The War

Anyone else watch the latest Ken Burns film?

I Thought it was excellent.

Amazing footage and stories.

I liked how the Japanese internment was covered along with the action seen by the 442. Hard to believe it wasn't that long ago.

The Manzanar relocation camp is about 45 minutes south of me. Some footage is in the film.

I'm watching it- downloading off the net as I have no cable.
I'll be buying the box set. It's an excellent series so far.

Excellent series. I watched the last episode last night. I just wish that my father was still alive so that he could see it. He was in Okinawa.

Is there any US History that Ken Burns doesn't know? I also love watching the shows when he is a part in them :)

I've really enjoyed watching it too. Great job!

My wife and I have watched every episode. Amazing documentary. The narrator, Keith David, has a voice that I find positively mesmerizing. Burns' treatment is brutally candid and forthcoming - we both shed lots of tears watching all this. And the real amazing thing is that this actually wasn't that long ago.

Fantasitfc series like everything he's done. He mentioned on Bill Mahr's program that many high kids today thought the Americans and Germans fought together against the Russians. I'll have to ask my grandson what they taught him about the war. I did go to Barnes and noble one time to get a book about the Korean War and I was told it was under Asian History. Funny, I was there and I'm not Asian.

George

George Herschell Wrote:

Tom,

They can label it what they choose, but it was a WAR plain and simple. If it wasn't there were a lot of young men that were killed playing "cops and robbers". It's stange that after all these years it is still called that though. It would be interesting to see what Ken Burns would do with that war. I do have a five volume set of videos about the Korean war that was basically put together from actual newsreel footage and it is very good and does not skirt the issues of that war.

Sorry for the rant but after all these years "conflict" still is a thorn in my side.

George

It is an excellent series. I especially appreciate his handling of the homefront and the war's impact on the civilian population as well. Prison camps, internment camps, scrap drives, rationing, people caught in the conflict as non-combatants, the industrial revolution that took place to support it, and the sweeping social changes that affected hometown America and its values and cultures were all aspects of this conflict, and most of them barely get the recognition they deserve in portraying the affect that this war had on people both at the time, and which shaped the history that followed afterwards.

It is a more complete view, in my estimation, and one which explains much about why we look back on it as being so different from our experiences today in the midst of yet another conflict which we term as "war". For the soldiers on the ground, fighting and winning is perhaps not that dissimilar to what their grandparents lived through at Anzio or Corregidor, but on the home front, that is where the similarity ends. As I said in another thread in this Off Topic area, "The commitment to this war is {or seems to be} an optional thing in these days, perhaps because we as a people see the war in Iraq as an optional war." I believe that my parents and grandparents saw nothing optional about WW2.

bbrower Wrote:

George Herschell Wrote:

A great series ! My dad survived two of Wingates penertrating patrols in Burma which I knew nothing about till he talked to my wife a year before he died.
The major difference between the present differiculties and WW2 is Bush took the army to war but not the nation. If the draft was inplace much of the military adventurism which has plagued us would stop. When every body goes politics are a whole lot different. War now pay later is all so a very low dishonest approch and we will pay as the dollar heads south.

Very Impressed-- Outstanding Approach, but I haven't heard of Ken Burns before... Who is he?

Cheers!
Mike

Wow!! What a great series. Ken Burns films are fantastic. I wish my dad were alive to see it. He died a year ago this month.

When the war started in Europe he was too young to enlist but that didn't stop him from trying. Being around 15 years old the recruitment officer told him he was too young. He kept going to the recruitment office often trying to persuade them to let him join. His mother (my grandmother, deceased) would walk down to the recruitment office to find him there because he was late for dinner. When she walked down the recruitment office several times for this reason, the officers would call her "mom".

Finally, he enlisted into the 101st Airborne division, but by then the war was pretty much over in the Pacific.

I hope it's better than the hack job he did on the history of Jazz.

All of my DI's at Parris Island in the late 50's were veterans of the Pacific and they taught us how survive...and this came in handy in Viet Nam. My salute is to Ken Burns for portraying war as it really is....ugly and evil. My gabdson is as well trained as was I and he has just come back from Iraq with his unit, the 2nd Marine Division.

A Marine veteran

Brad,

I agree on the Jazz series he did. I thought there were a good many important Jazz musicians that were left out of that series. Stan Kenton for one, who was one of my favorites.

George

George,

I had a laundry list of problems with the Jazz series. He left out many, many great musicians and painted too many others as mere rip-off artist. It was a feel good farce driven entirely too much by Wynton's view of Jazz from a purely New Orlean's stand point. At least, that's the feeling I was left with.

Brad

Try this one (The War Tapes):


http://thewartapes.com/trailer/

MGSteph Wrote:

Jo's dad was one of the unsung heroes - those that kept others flying. He maintained the Corsars flown by the Black Sheep Squadron.

Yes the pilots did a great job, but it's about time these others were given the recognition they deserve too..

locolobo85 Wrote:

Rod H. Wrote:

You're right Tom. There's more Jazz out there than most non-Jazz fans could ever realize and it would be impossible to mention everyone.

However, my problem with how he handled it wasn't so much who he included and didn't include, as much as how he omitted what I'd call modern Jazz. He went as far as the 60s, then basically said that nothing worthwhile had happened since then.

This is a valid opinion for a person to have, but as a documentary maker he could have done better IMO. He's caught a lot of heat for this, and from more than a few people. Although I appreciate earlier Jazz, the stuff I really like *started* in the 60s, so I felt very let down when he gave it almost no coverage. Seriously, as the series drew to a close I fully expected an announcement that "Part Two" would be coming soon!

I'm not a Burns basher though. He's done some really good stuff, and I did enjoy the series up to a point.