C. Peter Chen

C. Peter Chen

ww2dbaseI am the founder and managing editor of the World War II Database, which is a website brought to you by my consulting firm Lava Development, LLC. This website came from a relational database originally designed to organize text clippings, photographs, and my own notes. On 28 Dec 2004, the WW2DB website became publicly available to achieve two goals: To share my notes on WW2 history with others with similar interest, and to showcase the technical capabilities of Lava Development, LLC. From this initiative born the website you see today. Aside from WW2DB, I am also on the staff of the website Imperial Japanese Navy Page on the topic of the WW2-era Japanese Navy.

ww2dbaseWhat is it exactly about history that intrigues me so much? Perhaps this following quote from Eric Hobsbawn's book The Age of Extremes best illustrates it.

For historians of my generation and background, the past is indestructible, not only because we belong to the generation when streets and public places were still called after public men and events, when peace treaties were still signed and therefore had to be identified, and war memorials recalled yesterdays, but because public events are part of the texture of our lives. They are not merely markers in our private lives, but what has formed our lives, private and public. For this author the 30 January 1933 is not simply an otherwise arbitrary date when Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, but a winter afternoon in Berlin when a fifteen-year-old and his younger sister were on the way home from their neighboring schools in Wilmersdorf to Halensee and, somewhere on the way, saw the headline. I can see it still, as in a dream.

ww2dbaseTo our generations, that is exactly how we see World War II. In 2006 while on vacation abroad I met a gentleman who spent part of his childhood years in Shandong Province of China under Japanese occupation. He did not remember the war as a world-changing event, but to him the war was when he and his friends hid in the rice paddies as Japanese fighters flew over them, naively thinking they were targets of a Japanese offensive. To my grandmother, too; she did not care that the conflict was a World War, rather it was the air raid that separated her from several of her children.

ww2dbaseFor more information:

cpeterchen.org		C. Peter Chen's personal website
lavadev.com		Lava Development, LLC.'s website
dev-notes.com		Lava's contribution to the technical community
CougarDB.com		1999-2002 Mercury Cougar registry, an early Lava project