MovieChat Forums > The War (2007) Discussion > eye Opening moments... anyone?

eye Opening moments... anyone?


As a child of the 90's its hard for me to understand the shear scale of racial segregation and tensions back then. I already knew some about American's own Japanese Concentration camps but never had I seen just how badly we became as Americans. Thank you ken burns for opening my eyes to a time period i never was part of.

Anyone else have eye opening moments during the series so far? and please don't respond " yeh when i changed the channel or turned off this crap"
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thanks

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It would be perfectly reasonable to conclude after watching Burns' "The War" that (1) all Japanese-Americans were interned and (2) the reason for doing so was purely racist -- provided you did no other research on the topic.


No, the documentary made it very clear several times that only the Japanese from the West Coast were interned. And that it was done by Roosevelt who considered it a matter of national security.

The documentary made it very clear that the Japanese in Hawaii were NOT interned, and that the 100 were not interns. And that the joining of the 442 and the 100 was a joining of formerly interned Japanese-Americans with free Japanese-Americans from Hawaii.

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The percentage of deaths that were civilian. I don't remember the number, but I'm hoping I'll find out (I've seen the first three episodes so far) more details. For those who have seen the entire series, is there any more mention of this? Which were the hardest-hit places in terms of civilian deaths?



www.freerice.com

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Probably the story of the Japanese American soldier who had the german soldier as a prisoner and who he headbutted with his rifle when he thought the german soldier was reaching for a weapon, when all he was doing was reaching for some photos of his family in his pocket to show him.So heartbreaking, you have to wonder the guilt the poor man had to feel for year afterwards.And it really does summarize, like he said,what war is.

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Mainly the incompetence of generals and other commanding officers, time and time again, without learning any lessons or getting fired or whatever. Really frustrating, just like McClellan et al. in the Civil War. At least WWII was not as bad as the incredibly callous and longterm incompetence of mainly British generals in WWI. But I didn't realize until this doc that WWII had its share of boneheaded generals, orders, battle plans, and commanding officers.
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