[kabar]

My father and four of his brothers served in WWII. They were Irish from Jersey City. According to him everyone rushed to the recruiting centers right after Pearl Harbor. He was turned down the first time because he was married and was 30 years old. He was accepted six months later.

My point on the Latinos has more to do with the prism that Burns views life through, including WWII. It is all about groups and people as victims. And more often than not, he spends more time and emphasis on these small groups without putting their role into context. 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.

In terms of the numbers, if the US had 130 million people prior to WWII and Latinos were 1.5%, that works out to 1,950,000 Latinos. If approximately half of them are women, that leaves about 1 million males of all ages. Even allowing the fact that some women served, I just don't buy the assertion that 500,000 American-Latinos served in uniform in WWII.

The internment of Japanese-Americans was not one of our best moments, but it involved primarily Japanese living on the West Coast. Some German and Italian Americas were also interned. Some of it had to do with the fear of espionage and some had to do with protecting people from possible reprisal. A sad chapter, but why make it the lead in the opening of the series or at least put it into historical context?

[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!

[x]

In terms of the numbers, if the US had 130 million people prior to WWII and Latinos were 1.5%, that works out to 1,950,000 Latinos. If approximately half of them are women, that leaves about 1 million males of all ages. Even allowing the fact that some women served, I just don't buy the assertion that 500,000 American-Latinos served in uniform in WWII.

I think you're probably right. It looks like what someone's doing is taking the total number of troops (about 12 million) and dividing by the percentage of Latinos they think is in the population. But that figure changed over the years with immigration.

Something else that needs to be taken into account is that many Mexicans in the country then had children in Mexico, not in the US, so the number of draftable young men may not have been as high as one might think.

One caveat: in some states Latinos may have been numbered as White (or Indian or "Colored") so one can't wholly trust the figures of the time.