  The diminutive Mauldin appeared a little younger than he actually was, being 24 years old at the time of this photograph.  Indeed, Mauldin strongly resembled, oddly enough, Rockwell's Will Gillis depiction of an average GI.  Mauldin's appearance contributed to a public view of the cartoonist that fit very much in with the public's image of "fresh faced American boys" in general, but he'd already lived a hard life by the time he entered the service.  She son of New Mexican farmer/ranchers who were partially native American, Mauldin's early life had been somewhat chaotic and his teenage years were more so, being somewhat on his own by that time and living a somewhat odd life by the time he was in high school.  While Mauldin is associated with the typical GI, his status as a member of the staff of two separate Army newspapers lead to an atypical existence including have a teenage Italian mistress when he was in Italy.  In some ways Mauldin reflects the best and the worst of Army life in his cartoons and for that matter in actual service life.

Even where not completely sordid, plenty of misconduct occurred in all of the ranks.  This is depicted in the recent series Master of the Air with at least one of the affairs depicted actually having occurred.  In fictional form, it's portrayed in 1956's The Man In The Gray Flannel Suit.

The Man In the Gray Flannel Suit from 1956, but which starts off in World War Two and the moral failings in combat of the central character, including the violation of his marital vows.

This was bound to have some impact on the wider culture, and we've argued that it lead to the wider acceptance of the objectification of women.  Indeed, thousands of men became acclimated to the centerfolds in Yank during the war, making the introduction of Playboy in 1953 not all that much of the big leap as its claimed to be.

First issue of Yank's pinup girl.

Donna Reed as a Yank centerfold.  Reed was well known actress by this time, and is perhaps best known for her role in The Best Years Of Our Lives.  Her actual last name was Mullenger but as she started acting during World War Two, her studio changed it to Reed over her objection.  She became a peace activist during the Vietnam War.

Actress Susan Hayward as a Yank centerfold.

Playboy often gets credit for firing the open shots of the disastrous Sexual Revolution, but it can be argued that Yank did.  At any rate, by the wars end, millions of men had served in places were morality of all types was at a low ebb, and had ogled the girls in Yank, and perhaps painted topless or nude figures on government aircraft.  That this would have some effect, particularly later when bogus sex studies were released as scientific texts, isn't too surprising. The major erosion of the natural order between men and women that came into full fruition after the late 1960s had some roots that went at least as far back as the 1910s, but World War Two gave it a major boost.

The war also gave a major boost to automobiles.

Prior to the war, and during it, the US relied on rail transportation. But new types of automobiles, notably 4x4s, were introduced during the war, and cars overall simply improved.  By 1950 it was clear that road building and automobiles had become a major American obsession, spawned in part by the heavy road use, in spite of automobiles, that occurred during the war.  4x4s, which were strictly an industrial vehicle, were introduced into civilian use shortly after the war, with pickup truck variants ending the need for ranches to have cowboys in the high country during the winter, and allowing any part of the country to be accessed to some degree by sportsmen or agriculturalist year around.

1947 Sheridan newspaper advertisement for what was probably a surplus Dodge WC.

Reliance on equine transportation, in contrast, started to decline markedly.  

December 31, 1945 brought the news that Hirohito had renounced claims to divinity, with the nature of the Japanese monarchical claim on that point never understood by Westerners in the first place.  He did not ever claim to have been a god, and it was soon learned that the majority of the Japanese had never believed in the imperial family's claim to a unique divine status in the first place.

The war ended, seemingly for good, Japanese militarism.  It also seems to have ended German militarism as well, something assisted by the fact that the Soviets ended up with Prussia, it's source.

The war, of course, also advanced the frontiers of Soviet domination beyond its 1940 status, something the Soviets had been working on since 1917.  This would prove to be temporary, as would the Soviet Union itself, but that could not be foreseen in 1945.  A world that had worried about whether fascism, communism, or democracy would prevail, now worried over whether communism or democracy would be the ultimate victors.

In China, where on this day an unsuccessful treaty between the Nationalist and the Communists would be signed, a contest more resembling the pre World War Two one was going on, revived from its 1927 start and temporary hiatus during the Second World War.

1945 was a fateful year.  For Americans it started with American troops fighting the Germans in Bulge in Operation Wachts am Rhein and in Alsatia in Operation Nordwind.  For the Soviets, January 1945 would be the bloodiest month of the war, as it would be for the Germans.  For the Japanese, it marked pitched resistance to Allied advances everywhere, and a desperate effort to advance in China.  It all came to an end in August, 1945, and by December 31, 1945, the world was trying to sort out where it was going.  Much of it could be anticipated, but much could not be.

Some additional items:

Today in World War II History—December 31, 1940 & 1945: 80 Years Ago—Dec. 31, 1945: US National War Labor Board is disbanded. US ends tire rationing. British Home Guard is officially disbanded.

The prewar world was gone forever.  Sorting that out is still going on.

Related threads:

Father Arne and the Greatest Failure of the Greatest Generation

Baby Boom Generation, Great Migration, It was because of World War Two, mehr Mensch sein, trends, World War II (Greatest) Generation, World War Two, Yeoman's Fourth Law of History

Footnotes:

*I had typed out a very long and detailed look at the 1940s, and 1945, for the December 31, 1945 entry, before some computer glitch entirely wiped it out.  It's completely gone.

I may try to reconstruct it a bit, but the fact that I started working on it some time ago is a deterrent to that. And even if I do, a reconstructed post is never as good as the original.

1.  Like decades, centuries don't really track the calendar precisely either.  The 20th Century arguably began around 1898 or so, and continued on, perhaps, to 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed.

2.  An interesting sympathetic depiction of a woman engaging in prostitution due to economic desperation in found in the 1946 Italian film Paisa'.

Last edition:  

Saturday, December 29, 1945. Korean protests on US decision.

Labels: 1940s, 1945, 1948, Adolf Hitler, Army, Cartoons, Eva Braun, It was because of World War Two, J.R. Williams, Korea, Occupation of Korea, Operation Blacklist Forty, U.S. Coast Guard

Monday, December 31, 1945. The end of a historical episode and the dawn of a new one, additional labels.

Monday, December 31, 1945. The end of a historical episode and the dawn of a new one, additional labels, part two.