Posted on 09/26/2007 2:30:49 PM PDT by VOA
This is a "heads-up" for the airing of "The War", the Ken Burns
(Florentine Films) production on PBS.
In Philadelphia they wouldn’t even let blacks drive buses.
I am very conservative. But facts are facts. We fought well, we lost some we finally won. (Thank you Lord).
There is plenty of positive in this series. No..It’s not a John Wayne movie. But our guys fought really hard, under bad circumstances. Not all parts of American history are flattering.
“War is cruelty. You cannot refine it.” General William Tecumseh Sherman.
Jealousy over WWII Film sparks Latino Protest
SFGate | 09/19./07 | Delfin Vigil (?)
Posted on 09/19/2007 10:12:13 PM EDT by biscuit jane
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1899324/posts
I have been watching this with my husband. I don’t do well with war violence, but am forcing myself to watch. Was thinking of buying the DVD’s (so some of the idiots in our families could see it) but now don’t know....
I’m also torn....on Oct 7th is the 63rd anniversary of the death of my husband’s Uncle (bombadier in a B17 hit over Germany, made it to Switzerland - died in a hospital there.)....I am feeling called to send a note to a couple of his grand niece’s who today are extremely liberal, spoiled brats. I don’t think they even know about him....as I doubt their mother has told them much. Heck, they probably don’t know about their grandfather’s service in the Phillipines either. Maybe instead, I’ll put a book together of his letters, pictures, etc....and at some point they’ll get that....obviously I’m just blabbing here....but, worried about people forgetting WHY there IS war, and who the good guys are.
You nailed the way I felt watching this. In one scene we are asked to feel sorry for a black American who didn't get the promotion because of his race, and then in the next, a unit that suffers a 90% casualty rate is briefly mentioned.
It is like the war is a backdrop to talk about the racial inequities of the 1940's rather than the other way around.
"War is a series of catastrophes that result in victory." - Clemenceau
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IOW....Burns got it right.
Rodney Dangerfield had a joke that went "I went to a fight last night and a hockey game broke out".
I went to watch a documentary on WWII last night and a Ivy League class on victimology was presented instead.
All those black guys complaining that hey couldn’t go to the front and get in the big battles...they came home intact.
Not like my 19 year-old brother, who was killed on the island of Saipan.
Some people have made bellyaching a way of living here in the US. Ken Burns only enables this stupid “victim” mentality.
Sharpton and Jackson profit from it.
Guess what Burns next documentary is likely to be about?
That’s right, The Vietnam War.
As Ronald Reagan said, “You ain’t seen nothing yet.”
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I suggest Richard Tregaskis' "Guadalcanal Diary" (the book not the film). He makes it clear that the Marines learned pretty quick to kill the Japs twice after a few incidents wherein 'dead' Japs got up and killed incautious Marines. The Marines would walk the dead zone and put another bullet into every Jap body.
LOL!
My dad has come across a stash of wartime-era letters from his grandmother to his mother. One of them talks about Dad's impending birth, and how they're saving safety pins because the pins are so hard to come by.
At the time Dad found the letters, I was working on bring WBill Jr. into the world, and our house looked like an explosion at ToysRUS. Quite the contrast.
Bill Mauldin used to tell a joke; when he asked a soldier if he was on the front line, the guy replied "No, I was 100 yards behind it." Support troops may not have been at the very sharpest point of the stick, but there's a constant danger in any theater of war.
Not to keep going back to him, but my Grandfather would likely have been considered "Support Troops"...he commanded an Anti-Aircraft Unit. However, he saw more combat at the Bulge, and at Remagen, than I'm sure anyone would ever want to. Heck, at the Bulge, the way he found out that the Germans had broken through was by coming nose to nose with a German tank while in his jeep! He used to say that the only reason he was still around was that his driver was a smidge faster than the tank's gunner....
I just felt that Burns sold the black troopers short (in the bit of the series that I saw). Sort of implied that they just sat around + complained about not getting into the thick of it. Full disclosure - I have not seen anything of the series other than that bit on Tuesday night.
Great stuff. There's no substitute for hearing what the guys were thinking, and it's nice to see in its undistilled form. Historians sometimes do some selective editing.
Another good book on the “no quarter” combat in the Pacific Theater
(probably should come with a parental advisory):
With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa
by E.B. Sledge
I'll take a look for "Old Breed"
No, I don't.
When I was in the Army air defense artillery was sure considered a combat branch. We had a section of them in my tank battalion.
Possibly, but segregation in the North was insidious and very strong, stronger in some ways than in the South. Perhaps it wasn't seen because it supposedly wasn't happening.
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