Destination~Vienna
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"I have seen war. I have seen war on land and sea. I have seen blood running from the wounded. I have seen the dead in the mud. I have seen cities destroyed. I have seen children starving. I have seen the agony of mothers and wives. I hate war." --
World War I, also known as the First World War, the Great War, and the War to End All Wars, was a global military conflict that embroiled most of the world's great powers assembled in two opposing alliances: the Triple Entente and the Triple Alliance. World War I was one of the most destructive wars in modern history. Nearly ten million soldiers died as a result of hostilities. The enormous losses on all sides of the conflict resulted in part from the introduction of new weapons, like the machine gun and gas warfare, as well as the failure of military leaders to adjust their tactics to the increasingly mechanized nature of warfare. A policy of attrition, particularly on the Western Front, cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of
No official agencies kept careful accounting of civilian losses during the war years. More than seventy million military personnel were mobilized in one of the largest wars in history. The main combatants descended into a state of total war, pumping their entire scientific and industrial capabilities into the war effort. More than fifteen million people were killed, making it one of the deadliest conflicts in history. The conflict uprooted or displaced millions of persons from their homes in Europe and Asia Minor. Property and industry losses were catastrophic, especially in France, Belgium, Poland, and Serbia, where fighting had been heaviest.
How is it then, that within a time span of twenty short years, the world would find itself involved in an even greater conflict? World War II casualty statistics vary greatly. Estimates of total dead range from fifty million to over seventy million making it the deadliest war ever. Civilians killed totaled from forty to fifty-two million, including thirteen to twenty million from war-related disease and famine.
Total military dead: from twenty-one to twenty-five million, including deaths in captivity of about five million prisoners of war. U.S. battle deaths were 292,131 of which included: Navy 36,950, Marine Corps 19,733, Coast Guard 574 and the Army 234,874 of which 52,173 were from the Army Air Corps.
The basic causes of World War II were the nationalistic tensions, unresolved issues, and resentments resulting from the First World War and the interwar period in Europe, plus the negative reaction of the Roosevelt Administration to the aggressive expansion of the Empire of Japan in the Far East in the 1930s.
In the first chapter, we are going to discuss and explore all of these reasons as probable causes, both singularly and cumulatively. Is it possible that the tenets of the instrument to insure the peace and punish the offenders of World War I, the Treaty of Versailles, may in and of itself have been the prime mover of unintended consequences that led to World War II?
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About the Book
World War II was a great conflagration of unimaginable horror and destruction resulting in over seventy million killed, millions more displaced, families broken or destroyed, great cities and even whole countries left in ruins. This book will backdrop, from the end of World War I, or "The War to End All Wars" and the signing of the Treaty of Versailles on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918, the almost immediate series of events that led to World War II.
We will chronicle these events as they relate to the life of one individual and his ultimate entanglement with the dynamics of a world engulfed in war.
This book will retrace the mission of one solitary B-24 Liberator bomber crew on a single day in March 1945 when they met their "fate, somewhere among the clouds above." We will see the kindred spirit of complete strangers who were thrust into and subsequently banded together by untenable circumstance, to rise and act to cast off the yoke of evil.
About the Author
KEVIN W. EDWARDS is the son of the late William W. Edwards, a former 2nd Lieutenant/Navigator who served in World War II with the 783rd Squadron of the 465th Bomb Group/55th Wing of the 15th Army Air Force in Italy. The author was born in Bridgeport, CT and grew up in Stratford, graduating from Stratford High School and is presently a second career high school teacher of Mathematics, after having been a mechanical engineer and manufacturing executive for over thirty years. He is a graduate of Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, CT with a Master of Arts in Teaching, Bridgeport Engineering Institute in Bridgeport, CT with a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering, Norwalk State Technical College in Norwalk, CT with an Associate in Applied Science-Mechanical Engineering Technology. He resides with his wife Sharon and their two children, Kyle and Kelly, in Connecticut.