WWII Document Analysis Assignment

WWII Document Analysis Assignment

Directions:

1. In your group read through each of the documents 1 at a time. After reading/analyzing the document discuss in your group these questions:

What kind of document is it?
What does the document say/show?
What is the significance of the document?
What can be inferred from the document?
Any other thoughts?

2. After your group discussion each person must then write a statement about each document on their piece of paper detailing their analysis of the document(use the questions above).

3. After you have done this for each document each person then needs to write a 1-3 paragraph response to the following question. In your response you must reference at least ¾ of the documents. “ Was WWII worth the cost of human sacrifice?”

WWII Document Analysis Assignment

Directions:

1. In your group read through each of the documents 1 at a time. After reading/analyzing the document discuss in your group these questions:

What kind of document is it?
What does the document say/show?
What is the significance of the document?
What can be inferred from the document?
Any other thoughts?

2. After your group discussion each person must then write a statement about each document on their piece of paper detailing their analysis of the document(use the questions above).

DOCUMENT A

World War 2 Total Deaths (Approximate):

COUNTRY / CASUALTIES
Soviet Union / 23,954,000
China / 15,000,000
Germany / 7,728,000
Poland / 5,720,000
Japan / 2,700,000
India / 2,087,000
Yugoslavia / 1,027,000
Rumania / 833,000
Hungary / 580,000
France / 567,600
Greece / 560,000
Italy / 456,000
Great Britain / 449,800
United States / 418,500
Czechoslovakia / 345,000
Netherlands / 301,000
Austria / 123,700
Finland / 97,000
Belgium / 86,100
Canada / 45,300
Australia / 40,500
Bulgaria / 25,000
New Zealand / 11,900
South Africa / 11,900
Norway / 9,500
Spain / 4,500
Denmark / 3,200
TOTAL: / 63,185,500

DOCUMENT B

Evacuation to Manzanar
An Eyewitness Account by Yuri Tateishi
April 26, 1942

When the evacuation came, we were renting a home and had four kids: it was terrible because you had to sell everything. We were just limited to what we could take with us, and so everything was just sold for whatever we could get. Our furniture was rather new at that time because we had just bought a living-room and dining-room set. I just finished paying for a refrigerator when I had to sell that. Of course, we got nothing for it, because we had such a limited time. I don't remember how much notice we got, but it seems it was two weeks or something because we had to rush to sell everything. I don't remember how much time we had, but it wasn't very long. Otherwise, we wouldn't be selling at such low prices. The day of the evacuation was April 26. The day before, we had to sleep on the floor because all the furniture was gone. We all slept on the floor, ate on the floor, and cooked what we could with what few utensils we had. I recall we had to get up very early in the morning, and I think we all walked to the Japanese school because no one had a car then. And everybody was just all over the place, the whole Japanese community was there, the West L.A. community. The Westwood Methodist Church had some hot coffee and doughnuts for us that morning, which helped a lot, and we were loaded in a bus.

Just about the time we were ready to load, my youngest son broke out with measles that morning, and I had him covered up, and then a nurse came up to me and said, "May I see your baby?" He was almost three but I was carrying him, and she said, "I'm sorry but I'm going to have to take him away." Of course, I thought, he would be sleeping at that time so he wouldn't know, but I thought also that he would wake up in a strange place, he wouldn't know anybody; and he probably would just cry all day or all night. But the neighbours said that they would go and check him, so that kind of relieved me: If he were awake, maybe we would have been able to tell him something, but he was asleep. It was easier for me because he was asleep. I don't know. But when I thought about how he might wake up and be in a strange place, with strange people, I just really broke down and cried. I cried all morning over it, but there was nothing we could do but leave him. He stayed at the general hospital and joined us at Manzanar in three weeks.

When we got to Manzanar, it was getting dark and we were given numbers first. We went to the mess hall, and I remember the first meal we were given in those tin plates and tin cups. It was canned weiners and canned spinach. It was all the food we had, and then after finishing that we were taken to our barracks. It was dark and trenches were here and there. You'd fall in and get up and finally got to the barracks. The floors were boarded, but they were about a quarter to a half inch apart, and the next morning you could see the ground below: What hurt most I think was seeing those hay mattresses. We were used to a regular home atmosphere, and seeing those hay mattresses—so makeshift, with hay sticking out—a barren room with nothing but those hay mattresses. It was depressing, such a primitive feeling. We were given army blankets and army cots. Our family was large enough that we didn't have to share our barrack with another family but all seven of us were in one room.

You felt like a prisoner. You know, you have to stay inside and you have a certain amount of freedom within the camp I suppose, but ... you're kept inside a barbed-wire fence, and you know you can't go out.

And you don't know what your future is, going into a camp with four children. You just have to trust God that you will be taken care of somehow. It's scary—not in the sense that you would be hurt or anything but not knowing what your future will be. You don't know what the education for the children will be or what type of housing or anything like that. Of course, you don't know how you're going to be able to raise the children.

DOCUMENT C

The Death of Captain Waskow

AT THE FRONT LINES IN ITALY, January 10, 1944 - In this war I have known a lot of officers who were loved and respected by the soldiers under them. But never have I crossed the trail of any man as beloved as Capt. Henry T. Waskow of Belton, Texas. Capt. Waskow was a company commander in the 36th Division. He had led his company since long before it left the States. He was very young, only in his middle twenties, but he carried in him a sincerity and gentleness that made people want to be guided by him. "After my own father, he came next," a sergeant told me. "He always looked after us," a soldier said. "He’d go to bat for us every time." "I’ve never knowed him to do anything unfair," another one said. I was at the foot of the mule trail the night they brought Capt. Waskow’s body down. The moon was nearly full at the time, and you could see far up the trail, and even part way across the valley below. Soldiers made shadows in the moonlight as they walked. Dead men had been coming down the mountain all evening, lashed onto the backs of mules. They came lying belly-down across the wooden pack-saddles, their heads hanging down on the left side of the mule, their stiffened legs sticking out awkwardly from the other side, bobbing up and down as the mule walked. The Italian mule-skinners were afraid to walk beside dead men, so Americans had to lead the mules down that night. Even the Americans were reluctant to unlash and lift off the bodies at the bottom, so an officer had to do it himself, and ask others to help. The first one came early in the morning. They slid him down from the mule and stood him on his feet for a moment, while they got a new grip. In the half light he might have been merely a sick man standing there, leaning on the others. Then they laid him on the ground in the shadow of the low stone wall alongside the road. I don’t know who that first one was. You feel small in the presence of dead men, and ashamed at being alive, and you don’t ask silly questions. We left him there beside the road, that first one, and we all went back into the cowshed and sat on water cans or lay on the straw, waiting for the next batch of mules. Somebody said the dead soldier had been dead for four days, and then nobody said anything more about it. We talked soldier talk for an hour or more. The dead man lay all alone outside in the shadow of the low stone wall. Then a soldier came into the cowshed and said there were some more bodies outside. We went out into the road. Four mules stood there, in the moonlight, in the road where the trail came down off the mountain. The soldiers who led them stood there waiting. "This one is Captain Waskow," one of them said quietly. Two men unlashed his body from the mule and lifted it off and laid it in the shadow beside the low stone wall. Other men took the other bodies off. Finally there were five lying end to end in a long row, alongside the road. You don’t cover up dead men in the combat zone. They just lie there in the shadows until somebody else comes after them. The unburdened mules moved off to their olive orchard. The men in the road seemed reluctant to leave. They stood around, and gradually one by one I could sense them moving close to Capt. Waskow’s body. Not so much to look, I think, as to say something in finality to him, and to themselves. I stood close by and I could hear. One soldier came and looked down, and he said out loud, "God damn it." That’s all he said, and then he walked away. Another one came. He said, "God damn it to hell anyway." He looked down for a few last moments, and then he turned and left. Another man came; I think he was an officer. It was hard to tell officers from men in the half light, for all were bearded and grimy dirty. The man looked down into the dead captain’s face, and then he spoke directly to him, as though he were alive. He said: "I’m sorry, old man." Then a soldier came and stood beside the officer, and bent over, and he too spoke to his dead captain, not in a whisper but awfully tenderly, and he said: "I sure am sorry, sir." Then the first man squatted down, and he reached down and took the dead hand, and he sat there for a full five minutes, holding the dead hand in his own and looking intently into the dead face, and he never uttered a sound all the time he sat there. And finally he put the hand down, and then reached up and gently straightened the points of the captain’s shirt collar, and then he sort of rearranged the tattered edges of his uniform around the wound. And then he got up and walked away down the road in the moonlight, all alone. After that the rest of us went back into the cowshed, leaving the five dead men lying in a line, end to end, in the shadow of the low stone wall. We lay down on the straw in the cowshed, and pretty soon we were all asleep.

DOCUMENT D

Captain Waskow’s last letter home:

Greetings;

If you get to read this, I will have died in defense of my country and all that it stands for—the most honorable and distinguished death a man can die. It was not because I was willing to die for my country, however—I wanted to live for it—just as any other person wants to do. It is foolish and foolhardy to want to die for one’s country, but to live for it is something else.To live for one’s country is, to my mind, to live a life of service; to—in a small way—help a fellow man occasionally along the way, and generally to be useful and to serve. It also means to me to rise up in all our wrath and with overwhelming power to crush any oppressor of human rights.That is our job—all of us—as I write this, and I pray God we are wholely successful.Yes, I would have liked to have lived—to live and share the many blessings and good fortunes that my grandparents bestowed upon me—a fellow never had a better family than mine; but since God has willed otherwise, do not grieve too much dear ones, for life in the other world must be beautiful, and I have lived a life with that in mind all along. I was not afraid to die; you can be assured of that. All along, I prayed that I and others could do our share to keep you safe until we returned. I pray again that you are safe, even though some of us do not return.I made my choice, dear ones. I volunteered in the Armed Forces because I thought that I might be able to help this great country of ours in its hours of darkness and need—the country that means more to me than life itself—if I have done that, then I can rest in peace, for I will have done my share to make the world a better place in which to live. Maybe when the lights go on again all over the world, free people can be happy again.Through good fortune and the grace of God, I was chosen a leader—an honor that meant more to me than any of you will ever know. If I failed as a leader, and I pray to God I didn’t, it was not because I did not try. God alone knows how I worked and slaved to make myself a worthy leader of these magnificent men, and I feel assured that my work has paid dividends—in personal satisfaction, if nothing else.As I said a couple of times in my letters home “when you remember me in your prayers, remember to pray that I be given strength, character and courage to lead these magnificent Americans.” I said that in all sincerity and I hope I have proved worthy of their faith, trust and confidence.I guess I have always appeared as pretty much of a queer cuss to all of you. If I seemed strange at times, it was because I had weighty responsibilities that preyed on my mind and wouldn’t let me slack up to be human—like I so wanted to be. I felt so unworthy, at times, of the great trust my country had put in me, that I simply had to keep plugging to satisfy my own self that I was worthy of that trust. I have not, at the time of writing this, done that, and I suppose I never will.I do not try to set myself on a pedestal as a martyr. Every Joe Doe who shouldered a rifle made a similar sacrifice—but I do want to point out that the uppermost thought in my mind all along was service to the cause, and I hope you all felt the same way about it.When you remember me, remember me as a fond admirer of all of you, for I thought so much of you and loved you with all my heart. My wish for all of you is that you get along well together and prosper—not in money— but in happiness, for happiness is something that all the money in the world can’t buy.Try to live a life of service—to help someone where you are or whatever you may be —take it from me; you can get happiness out of that, more than anything in life.