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Been waiting for this mini-series to start. Hope it is somewhat as good as band of brothers. Hard to top band of brothers though.
Amazing Photos of Iwo Jima Circa WWII
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Bob Sacamano
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BrAinPaiNt;3306215 said:
Just go into it with an open mind BP and don't try to measure it up with BOB.
Words to live by.
arglebargle
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burmafrd;3306466 said:
Linky?
Earlier this year I was reading a biography of Eisenhower, and one of the jobs he had in 1940 was preparing the expansion of the US military from 100K to 1mil. They knew that the storm was coming. Roosevelt was just waiting for something to happen.
While we may have been rascist then, it had precious little to do with the reason we were fighting.
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arglebargle;3306512 said:
He is pleased that The Pacific has fulfilled an obligation to our World War II vets. He doesn’t see the series as simply eye-opening history. He hopes it offers Americans a chance to ponder the sacrifices of our current soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. “From the outset, we wanted to make people wonder how our troops can re-enter society in the first place,” Hanks says. “How could they just pick up their lives and get on with the rest of us? Back in World War II, we viewed the Japanese as ‘yellow, slant-eyed dogs’ that believed in different gods. They were out to kill us because our way of living was different. We, in turn, wanted to annihilate them because they were different. Does that sound familiar, by any chance, to what’s going on today?”
http://www.newsrealblog.com/2010/03...ate-the-japanese-because-they-were-different/
arglebargle
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Thank you, sir!
arglebargle
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jwhardin;3307062 said:
The 1st Marines saved my grandfather's life in Korea, so I always proffer hat's off and thanks to any and all who served with them. Interestingly, Mao Tse Tung considered them the best unit in the American military.
Quadacanal was some rough business, and probably determined the course of the war.
arglebargle
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I think it starts after that. To do Pearl Harbour right would take a lot of logistics.
MetalHead
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arglebargle
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Far too many so-called journalists today just get a handout and regurgitate it. They don't actually do what previous generations would consider to be journalism. I am sure if you gave them a handout on Iwo Jima, they could parrot it fairly well.
Lacking of any understanding or interest in history is kind of scary.
Lacking of any understanding or interest in history is kind of scary.
bbgun
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This is somewhat depressing/alarming.
Unrecognized Iwo Jima photo shows how World War II memories fading
Ron Grossman
Chicago Tribune
March 15, 2010
I took a quick survey in the newsroom the other day, something between a Rorschach test and a pop quiz, asking younger colleagues to identify an iconic photograph of World War II.
While some instantly recognized the image, others couldn't quite place it.
"I know I ought to know it," one co-worker said. "It was in the movie, ‘Flags of Our Fathers.' " Some, seeing uniforms, realized it must be a war photo. Maybe Vietnam? One got the era right but the battlefield wrong. She guessed it was D-Day, not, as it was, the raising of the American flag on Iwo Jima.
Journalists are probably more attuned to history than many people. We stick bits of it into the third or fourth paragraph of a story as background to the day's events. But non-journalists have less incentive to keep up with the past, apparently not even the lure of good grades. Nearly a quarter of 17-year-olds recently surveyed by Common Core, an educational advocacy group and think tank, couldn't identify Adolf Hitler.
I don't cite those statistics to criticize young people but to alert them to a quandary they will face some day: Your historical tape measure won't be automatically adopted by your children.
For many of us who remember World War II, it was the biggest event of our lifetime, not just in magnitude but rectitude. It was a morality play, lacking shades of gray or traces of ambiguity. Americans took lives, but they did so in order to stop the slaughter of millions.
That kind of unshakable conviction about who was Right and who was Wrong obviously depends upon knowing the combatants. If you can't identify Hitler, you're not likely to grasp the enormity of his crimes.
This year marks the 65th anniversary of the end of World War II. As the calendar of the final battles rolls by — Iwo Jima recently and soon Berlin and Okinawa — there will be newspaper and TV coverage. Surviving veterans will be interviewed, returning the war to public consciousness.
Yet that can only postpone the inexorable erosion of that intersection of memory and emotion with which we mark the sliver of history we inhabit. Some of our mental signposts are profound, others mundane. We recall exactly where we were when we heard the news that John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. were assassinated. We remember how our hearts beat faster the first time we heard The Beatles or Frank Sinatra or saw Willie Mays shag a fly ball in deep center field.
My own understanding of World War II is welded to memory flashes of my parents doing the dinner dishes. The radio was on, ears were then trained to listen for the words, "We interrupt this broadcast for a bulletin," followed by news of battlefield victory or defeat. My mother would wash cups and plates and hand them to my father. Drying each with a dish towel, he'd return it to a cabinet shelf.
Memory is like that. It has its own logic. It blends world-shaking events with those not preserved in history books but deeply inscribed in our psyche. I don't recall seeing a dish rack until I encountered one in the home of an art professor to whom I had emotionally apprenticed myself. He and his wife explained they left dishes to dry of their own accord. They called it "air-drying." The words seemed to separate the avant-garde from the bourgeois world I was eager to flee. The professor and his wife belonged to the Bauhaus movement, which preached that artists should use their talents to design utilitarian objects that would reduce the drudgery of household chores, freeing mankind for the finer things in life.
To me, that meant the dish towel had to go. When I got my own apartment, I bought a dish rack as evidence of my escape from the middle class. That purchase and World War II were my historical markers. Until, that is, I noticed a general decline of the dish towel. Air-drying became commonplace, followed by dishwashing machines — robbing me of a snobbish way to distinguish the before and after of my life.
Now, another marker feels endangered. If the dish towel set me apart, the sacredness of World War II bound me to others — whose ranks are patently diminishing. A few months ago, students at a high school in Chatham, Ill., painted a mural on a school wall. These young people recognized the iconic imagery of Iwo Jima. They borrowed it but replaced Old Glory with a windmill. Saving the environment from pollution was their crusade, they explained.
Most of the 236 comments on the local newspaper's Web site seemed divided between those who found the mural disrespectful of World War II veterans or those who believed it symbolized the freedom for which they had fought. One, though, reacted with a haunting forecast:
"One day down the road the wall will need to be repainted, and at that time some other artistic individual will paint something there, too. At that time, who knows, it could reference another historical event on another level … Each generation has its own battle."
Edit: Oops, re-post. Sorry.
Unrecognized Iwo Jima photo shows how World War II memories fading
Ron Grossman
Chicago Tribune
March 15, 2010
I took a quick survey in the newsroom the other day, something between a Rorschach test and a pop quiz, asking younger colleagues to identify an iconic photograph of World War II.
While some instantly recognized the image, others couldn't quite place it.
"I know I ought to know it," one co-worker said. "It was in the movie, ‘Flags of Our Fathers.' " Some, seeing uniforms, realized it must be a war photo. Maybe Vietnam? One got the era right but the battlefield wrong. She guessed it was D-Day, not, as it was, the raising of the American flag on Iwo Jima.
Journalists are probably more attuned to history than many people. We stick bits of it into the third or fourth paragraph of a story as background to the day's events. But non-journalists have less incentive to keep up with the past, apparently not even the lure of good grades. Nearly a quarter of 17-year-olds recently surveyed by Common Core, an educational advocacy group and think tank, couldn't identify Adolf Hitler.
I don't cite those statistics to criticize young people but to alert them to a quandary they will face some day: Your historical tape measure won't be automatically adopted by your children.
For many of us who remember World War II, it was the biggest event of our lifetime, not just in magnitude but rectitude. It was a morality play, lacking shades of gray or traces of ambiguity. Americans took lives, but they did so in order to stop the slaughter of millions.
That kind of unshakable conviction about who was Right and who was Wrong obviously depends upon knowing the combatants. If you can't identify Hitler, you're not likely to grasp the enormity of his crimes.
This year marks the 65th anniversary of the end of World War II. As the calendar of the final battles rolls by — Iwo Jima recently and soon Berlin and Okinawa — there will be newspaper and TV coverage. Surviving veterans will be interviewed, returning the war to public consciousness.
Yet that can only postpone the inexorable erosion of that intersection of memory and emotion with which we mark the sliver of history we inhabit. Some of our mental signposts are profound, others mundane. We recall exactly where we were when we heard the news that John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. were assassinated. We remember how our hearts beat faster the first time we heard The Beatles or Frank Sinatra or saw Willie Mays shag a fly ball in deep center field.
My own understanding of World War II is welded to memory flashes of my parents doing the dinner dishes. The radio was on, ears were then trained to listen for the words, "We interrupt this broadcast for a bulletin," followed by news of battlefield victory or defeat. My mother would wash cups and plates and hand them to my father. Drying each with a dish towel, he'd return it to a cabinet shelf.
Memory is like that. It has its own logic. It blends world-shaking events with those not preserved in history books but deeply inscribed in our psyche. I don't recall seeing a dish rack until I encountered one in the home of an art professor to whom I had emotionally apprenticed myself. He and his wife explained they left dishes to dry of their own accord. They called it "air-drying." The words seemed to separate the avant-garde from the bourgeois world I was eager to flee. The professor and his wife belonged to the Bauhaus movement, which preached that artists should use their talents to design utilitarian objects that would reduce the drudgery of household chores, freeing mankind for the finer things in life.
To me, that meant the dish towel had to go. When I got my own apartment, I bought a dish rack as evidence of my escape from the middle class. That purchase and World War II were my historical markers. Until, that is, I noticed a general decline of the dish towel. Air-drying became commonplace, followed by dishwashing machines — robbing me of a snobbish way to distinguish the before and after of my life.
Now, another marker feels endangered. If the dish towel set me apart, the sacredness of World War II bound me to others — whose ranks are patently diminishing. A few months ago, students at a high school in Chatham, Ill., painted a mural on a school wall. These young people recognized the iconic imagery of Iwo Jima. They borrowed it but replaced Old Glory with a windmill. Saving the environment from pollution was their crusade, they explained.
Most of the 236 comments on the local newspaper's Web site seemed divided between those who found the mural disrespectful of World War II veterans or those who believed it symbolized the freedom for which they had fought. One, though, reacted with a haunting forecast:
"One day down the road the wall will need to be repainted, and at that time some other artistic individual will paint something there, too. At that time, who knows, it could reference another historical event on another level … Each generation has its own battle."
Edit: Oops, re-post. Sorry.
xWraithx
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did the Japanese start blowing themselves up too soon?
in "Letters from Iwo Jima", it seems that as soon as the Americans landed on the beach, the Japanese were already pulling out grenades and blowing themselves to peices....
"oh my GOD! they actually have GUNS??? screw this! *blows self away with a frag*"
in "Letters from Iwo Jima", it seems that as soon as the Americans landed on the beach, the Japanese were already pulling out grenades and blowing themselves to peices....
"oh my GOD! they actually have GUNS??? screw this! *blows self away with a frag*"
Concord
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This photo was taken in Bad Nauheim, Germany in January 1946, right after the death of General George S. Patton Jr. on 21 December 1945 at the Army hospital in Heidelberg, Germany, the result of a tragic automobile accident. The photo shows Patton's papers that have been packed in trunks to be sent to his aide, Colonel Charles R. Codman, his briefcase, and above all his faithful friend Willie, Patton's pet bull terrier.
The most famous bull terrier owned by General Patton was purchased on 4 March 1944. He was named Willie, short for "William the Conqueror." When General Patton bought Willie, he wrote in his diary, "My bull pup...took to me like a duck to water. He is 15 months old, pure white except for a little lemin [sic] on his tail which to a cursory glance would seem to indicate that he had not used toilet paper..." Willie wore jingle bells on his collar so everyone would know when he was around and he was rumored to be a prodigious "lover." He supposedly had his own set of "dog tags" too. Willie was devoted to General Patton and followed him everywhere.
Willie was sent home to the United States, and lived out the rest of his life with the General's wife and daughters. There is a statue of Patton and Willie at the General Patton Memorial Museum, Chiriaco Summit, CA thirty miles east of Indio on Interstate 10.
arglebargle
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Not in Eisenhower's character, imo. He and Patton went back a long way, and I am sure that Eisenhower had more on Patton than the reverse. Patton was still a front line general only because Eisenhower went to bat for him anyway.
Sometimes a car accident is just a car accident.
Sometimes a car accident is just a car accident.
burmafrd
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Marshal is the one that picked Patton early on in our pre war preparations since he was the only real tank expert we had. And when the controversy about pattons remarks (The Peover Incident) just before D-Day Eisenhower had had enough and was willing to send Patton home but Marshal said no.
Patton really in the end did more for Eisenhower: After Kasserine Pass he rebuilt 2nd Corps; did a very good job in Sicily (then the slapping Incident); then the whole deception plan that convinced the Germans that he would lead the Invasion at Pas De Calais(which was critical to the success of D-Day); then the Breakout across France; then most important of all the flank march -unprecedented in Military History- to relieve Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge.
And who said Eisenhower had anything to do with it? Bedel Smith hated Patton (and it was certainly mutual) and Bedel would have been one of the prime targets of a Patton tell all.
Actually I really do think that it was an accident- but one could make a case about a conspiracy. Especially the very strange order that had the hospital in Germany put a cast on Patton in order to ship him home right away. That was what casued the Embolism that killed him; and it was contra-indicated by the best medical advice of the time (and still would be today). Patton had told people that he was determined to write his memoirs even paralyzed. That cast killed him in days. Patton might have lived for at least another 6 months or so otherwise.
Patton really in the end did more for Eisenhower: After Kasserine Pass he rebuilt 2nd Corps; did a very good job in Sicily (then the slapping Incident); then the whole deception plan that convinced the Germans that he would lead the Invasion at Pas De Calais(which was critical to the success of D-Day); then the Breakout across France; then most important of all the flank march -unprecedented in Military History- to relieve Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge.
And who said Eisenhower had anything to do with it? Bedel Smith hated Patton (and it was certainly mutual) and Bedel would have been one of the prime targets of a Patton tell all.
Actually I really do think that it was an accident- but one could make a case about a conspiracy. Especially the very strange order that had the hospital in Germany put a cast on Patton in order to ship him home right away. That was what casued the Embolism that killed him; and it was contra-indicated by the best medical advice of the time (and still would be today). Patton had told people that he was determined to write his memoirs even paralyzed. That cast killed him in days. Patton might have lived for at least another 6 months or so otherwise.