[msnpatriot]

Having gone out of my way to ask questions of any WWII veteran I’ve encountered, and family involved, I think this documentary is very accurate and worth watching. It defines the events chronically with personal touches throughout. There is a chain of information to understand the events in the war which few know, and, what the participants didn’t know at the time such as the promise to relieve our ‘cut off’ troops in 42.

Revisionist documentary? How many noticed the point in the segment last night that Burns accepts the official story that Pearl Harbor was a surprise? With nothing mentioned of FDR fore-knowledge.

I think this an excellent production for anyone interested in WWII

[af_vet_rr]

I think this documentary is very accurate and worth watching. It defines the events chronically with personal touches throughout. There is a chain of information to understand the events in the war which few know, and, what the participants didn’t know at the time such as the promise to relieve our ‘cut off’ troops in 42.

I was impressed with that. People don't realize how much was concealed from the public (for fairly good reasons) and so sometimes it's hard to understand the context of why people felt our troops were left to die, etc., and Burns did a pretty good job of showing things how people saw them at the time, not how we see them with 60+ years of hindsight.

We got some nice fancy maps last night (especially if you watched in HD) that made it clear that at that point the Philippines were a lost cause for the time being. They weren't exactly letting the public see such maps for good reasons, and so it's easy to see how some in the public felt we were simply leaving them to die.

How many noticed the point in the segment last night that Burns accepts the official story that Pearl Harbor was a surprise? With nothing mentioned of FDR fore-knowledge.

Burns could spend 15 hours alone on the run-up to WWII. You could go back to the early '30s and see signs of an eventual collision of the US and Japan. In fact, several times Japan did things that they thought would draw the US into a war with them. Why FDR wanted to appease, or at least try to avoid conflict with the Japanese, that's hard to say, or at least judge, because a good case can be made across the board for every reason FDR could have come up with.