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They didn't fight on the same front, but they were allies nevertheless. We were all friends with the Soviets until 1945. Because of Operation Barbarossa, of course.

Norwegian and Swedish volunteers fought alongside Finns against the Soviets during the Winter War (1939-40), but Norway ended up on the same side as the Soviet Union a year and a half later. My point was simply that not even WW2 was "good vs evil" - there was a bad guy with a moustache on the Allied side as well ...
 
World War II is much more fascinating than World War I in general. My country was a major piece of the puzzle in the first one and didn't even participate in the second but WWII still is much more interesting to me. In fact, I've spent the last three hours writing a timeline about it.
 
The USSR did a lot of the dying for the Allies. They did most of the dying. The scale of combat on the Eastern Front is exponentially larger than that in the West. It's hard to comprehend without a solid grounding in the history of the period, but yes, the USSR and the western forces did not fight side-by side. That's mostly because the USSR didn't need men. But that doesn't mean it wasn't a united effort.

Russia mobilized something like 35 million soldiers. They did their dying in boots made in New England. They drove to their place of death in trucks made in Detroit after they got off of trains pulled by engines made in Pittsburgh. When they lived, they were bandaged by bandages made in Kentucky and when an airplane appeared overhead and saved their ass by blowing up the German tank it was a 50/50 chance that was a Seattle-made airplane.

World War II is also more dynamic than WWI. It's easier to romanticise. That's why you hear people talk about D-Day and not Leningrad. Even people who are decent scholars of WWII don't think about Leningrad, despite it being the largest battle of World War II. Why? Because it was 2 years of trench & siege warfare. Not exciting. It's not a mad dash through France by the 7th Panzer or a wicked hook out of Falaise by 3rd US Army. It's not a brutal deathly slog like Stalingrad, spattered with soundbytes, and it's not a wild yet violent melee in the desert like El Alamein.
 
One of the biggest injustices in post-war Norway is widely regarded to be the treatment of the "war sailors" - seamen who took part in the many convoys that, among other things, brought supplies from the Western allies to the Soviets through the Barents Sea. Their significance for the war effort wasn't properly recognized until decades after the war, and neither was their suffering. Even though the majority of Norwegians who died during WW2, died at sea.
 
Mostly that their effort was more or less ignored, and they received little support after the war (both in terms of money and in terms of moral backing).
 
Could you enlighten me why that happened? People were so busy with getting back to normal life / rebuilding the country, that they "forgot" about these sailors?
Did they do anything bad in their eyes?
 
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Because not all soldiers get parades. Even Caesar was denied a triumph. (Of course that one didn't turn out so well...)

Seriously, in the US at least, there was more an attitude of "it was a job that had to be done". Not that soldiers weren't praised, but most people thought it was time to move on. Once the '50s were underway, people lived their lives rather than care about their own memorials. It takes a generation or two to look back to it as history to recognize everything. In the US, we just opened our WWII memorial in 2004.
 
Look what I found. Interesting:
http://www.newsinenglish.no/2013/12/03/sailors-finally-win-wartime-recognition/
Author and former newspaper editor Jon Michelet has struck a national nerve with his first two novels about a fictional wartime sailor. Norway’s merchant marines had a huge role in the allied war effort during World War II, but suffered greatly for it.

“One in four young men (in Norway) were at sea during the war. Everyone seems to have a wartime seaman among their close relations,” Michelet told newspaper Aftenposten. He thinks it’s shameful that they got no recognition afterwards, or help for post traumatic stress.
Click to expand...

It's fiction, but his books could make for some great reading, knowing what inspired him!
 
I just prepared a presentation in English for 6 hours. It's late, no time to get proper sleep, and the first lesson tomorrow is PE.

cartman-lame.jpg
 
God, that list is bad.

1: Metallica should not be below Slayer. In fact, dare I say it, Metallica should be #1 or #2.
2: Pantera is way too high.
3: No Queensryche, DT or Venom? Seriously? I also think Nightwish needed a mention considering their popularity.
4: Cannibal Corpse. No.
5: Meshuggah is also a no, but not as much as CC.
 
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