Uber #1

[superboyprime]

'As much as it's possible for a book like Uber to be respectful, I need it to be respectful (and I was always aware that may be impossible, at least in some people's eyes). It's about WW2, not using WW2. I cannot forget that at any point.'

- Kieron Gillen

Comments

[bizarrohulk]

The historical Churchill wouldn't have balked at using poison gas. He'd have been among the first to suggest it.

[captainbellman]

Mm. He was the one who suggested machine-gunning the Miners when they went on strike after the war...

[arbre_rieur]

I was surprised to learn this, but apparently poison gas was never used as a weapon at any point in the European theater during World War II.

[arilou_skiff]

There's a (probably apocryphal) story about that, they asked Göring after the war they never used poison gas, and he answered that they never got enough gas masks for the horses.

[captainbellman]

Nor in London; Hitler was aware of our sterling effort to get everyone in possession of a gas mask and acquainted with their use, so he never saw the point in making the effort.

[mortimerwclankitybritches]

Maybe. The popular tale of him trying to have poison gas used in Iraq against rebel/bandit tribes may be bullshit (as the gas he was advocating was tear gas, and he advocated it entirely because of its non lethality) but considering just what he and the British government were planning to throw at the invading nazis should Operation Sealion have come about (basically setting the entire sea on fire with petrol, spraying mustard gas on the burning boats and beaches, and then spraying the burning, poisoned beachhead with bullets and bombs for good measure) i agree that dumping a few thousand tonnes of nerve gas on the nightmarishly powerful and mass murder happy supermen would probably be at least considered by Winnie.

[donnblake]

He did actually push for looking into the use of poison gas against the Germans, though.

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=_wUAAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA42&lpg=PA42&dq=bernstein+gas+lewis+atomic+anthrax&source=bl&ots=zqgcfV1bQd&sig=ErRfCFbKCsN_xsEJMtA2HRVz_5M&hl=en&ei=zSvUTfiyNceD-wby7Z3PCg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBgQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false

[jlbarnett]

I think I'm among those who say this could never be respectful

[benuben]

Is it really any worse than any Captain America comic that takes place in WW2? Especialy the ones with Invaders?

[captainbellman]

We stood for "Inglourious Basterds" (or most of us did), "Red Son", etc. We'll stand for this, and probably also for that upcoming story Morrison's going to do with an alternate-history Nazi Superman.

[blunderbuss]

Would Churchill ever refer to the British people as 'plebians'? I admit I don't know much about the man but that strikes me as out of character.

Secondly, what did Siegfried do? His eyes started glowing and then ...? Something horrifying enough to make Nazi officers puke, sure, but did he kill them all?

[akodo_rokku]

Quoth the comic itself, "less than one in twenty escaped the scene". So yeah, on Hitler's order, he started slaughtering the Soviet POWs.

[blunderbuss]

Makes me wonder why those nazi officers were so repulsed then. It's not like they're not used to this sort of thing. :P

[wizardru]

The generals and colonels of a command staff weren't out bare-handedly disemboweling people. The reason the death camps worked the way they did was the banal systemic nature of them. They were horrible, but they were also designed to dehumanize over time, reduce their victims to sub-humans and then kill them by overwork and mistreatment, eventually exterminating them in impersonal ways like gas chambers (and then mass burials or ovens or both).

Watching a superhuman commit mass slaughter is an entirely different thing and so I don't find it surprising that they would react that way.

[damar148]

Early on, they had problems with their soldiers, even the die-hard fanatic SS troops, not dealing well with gunning down hundreds or thousands of helpless people at once with resulting psychological issues and heavy reliance on alchohol and narotics..

[mrstatham]

Thing is, Churchill was a great wartime leader. That's where he gets the rep from, the speeches and the leadership and the 'v' sign. Outside of the war, however, you could very much perceive Churchill as being rather like Thatcher and having a distinct - not publicly pronounced, but distinct - dislike of the working class, leading to instances like that which captainbellman brings up, above.

[captainbellman]

It'd be interesting for someone to stage a production of "Coriolanus" in a post-WWII alt-timeline England, the way that Ian McKellen set his "Richard III" in a pre-WWII alt-timeline England. The problems of Caius Martius are not unlike Churchill's own, though he dealt with them in a different manner...

[blunderbuss]

Now that you mention it, that doesn't really surprise me. During WWII he expected that Australia would defend the Motherland at the expense of ourselves and got pissy when we turned to the US as our major wartime ally. Makes sense that he would have that sort of attitude towards his own people.

[espanolbot]

Can't remember hi getting annoyed at the UK turning to the States, what with him saying "Ah, we've won the war" after hearing about the bombing of Pearl Harbour.

Plus there are the loans the US gave us and the work that was put in by FDR and such to get them to come into the war on our side.