WWII Letters

Who am I?

I created a fictionalized version of my grandfather as the character I am writing a letter as. He is a navy soldier (sort of) but mainly just a late twenties recruit working for the 17th Task Force during the Battle of Midway in June of 1942 (the Task Force 17 was aboard the USS Yorktown, the only US carrier sunk that day).

He is sending the letter about 6 months later, retelling his story of survival, the letter is dated October 13th, 1942, one day before the attack on Henderson Field, which he references as to be temporarily stationed (he dies the next day).

Blog 15

Section of Interest: Modern ideas of war & war crimes

Reasoning?

Mainly I want/like/interested by the modern concepts of war is how structured it is. War is always seen as something barbaric, but then we have things such as laws, crimes, courts and other various justice systems. So much thought goes into the argument whether or not a war is just or whether or not you committed a war crime could be better used in solving the dispute between two countries before going to war. I've always wondered how decisions are made and how things are decided when it comes to the War justice system.

Blog 14

1. I feel that it is really interesting that both WWI and WWII are connected. The treaty of Versailles, which ended WWI also indirectly started WWII (that's arguable, I guess, since the conditions that it put Germany in made its government susceptible to Nazi rule and what not).

2. I'm not sure what I want to learn about these wars...I kind of have learned about them every year of school since 8th grade, well, almost.

3. We need to learn our history so we don't make the same stupid mistakes that we once did. If we don't learn our history we are doomed to repeat it. It's arguable whether or not WWI had a good enough reason to happen, which is interesting since we are currently in a war (unofficially not in a war) that has literally no reason for us to be over there.