Hello everyone,

This thread is trending high right now and getting a lot of attention, but it is important to remember those upvotes represent interest in the question, and it can often take time for a good answer to be written. The mission of /r/AskHistorians is to provide users with in-depth and comprehensive responses, and our rules are intended to facilitate that purpose.

We remove comments which don't follow them for reasons including unfounded speculation, shallowness, and of course, inaccuracy.

Making comments asking about the removed comments simply compounds this issue. Since I last checked this thread, there have been 14 new posts - fully 13 of which were complaints that all the comments are removed. Stop scratching that, you're just making it worse. Please check out the rules, as we don't want to have to warn you further.

Of course, we know that it can be frustrating to come in here from your frontpage or /r/all and see only [removed], but we ask for your patience and understanding. Great content is produced on this subreddit every day, and we hope that while you wait, you will check out places they are featured, including Twitter, the Sunday Digest, the Monthly "Best Of" feature, and now, Facebook. It is very rare that a decent answer doesn't result in due time, so please do come check back on this thread in a few hours. If you think you might forget, send a Private Message to the Remind-Me bot, and it will ensure you don't!

I know this question never got an answer, but a similar one was just asked and did, so this might be of interest OP and anyone else in the archives.

Sorry to see you don't have an answer (yet) OP, but a few things to note!

First, as it's been a slow night for me, as we occasionally like to do, I thought I'd provide that periodic peek behind the curtain with a screenshot of the removed comments. When the top-level warning was posted, as noted then, the thread was mostly just detritus, and little has changed at this point. Here it is, in all is ignonimity. Only modifications I've made are collapsing a few child comments of parents which weren't removed quickly enough, and also edited out all usernames. Otherwise, this is the view that the mods have of the thread.

As you can see, it is, ironically, mostly just people complaining that the comments are removed. A few comments made some attempt to answer, but they fell into two broad categories: vague speculation, and just linking to other sites (Wiki mostly). None came close to what we expect vis-a-vis the rules. Many of those users were temp banned, as a Top Level Warning is in place in the subreddit.

Second, as you can see, we did remove a follow-up question after some quick internal discussion. We do allow them, but only when they hit the sweet-spot of substantively expanding on the question without going to far into another topic, but not simply asking something that is a core component of the question and would be answered by anyone who is answering it anyways. Given that our expectation in modding the thread already was that an answer focusing on a single country would easily be allowed to stand, the follow-up was removed. But, that being said, it still isn't entirely without merit. If you, or someone else, were to reask the question, phrasing it to be more focused can make it more attractive to a prospective answerer. Your phrasing does imply that you are interested in the Allies perspective, but you can narrow that down further even. "How did American veterans of WWI who served in WWII come to view their service and the experiences of the Great War in the context of the later conflict?" To be sure, even within that cohort there is no singular view, and there can be wide disagreement from man to man, but it nevertheless provides deeper focus and guidance, so might be something to consider down the line.