The Fallen of World War II – An Interactive, Data-Driven Documentary (opens in new tab)

> What worries me is how deeply dependent that peace has been on policymakers having living memories of how terrible World War 2 actually was

I worry about the same thing, and not just policymakers but the public too. I hypothesize that a few behaviors are connected to it:

* The disregard for the importance of the multilateral international institutions built after WWII: The UN, the EU, the WTO, the Geneva Conventions, and the general rules-based international order. Many conservatives seem to describe these as naive, idealistic and unrealistic, but these institutions were built by the survivors of WWI and WWII. They knew far more of war than we do; if anyone is naive, it's us.

* The war-mongering: Within a large segment of U.S. political arena, people compete to show who is most aggressive with the use of the military, as if to prove that they are not 'liberal'. War is not a last resort for them, but almost a first choice.

* The embrace of ideology and nationalism: It seems to me that a lesson of the World Wars is that nationalism and dogmatic ideology leads inexorably to war, and integration with your neighbors and pluralism prevents it. But now xenophobic nationalism and extreme ideologues, unmoderated by skepticism, are mainstream, from the U.S. to Europe to East Asia to the Middle East. We all know where that ends.

* The civilian-military divide and the glorification of the military: Also a product of the move to an all-volunteer force, few Americans have experience in the military or know someone who does, a far remove from the days of WWII or the draft. The results (based on what is written about more and more): Civilians that recklessly send people to the horrors of war (see "war-mongering", above); a military that resents the burden they carry for the civilians; and a highly partisan military. Another result is the recent glorification of the military: Around WWII (and other wars during the draft era), when a large portion of the public had military experience, the military was associated with terms like SNAFU and Catch-22, a bureaucratic disaster that soldiers had to overcome. Now, from a distance, with so few having familiarity with its realities, the military is glorified by civilians. It's almost unpatriotic to criticize it (which incidentally creates a lack of accountability that endangers the personnel we claim to care so much about).

What you get is the current middle eastern situation. Everyone believed invading Iraq would be quick and easy, which it was, and that the reconstruction would be like the post-WW2 reconstruction of Europe, which it really wasn't.

Even WWII was started on the assumption that it would be a quick and relatively painless war. I suspect that modern missile technology makes this assumption flatly invalid.

Here's some scientific evidence of the Russian winters 1940 - 1942 being particularily harsh: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1256/wea.248.04/pdf

Of course, it did not help that Hitler thought he could advance much faster and did not even prepare for winter. Those two winters weakened the Germans significantly.

From the diary of Otto Geipel: “1942: The winter comes with full strength, hardly a way left to advance without missing winter equipment. Even the winter clothing is missing. (. . .) At midnight the temperature dropped to a new reported low point. On 24 January 1942, –56 °C was measured at our division observation post.”

Temperatures like that make a difference.

Quite right. Also the flags of other countries are shown as they were at the time. Nazi and Soviet flags are obvious, as is the case for Yugoslavia which existed then and is no more, but the flags of Greece and Burma are contemporary as well.