Heads up!! "The War" begins tonight on PBS

PBS.org ^

[af_vet_rr]

I’m sure that there were a few farm boys here and there who looked at the war as a way to get out of the corn fields and see other parts of the world they never thought they’d have a chance to see.

Growing up, I knew plenty who did join just to get away from what they saw as a dead-end life (many of whom stayed in after the war was over). When Pearl Harbor was attacked, it was the proverbial light bulb going off in the head of many.

Before Pearl Harbor, the military was not glamorous at all. My dad's crew literally shared a bomber with three other crews, because the Army didn't have the money to buy more planes. The amazing thing is, there were men in the Army (and the other services) who worked to get men in, even if they didn't have enough planes or tanks or equipment, because they knew that there was a war coming, and they would need experienced men, but I digress.

After Pearl Harbor, you had all of these men who had just come out of the Depression, and for many of them, joining the military was the first time they might have been out of their home state, and with the feelings that were running high, they felt a pride and a sense of belonging to something bigger, and doing something meaningful. One of the guys from Minnesota, one of the guys from Alabama, and one of the guys from California that was in the Marine Raider battalion kinda touched upon that.

I think a lot of us have a hard time understanding the conditions these men (and women) lived in. They had just come out of the Great Depression, something which the majority of us living today have no way of comprehending, many of them were rural, and that's definitely not the case these days. The best example is one of the pilots from Minnesota who talked about growing up on a farm, and would see an airplane every now and then, and how his spirit would soar when seeing that. Rural life in the '30s and early '40s was just not what a lot of young men wanted to do with their lives.

I've often wondered if we did not have the Depression, how things would have turned out, because the Depression was a huge test for many people in this country, and as cliched as it is, it built a lot of character. Many people who served in the military did not have what I would call "soft" backgrounds - they knew what it was like to not have much to eat, they walked all over the place a lot since for many an automobile was a luxury, or it was something used for the family or the farm. My dad and my uncles said that the lean times they had in the '30s helped make them better soldiers and Marines in the '40s.

[sageb1]

You joined up, sir. Whether you saw combat or not isn’t the point. You had more courage than so many who think they do not owe their country anything at all. Thank you.

[kabar]

Why? You don't think they wanted to serve their country, too? I'm sure that many of those men were also looking to better themselves, and they thought that being part of the military would help them do that, just like many other young men from less than wealthy circumstances all across the country.

I have no doubt that they did and thirteen won the MOH. My point was the number of 500,000 is much too high given their percentage of the population at the time.

[SuziQ]

True, but his was the only interview stating why people joined up. This implies, at least in my book, that this was a mainstream point of view

May be, but only if you're looking for things to criticize the series about. Other participants talked about signing up, and why; some for patriotic reasons, some not. Doesn't mean they didn't believe in their mission.

There were men who were interviewed who had been left behind on Bataan who were mighty critical of Douglas MacArthur. Doesn't mean they weren't patriotic soldiers, they were just stuck in a horrendous situation which none of us could even imagine in our worst nightmares. In my opinion they earned the right to criticize MacArthur or anyone else, for that matter.

[VOA]

It mirrors what is now being taught in our school history books.
George Washington may get a line and George Washington Carver a paragraph.
It is all part of multiculturalism and revisionist history.

You're "preachin' to the choir" with me on that!
Although some primary reviewers said that Burns had
"kept politics out of it", I should have known it was a word-game.
He didn't keep certain sorts of ideologies out of it!

A sad chapter, but why make it the lead in the opening of
the series or at least put it into historical context?

Well, for Burns, given some of his prior work-product, he probably
sees it as his way of "making America better".
But as for the PBS programmers, I suspect they want certain "topics"
included as part of a general "Blame America First" mentality.

I'll continue to watch the series...with a critical eye and
swallowing a few grains of salt every couple of minutes!

[kabar]

Burning Burns

"Burns has, in past endeavors, chronicled America’s history through sweeping documentaries on the Civil War, baseball, and jazz and sets the gold standard for public broadcasting. Yet Burns and PBS have just been mugged by censors and pressure groups demanding major changes to his critically acclaimed documentary"

So where were Bill and his platitudes against contemporary McCarthyism? Where were the other self-appointed protectors of public television? Where was Salon, which accused a recent Republican appointee at the Corporation of Public Broadcasting of leading a “jihad” against liberal bias in public broadcasting? Where was Rep. David Obey, the liberal committee chairman who has taken great pains to excoriate Republican overseers at CPB? Where were the liberal bloggers, who happily compare Republicans at CPB to the Nazi SS?"

And what about the editorial pages of America’s newspapers, which usually can be counted on to take note of such outrageous forms of censorship, even if it means ticking off a few special interests groups? Again, near total silence. The Boston Globe ran an op-ed that attacked PBS and Ken Burns over their “lack of connection with our increasingly multicultural society.”

"Perhaps the silence can be explained by one simple fact: the censorship was coming from a group of leftist Hispanic organizations who called themselves “Defend the Honor.” They protested when they found out that Burns’s documentary didn’t spend enough time talking about the Hispanic-American experience of World War II."

"Not that this was done quietly; it all happened in plain sight: Hispanic members of Congress harangued the PBS chairman at a public hearing. Burns was petitioned heavily. And wilting under the pressure, Burns and PBS capitulated

[af_vet_rr]

I’ve actually learned a lot from tonight’s show. Had no idea that the German’s blew up American oil tankers in the Gulf of Mexico.

I think that somebody has been putting together a project to document all of the naval action in the Gulf. There were some German subs sunk, and a lot of ships. I want to say that people have recently dived on some of the wrecks near Florida and near New Orleans.

I remember reading that the Germans were working to get in close enough to shut down Houston and New Orleans and Mobile by blocking the ports with sunken ships.

It was kept quiet by the government for fear of panicking people, but the woman in tonight's show mentioned that everybody knew it was happening, since stuff from the wrecks was washing up on the beaches.

My dad, Pearl Harbor survivor and life long conservative always said the what happened to the Japanese Americans during the war was a big disgrace. I think it was an honest telling of what happened to these people following Pearl Harbor.

It was not one of our finest moments, and many Conservatives have blasted FDR and other liberals who supported it over the years. I can certainly see why the government reacted the way they did though, because all it would have taken was a few people working for the Japanese to lay out some signals or light some fires in a certain pattern, and it could have been disastrous. I'm not saying it's justified, just that when you put it in context, you can see the government over-reacting, because they didn't have a grasp on what was happening in the Pacific. They messed, and many Americans of Japanese descent paid for it by being sent to the internment camps.

[SuziQ]

I know one young man who joined up a year ago after his girlfriend, with whom he’d had a child, left him. Some amount of fatalistic thinking probably was a reason he signed up.

One of the soldiers mentioned tonight joined up for a similar reason. He found out that the girl he loved didn't feel the same way, so he got mad and ran his motorcycle into a bar, smashing it up. He felt so bad about it that he thought joining the army might redeem him. He was one of the survivors of Bataan. I'd say he was redeemed for his actions, but his joining wasn't necessarily for patriotic reasons.

[KosmicKitty]

My dad joined the Naval Reserves in 1928 right after High School cause he had a friend who was also joining who talked him into it. I don’t think he’d ever been out of the state. In the reserves, you got away for 2 weeks every year on a training cruise to Puerto Rico, where the rum & cokes were mostly rum as the coke was more expensive. He told us that MANY times LOL

He got called to active duty in June of 1941 - left Newport, RI and ended up in Pearl Harbor in October of 1941.

He had Sunday, Dec 7th off. He was going to take a bus tour of Honolulu. Obviously, didn’t get the tour. ,p. HE Never talked much about the war outside of little amusing stories about life on the ship. I always felt his generation had the mentality of you do what you have to and you don't complain about it.

Lost him this past January at the age of 97

[Snoopers-868th]

See #188.

[af_vet_rr]

I’ve actually learned a lot from tonight’s show. Had no idea that the German’s blew up American oil tankers in the Gulf of Mexico.

I remembered now the info on the Gulf of Mexico - it was a NOAA expedition:

OceanExplorer.noaa.gov

The MMS, in partnership with the NOAA's Office of Ocean Exploration (OE), under the auspices of the National Oceanographic Partnership Program, awarded a contract to C & C Technologies, Inc. to conduct the research. MMS is providing $350,000 toward research costs and NOAA OE is funding the ship time, a deep-submergence remotely operated vehicle (ROV), and personnel for both, all provided by Sonsub, Inc. of Houston.

The study has two separate but equally important objectives: an archaeological/historical objective and a biological objective. The archaeological aim is to document the wreck sites being investigated as historic properties with significance to American history. The biological component will approach the question, “Do manmade structures, such as shipwrecks, function as artificial reefs in deep water?"

“The Gulf is the ideal laboratory for this study, because of the number of steel-hulled ships that were casualties of World War II,” explained Rob Church, C & C Technologies' project manager for the study. The Gulf represents one of the greatest concentrations of Allied vessels lost to German U-boats (U-166 Exploration 2003) anywhere in the world, with 56 ships sunk in 1942 and early 1943.

That link has pictures of some the ships on the bottom (including a German sub that is near New Orleans) and some of the ships sunk included a passenger freighters (Robert E. Lee among others).

The reason why many people don't realize it was because the government didn't want people freaking out, and they didn't want the Germans knowing of any successes. If the Germans thought they were hitting ships but not sinking them, they might move on to other parts of the ocean.

[SuziQ]

Based on the opening, I turned it off.

Too bad. It really is well done. It presents the facts of the war, and that's not necessarily what we were learning about it as we grew up. These are not politically motivated comments, they are simply facts. Doesn't change my view of the war, or how right we were, it just gives some reality to the the situation.

I, for one, prefer to know the truth rather than any glossed over, rah rah, versions of the war.

[donnab]

I liked the comments and sign that showed EVERY American was behind the war effort...and the stories of what people did to support it. It showed that there were people too that were cynical of how bad ...reminded me of people today.

[La Enchiladita]

I’m quite happy with not watching it, actually.
And I’m not holding out for “glossy” either; don’t presume to know what others are thinking.
Thank you.

[VanDeKoik]

Seriously!

I don’t know what’s worse, a Libbed up PC whitewash of WW2 or a freeped over whitewash.

I want the TRUTH of what happened back then. Anything less is a slap in the face to the people who went through it.

[kabar]

I had the benefit of listening to the Costas' one hour interview with Burns about the series. Burns made no bones about the fact that the Iraq war is a major mistake and most of the American people don't support it. He compared it to WWII, the "necessary war" that all Americans supported. Burns [and Costas] despise Bush. Burns also mentioned that many who fought were children of immigrants making a comparison to the way we treat immigrants now. Of no differentiation between legal and illegal.

I will watch the entire series, but I don't view it as a real documentary about WWII. It is about individual perceptions of what was happening based on the personal experience of individuals who were participants but not movers and shakers in terms of the events. Burns uses these anecdotes to support his view of history, which is more subjective than objective. His view of MacArthur is somewhat one-sided.

[VOA]

“...I knew plenty who did join just to get away from what they saw
as a dead-end life.”

A good example of a poor Texas boy that signed up to keep his
brothers and sisters fed (IIRC).
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0048729/

“Before Pearl Harbor, the military was not glamorous at all.”

IIRC, beside all the poor levels of materiale/supplies, enlisted
men weren’t even allowed to be married.

“After Pearl Harbor, you had all of these men who had just come out
of the Depression, and for many of them, joining the military was
the first time they might have been out of their home state, and
with the feelings that were running high, they felt a pride and a
sense of belonging to something bigger, and doing something meaningful.”

Three squares and a cot, free medical care and get your teeth pulled
and/or fixed, and a chance to learn some skills...what wasn’t to
like after the gray dreary days of the Depression?

“I’ve often wondered if we did not have the Depression, how things would
have turned out, because the Depression was a huge test for many people
in this country”

I remember reading a story about a young fellow and his experiences
as The Depression bit down hard in his home town of Flint, MI.
Besides recounting how he and his father would spend a day delivering
coal to homes and end up maybe 5 cents in the black...
he talked about how many suicides there were in his neighborhood.
Suicide is awful...but in some cruel calculus, The Great Depression
did take some folks “out of the game”. Just before “the BIG Game”.

[Snoopers-868th]

Look, I happen to know there was no Air Force it was the Army Air Corp. Let’s split hairs. My point was that with the commentary it could have been mentioned since other references were made regarding the social aspects. BECAUSE this was a narrow perspective it was O.K. to leave out. HOWEVER, if this is all a high school kid sees—it is a revisionist version of WW-II. Plain and simple. And my example was pointing to important omissions that I believe those other men who were there would not be happy about.

[flaglady47]

By the way, in case anyone doesn’t know, Ken Burn’s father was a soldier during WWII. He came in on the tale end of it, and was stationed in Europe. He said his dad makes a couple of cameo appearances somewhere in the documentary.

[flaglady47]

oops, tale = tail