"The War" FUBAR: September 1944 - December 1944 (2007)

User Rating:

7.5/10   

Directors:

Ken Burns (co-director)
Lynn Novick (co-director)

TV Series:

"The War" (2007)

Original Air Date:

30 September 2007 (Season 1, Episode 5)

Genre:

Documentary | War

Plot:

Plot Keywords:

Interview | WWII | Archive Footage

Cast

Keith David	...	Narrator (voice)
Tom Hanks	...	Al McIntosh
Katharine Phillips	...	Herself

Certification:

USA:TV-14

Soundtrack:

Pennies from Heaven

More Battles And Plenty Of Heroics & Suffering

This disc only covers a few months - from September through December in 1944 - but it has a lot in it, just as the other discs, and a lot of its powerful.

I didn't take any notes but I remember a bunch of sights, such as the skies filled with men parachuting in Belgium. That campaign, "Operation Market Garden," initiated by Britain's Gen. Montgomery, was a disaster. Another was a raid on Peleliu, a small island in the Pacific, which also turned brutal, thanks to the Japanese digging in, in these incredibly-built, fortified caves. "There's nothing left to bomb," says one naval officer but then when the Marines land, they get the same surprise as what happened to the soldiers at Iwo Jima (except, thankfully, with fewer losses. However, the assignment was expected to take four days and it took four months!)

A couple of the guys from Mobile, Ala., that have been featured in this series, were among the Marines on that island. One of them wrote a diary, where he writes of his frustration over matters. His most vivid descriptions, I thought, were those of seeing dead bodies in their different stages of death and decay - gruesome stuff. It's a wonder more of these men didn't wind up mental cases the rest of their lives, the horrors they saw described here.

The gist of some of this episode seemed to be how the infantry suffered everywhere, that the men in control of decisions were fairly safe-and-sound but the guys on the ground - the average men - did all the fighting and dying, and all the suffering and witnessing of the almost unspeakable brutality.

Other memorable scenes and words included the bravery of the Japanese-American fighting unit; the horror of a man being introduced to the shock of war by seeing two dead Germans who looked to be 12-year-old boys with brains sticking out of their head and - maybe the most amazing battle site of the entire war - the ultra-thick and dark Hurtgen Forest in Germany - another place that produced a high death-rate total, a disaster on both sides when the fighting stopped.

The stories just keep getting more incredible as the tales of this war continue.