1945: World War II's forgotten year?

I have a strong interest in the final stages of World War II, but am often frustrated by the surprisingly limited literature on the topic. Happily, there seems to be a minor boom in works on the topic, but major gaps still exist.

The literature on the war tends to be focused on the period 1940-1944. There are lots of good reasons for this, as these were the years where the outcome of the conflict was in the balance (1940-42) and then decided (1943-44). It's fair to say that as a result this period will be of most interest to readers given that it's when the most dramatic events of the war occurred.

However, overlooking 1945 comes at a cost. By focusing on the earlier periods of the war, our understanding of the important question of why the Allies won (to quote the title of Richard Overy's excellent book) is incomplete. In part, this is because contributes to the frequent over-estimation of the performance of the German and Japanese armed forces and under-appreciation of how capable the Allied militaries became - by 1945 the Red Army was probably the most powerful army in human history up to that time, and the US Navy the most powerful fleet. In addition, it leads to gaps in our understanding of the human costs of the war - the folly of the German and Japanese governments' decision to fight on in the face of certain defeat was a crime against their own people, and led directly to millions of avoidable deaths and vast human misery. The increasing brutality of the Axis governments and the relief felt by most citizens of these countries at the end of the war can also be over-looked.

A result of the relative neglect of 1945 is that some of the key campaigns have only ever been properly covered in the official histories produced in the decades immediately after the war. For instance, when researching the Air raids on Japan article I found that the 1953 USAAF official history Pacific: Matterhorn to Nagasaki provided the only truly comprehensive and account of the massive bombing campaign conducted against Japan, and was also generally the most reliable work on this topic. Similarly, Gavin Long's Final Campaigns which was first published in 1963 remains the one and only detailed account of the Australian Army's operations in the year. The same holds true for the important campaigns in Germany, the Philippines and South East Asia. While these books remain of great value, they are now in many aspects dated and the topics they didn't cover (for instance, Samuel Eliot Morison describes many of the US Navy's major carrier operations against the Japanese home islands only briefly in his semi-official history) have never been properly addressed by other authors.

Some thoughts on infoboxes

Infoboxes are a standard part of Wikipedia's military history articles, and provide a way of summarising details on conflicts, people, equipment and the like. At the time of writing, the Military History Project maintains eleven primary infoboxes, three auxiliary infoboxes and a standard design for navigation template. In addition, many articles use infoboxes which fall under other projects, such as WikiProject Biography's and WikiProject Ships'. Infoboxes are such a well-known feature of Wikipedia's military history articles that I've seen them used in a cartoon satirising a local political dispute. Yet despite this, they're often badly executed and can absorb absurd amounts of editors' time. But this doesn't have to be the case.

What goes wrong?

In my experience, Infobox military conflict is by far the most troublesome infobox as pretty much every element of it can be miss-used or gamed. However, other infoboxes can be used in problematic ways. Some of the most frequent issues I've seen are:

Too much detail - All the guidance on infoboxes stresses the need to keep them very simple, with the relevant manual of style page noting that the less information an infobox contains the better it serves its purpose. Despite this, there's often a tendency for more and more detail to be added to infoboxes over time. Taken to its logical conclusion, this can lead to monster-sized infoboxes such as those which confront readers of the Syrian Civil War and Eastern Front (World War II) articles.
Over simplification - The converse of the above are attempts to shoehorn information on a complex issue into an infobox. For instance, the Moro Conflict article's infobox tries to cover a war which has been running since 1969 but confuses readers by giving point in time information for involved countries and the strengths of the various forces.
Endless trivial disputes - As a splendid example of Parkinson's law of triviality, infoboxes in articles such as the Pacific War and Allies of World War II have been subject to long-running disagreements over which countries should be included and excluded, and in which order they should be listed, while little is done to actually improve the article. In the worst instances, editors have been blocked and articles protected from editing to end these disputes.
POV-pushing More seriously, there are any number of examples to use infoboxes to push a certain view. Edits to the "results" section of Infobox military conflict are a frequent offender here.
Including information which belongs in the body of the article - Other infoboxes such as that in the War on Terror article present readers with detailed information on the results or status of the conflict: when this can't be summarised into a sentence or two, it really belongs in the body of the article.
Containing unreferenced material - While material in infoboxes doesn't need to be referenced if it's referenced in the body of the article, there can be a tendency to add in extra details or claims.
Being boring or confusing - As infoboxes are among the first things readers see, they should grab their attention. However, all too often they include a boring or unclear picture (such as that in the Focke-Wulf Fw 190 article), an image which doesn't really illustrate the topic (such as that in the Operation Enduring Freedom – Horn of Africa article) or a jumble of details. While it's often not possible to find a good Wikipedia licensing-compliant image, it's well worth digging around for one to help engage readers.
Unnecessary graphics or miss-use of fields - While a fairly minor issue, care should be taken to minimise the use of graphics in infoboxes: too many make the thing hard to follow and confuse readers. Similarly, putting information in inappropriate fields can be seriously confusing.
Everything - In the worst cases, everything can go wrong with an infobox. One of the better examples of this is the joke infobox which has bedevilled the Emu War article for years (it still gets edit warred in from time to time thanks to Reddit threads!). More seriously, infoboxes such as that in the Military intervention against ISIL article are of no help to readers, and almost certainly discourage them from reading further.

Why does it go wrong?

Generally speaking, bad infoboxes develop over time. Because they're prominent and fairly easy to edit many of them are regularly tweaked, especially by new or infrequent editors. Multiple such edits typically lead to over-sized, inaccurate or confusing infoboxes. Conversely, infoboxes which are neglected can end up being outdated due to no longer reflecting modern scholarship or, in the case of those on contemporary topics, more recent developments.

However, sometimes infoboxes go bad quickly. This is particularly the case when someone decides to use them to advance their preferred version of history. Infoboxes on current events and individuals often also start bad, and don't always get better when editors add in low-quality material and then expand on it.

Why is it a problem?

What can be done?

There are lots of options for improving infoboxes. These include:

Cutting - Often being bold and chopping material out of over-detailed infoboxes is the best approach. When the extent of the change is significant, this should be accompanied by a post on the talk page explaining why you made the change.
Referencing and correcting - Self evident really
Discussing and compromising
Removing unsuitable material - A good approach to handling material where its agreed that the subject is too complex to summarise in an infobox is to simply remove it, and replace it with a link to the section of the article where the the topic is discussed.

10 years before the Wiki-mast

With apologies to Richard Henry Dana, Jr.

In November 2015 I reached ten years as a Wikipedia editor.

Remembering the First World War in Australia - some personal reflections

The First World War took place before almost all Australians currently alive were born, was fought almost entirely on the other side of the world, and many modern Australians have no family links to anyone who served in the Australian military at that time. Yet the centenary of the war has been the subject of a huge Government-funded remembrance program which has attracted large crowds to some events and received considerable coverage through the popular media and an outpouring of works by historians.

Why is this the case? A major reason is that the war remains the most costly in Australia's history - 61,530 people were killed and 137,000 were wounded, much higher than the 39,652 killed in the Second World War. These are shocking figures for Australians, and dwarf the numbers of casualties incurred in subsequent wars. Indeed, the First World War continues to include the worst-ever days in Australian history in terms of numbers of people killed. While many Australian families continue to remember ancestors who are killed and wounded in the war, this doesn't explain much of the conflict's continuing prominence - after all, the war ended almost 100 years ago, and due to mass migration since 1945 a high proportion of Australians do not have this connection (for instance, almost 30 percent of the current Australian population was born overseas). As such, the content of the education system and books and TV shows emphasising Australia's military history over other aspects of national history explain much of the continuing interest in the war.

The most notable aspect of commemorations of the war's centenary to me is how antiseptic it all is. Much of the remembrance seems to have been planned and scripted by well-meaning committees, and little of it is actually memorable. The more high-profile memorials are particularly bland - for instance, the redeveloped First World War galleries of the Australian War Memorial are technically excellent, but have less of an emotional impact than the more "rough and ready" galleries they replaced. Similarly, the large new displays on the war in the museum section of the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne are dominated by dull collections of photos and well-laundered uniforms. The ceremonies commemorating the war have been equally bland, with none to date producing any memorable moments.

In contrast, many of the memorials to the war which were erected during or shortly after the conflict remain emotionally powerful. For instance, the huge ANZAC War Memorial in central Sydney and its extraordinary central sculpture of a sacrificed solider continue to pack a punch. The seemingly endless list of names of men and women killed in the war on the roll of honour at the Australian War Memorial also brings home the cost of the conflict, with military historians being well placed to understand what the meaning of the hundreds of names which follows each infantry battalion means. The small memorials erected during the 1920s in almost every town and suburb which existed at the time listing the locals who either fought in the conflict, or were killed also continue to be an important reminder of how the war affected communities.

However, to my mind the most moving memorials are those dedicated by the families, friends or colleagues.

Special forces

Last year was a good one for people with an interest in the history of Australia's special operations forces. The Australian War Memorial opened its long-awaited temporary exhibition on these forces, From the Shadows: Australia’s Special Forces, and prominent investigative journalist Chris Masters' book No Front Line: Australian special forces at war in Afghanistan was released. The two projects are inter-related, with Masters having contributed to the AWM's exhibition, but provide some rather different perspectives on the topic.

Masters' book is perhaps the most detailed book I've seen on modern special forces operations, and weighs in at a hefty 608 pages. He covers each of the rotations of Australian special forces to Afghanistan between 2001 and 2013 in detail. This includes describing the weapons and tactics used, as well as providing blow by blow coverage of many engagements. The Australian Army cooperated with Masters in order to lift the visibility of its contribution to the war in Afghanistan, but he states that he was entirely free to form his own judgements (something I find credible given his track record).

I'm not sure whether the Army would have been particularly happy with the book, as it provides a warts and all perspective on the special forces experiences. As well as describing the significant achievements of the Australian commandos and Special Air Service Regiment troopers, Masters describes their growing disillusionment with the war and questions the effectiveness of their operations. For instance, he notes that the SAS were typically used to kill or capture low level Taliban commanders who were rapidly replaced, and the commandos spent the last years of the war on an exciting but strategically questionable campaign against the Afghan drug industry. Both forces were also often dispatched on tasks better suited to the conventional Australian infantry units in the country, who were often left under-employed, and at times caused avoidable civilian casualties due to carelessness. Overall, No Front Line is probably the single best book on Australia's involvement in the fighting in Afghanistan, and likely to be of interest to an international audience.

The AWM's exhibition is a somewhat different beast. As it is a government institution which serves as both a memorial and a museum, the AWM has nowhere near Masters' freedom to present critical perspectives. However, its exalted status and remarkable collections allows it to present impressive exhibitions. The most interesting elements of From the Shadows are the items donated or loaned by special forces units and personnel which illustrate their experiences. These include remembrance bands worn by soldiers in combat to honour their fallen comrades, a striking "story board" prepared by the SAS to mark its success in killing a Taliban leader which was made from his personal belongings and all manner of specialised weapons and equipment.

What From the Shadows lacks though is a critical perspective on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan which have dominated the experiences of the special forces units since 2001. It doesn't attempt to provide a campaign history of these wars, or assess the overall effectiveness of the Australian special forces. There is also no hint that many of the operations the forces were involved in were, as Masters convincingly argues, unsuccessful or even counter-productive.

There are some common themes between the book and the exhibition though. Most strikingly, both pull few punches in depicting the human cost the special operations units suffered. Masters provides detailed accounts of the deaths of all of the special forces soldiers killed in Afghanistan, and From the Shadows has a large range of memorials made by special forces soldiers, as well as several items relating to the medical efforts made to keep them alive.

Amongst the once dead cities: Why is Wikipedia's coverage of World War II city bombing so poor?

Even with Tokyo's efficient, and vast, public transport system it takes an hour to travel across the area destroyed in the devastating 10 March 1945 air raid.

Turning a corner in Nuremberg while looking for a restaurant, I was confronted with the ruins of a long-burnt out church. I immediately thought of the similar memorials to air attack I had seen in Berlin, Caen, Hamburg, Liverpool and London.

Halfway during the walk from Yokosuka Station to a preserved battleship, I realised that I was using both my phone and myself with memories of strike and reconnaissance photos taken during air raids in 1942 and 1945 to navigate.

Looking at a map of Hiroshima at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, I was sobered to see my hotel was in the zone in which there had been no survivors. Years later at the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum, I was pleased to learn that the area in which my hotel was located was just beyond the boundary of where the firestorm had ended.

When visiting a Commonwealth War Memorial Cemetery in Normandy I found the grave of an Australian airman. I later learned that he had died while deliberately bombing a French village to prevent German units from passing through it to attack the Allied beachhead in June 1944.

Aerial bombing of towns and cities was one of the most important aspects of World War II. As the above examples illustrate, many modern cities were shaped by their destruction and this is commemorated by memorials. A very large and ever-expanding literature also covers the subject. Yet Wikipedia's coverage of the bombing of towns and cities is highly uneven.

As illustrated by the number of articles Category:World War II strategic bombing, we have articles on most of the main strategic bombing campaigns of the war. Coverage of key raids is uneven - for instance, while we have an overall article on the Bombing of Hamburg in World War II, there isn't a dedicated article on the devastating firebombing raids of July 1943. Similarly, there's a Bombing of Cologne in World War II article, but not a dedicated article on the famous "1,000 bomber raid" which targeted the city in 1942.