Running "The War" Thread

I don't know.
I thought the Hispanic guy who fought on Guadalcanal and told the story about killing the POWs was very compelling.
I loved the guy from Minneapolis who talked about being 19 and suddenly being avle to be whatever you want.
I'm sold.

 

I just finished typing up my grandfather's life story, he became a POW when the Japanese took over Corregidor. The stories I had to re-type from his time as a POW had me in tears, it's amazing what they went through.

 

It was an extremely nasty war, as Burns asserts in interviews and reports.

I used to work with an older (heh) Japanese fellow who spent the last couple of years of the war in Borneo. During his training in Kyushu, food was already running low, so they were fed only a bit of rice and lots of pumpkin. (Kabocha is squash to me, but he called 'em pumpkins.) He said he would never eat pumpkin again.

And that's the only war story he would ever tell me.

 

Right, I loved his story. Very compelling. But the insertion into it after that montage with the music was clumsy.

I wish Burns would have put it elsewhere and left the original ending intact.

 

I don't understand A. Stanley's need to bring Iraq into it, except for those few NYT readers who didn't realize there is a war in Iraq going on. Geez. How does this compare to Ollie North's show on Fox News? North does a good job of relating small parts and incidents that might otherwise be glossed over by the larger engagements.
God bless the vets.

 

I think Stanley was pointing out that Burns has been talking about Iraq on his press tour promoting the series, specifically in the context of shared sacrifice. She could have made that clearer.
I think, if I were at Auburn in the 1940's, I would have had a crush on that woman from Mobile. What a hoot.
Burns was really tough on MacArthur -- for whom my Navy Dad had no use either. I thought Midway got really short shrift, although the Guadalcanal setpiece was worth the time it got. Tonight's your night if you had relatives flying bombers over Europe, by the way.

 

I completely agree, Inky. Very clumsily edited. The story fit right into the episode, but the placement was really off and took away from what would have been a more powerful ending.

 

I thought the juxtaposition of the Bataan Death March to the Japanese American forced relocations was interesting. Although no one really knew in the States about Bataan at the time of the imprisonment of the Japanese Americans.

The use of the term concentration camps for the Japanese Americans is hyperbole and is inflammatory considering the true concentration camps in Germany and Japan. The American reaction to Japanese Americans was racist, but no one was marched from Seattle to Kansas, no one was executed on the way and they weren't starved, beaten and experimented on.

Can't we just acknowledge the difference in degrees of horrible actions. What America did to the Japanese, while absolutely wrong, but does not bare any comparison to the Japanese treatment of Americans and the Nazi's treatment of anyone they disliked.

 

Manzanar was a concentration camp in the classic sense, which is the method by which the Brits invented them for the Boers in South Africa. (I'd argue Australia was the first concention camp if I were being snarky. Also Georgia.)
The Nazis turned the concentration camp into a center for industrialized murder.

 

I don't think they did a good job giving a sense of overall timeline and how much was going one between DEC '41 and DEC '42- . Too much time spent on Pacific war and not enough spent on debate leading to Operation Torch.

Maybe there is no way to really convey it but when you think about the type of decisions that FDR had to make in the year it is mind boggling.

 

The Nazis turned concentration camps into more than industrialized murder. That's almost being benign. They used it for systemic slaughter, genocide, slave labor, extermination of women, children and the infirm, ritualized torture and medical experimentation.
The term, concentration camp, as used today is generally defined in that manner.

Referring to Manzanar as a concentration camp is like calling the American public school system, Vietnamese/Chinese-style Re-Education Camps.

 

Oh, balls, it's not.
Read some history, please. Then read what I posted. The concentration camp was invented by the Brits in South Africa as a place to "concentrate" the Boer population to keep it from waging guerrilla war, which, unlike the Japanese on the west coast of the US, the Boers actually were doing. That is precisely what we did with Japanese citizens at Manzanar and places like it. We ran concentration camps here. Get over it. We didn't run death camps.
How "industrialized murder" gets called "benign" in the fever swamp that is your brain is beyond me.
And Boom, I think Burns was right to narrow his focus in order to control the material and tell his story. Can't say I blame him. I think North Africa -- or, at least, Kasserine and the arrival of Patton -- comes up tonight.