Again Tonight: Ken Burns' The War
This documentary has, thus far, proven to be a masterpiece.
Tonight, in Episode 7: "A World Without War"
- Soviet and American troops met at the River Elbe, near Torgau in Germany
- V-E Day
- First Evidence of The Holocaust
- Damned Dirty Business on Okinawa
- Fat Man and Little Boy
- V-J Day
This documentary has proven to be most extraordinary.
I will definitely be buying it on DVD.
- ferg
Footnote: This is where "The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit" comes into play.
posted by Fergie @ 10/02/2007 09:44:00 PM
2 Comments:
If you have not seen it already, go pick up a copy of "The Civil War" by Ken Burns ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Civil_War_%28documentary%29 ). It is an incredibly good documentary of the American Civil War.
For those who saw the FUBAR episode (if don't know what that means, you'll find out), it what Ken Burns meant when he said that your pereception of WW II will never be the same. Of particular note was the fighting on the island of Peleliu in the Palau islands of the western Pacific. 'till now, I've never had one person register that name when I mentioned, yet disaster-wise it was equal to 9/11 in terms of magnitude, but it happened during WW II, so it was buried in an avalanche of other stories. I spent two days walking the island of Peleliu several years back, and, 55 years after the fighting it still was hideous - human bones could be found everywhere live ordanance that would close 10 city blocks of Manhattan were under foot, a human femur imbedded in the limesone roof of a Japanese defensive cave. Of particular note was Ken's quote from E.B. Sledges book "With The Old Breed on Peleliu and Okinawa" (highly recommended), where Sledge describes a U.S. marine knocking out the gold teeth of a severely wounded, but very much alive Japanese soldier. That's the kind of stuff that never made it to Hollywood, or even into the newspapers.
Bryan Cockel
Santa Cruz, California
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