Could we Win if We Had to Fight World War II Today?
by Rick Moran
The debate over “The Greatest Generation” and whether the way America is today could duplicate their stunning achievements in winning two wars and fighting through a depression while maintaining unity has been hashed and rehashed by far superior minds than mine.
But I just can’t help thinking about it after watching the History Channel this week and their excellent series, “Word War II in HD.”
If you haven’t been able to catch any of it, they will run the entire 10 hours on Saturday starting at 8:00 am central time.
Quite simply, it is the grandest, the most heartbreaking, the most stirring documentary series on World War II ever made. And that includes both “Victory at Sea” and “The World at War.”
TWAW is the gold standard – 32 hours of in-depth analysis of the politics, the strategy, the personalities, and ordeals experienced by civilians during the war. But it is rather soulless. It’s academic approach can be dry, although the images and words of survivors lend an emotionalism outside the rather clinical analysis offered.
“Victory at Sea,” on the other hand, went hard for dramatic effect. With the sonorous voice of Leonard Graves supplying the narration and music by Broadway impresario Richard Rodgers, VAS was a made for TV blockbuster that went right for the heart and kept the viewer entranced with its quick cuts, and snappy pace.
Other documentaries of individual battles (there have been a couple of excellent treatments of D-Day) have suffered from using stock footage that, if you watch enough of these things, you recognize from other projects.
But the History Channel sojourn into the past with “World War II in HD” is everything a good documentary should be; highly original, well scripted, images lining up with narration in an artistic mix, all the while marching forward with a pace that allows the viewer to digest the information and feel what the documentarian is feeling about his subject.
But it is the images that capture the mind and rend the soul. Culled from literally thousands of home movies – many in color – and long lost color combat footage, there is a freshness and even an immediacy about the entire package that has held me absolutely in thrall for the entire run of the series.
The technique is itself, fresh and original. Focusing on several individuals who fought in both the Pacific and Atlantic theaters, the survivors take us through everything from the home front, their battle experiences, the horror, mud, blood, guts, and monumental sense of loss when a comrade falls. The narration is accompanied by stunning combat footage – real “You Are There” images of mortar rounds exploding just feet from the camera, horrific sights of the wounded and dead, and always, the total destruction that war leaves in its wake.
A small example of the originality of the series can be found in the way that the narration will, from time to time, fade out slowly and the reading of the script is picked up by the actual survivor. It is an extraordinarily effective technique in that it humanizes the actor reading the narration when, after just a few seconds of the survivor reading, the voice of the actor portraying him is slowly brought back up, while the survivor’s words fade away. This is not a new technique but it it works spectacularly.
The music is obtrusive without overwhelming the action. Indeed, the music is used as a dramatic device to measure the pace of the documentary, mirroring the pace of the excellent narration (Gary Sinise). Beautiful editing builds bridges to each succeeding scene, allowing for seamless segues from clip to clip. A truly masterful job.
A word about the HD: It could be that they really didn’t have anything else to call the project, what with “World War II in Color” already taken. Shooting the program in HD is not the reason to watch it, nor is much of it in HD anyway. The films, as you can imagine, are grainy, and out of focus at times so even with an HD TV, it really doesn’t enhance the viewing experience that much.
All in all, “World War II in HD” is a triumph of documentary film making that should do for World War II what Ken Burns’ “Civil War” did for that conflict; bringing the viewer up close to the war while allowing us to get to know some fascinating characters who increase our understanding of the conflict. (Burns’ “The War” was good but lacked the dramatic punch of the History Channel treatment.)
And as the last scenes of the documentary faded and the survivors, now all near or over 80 years old were left with their memories, it hit me that the hackneyed question about whether America today could pull together and perform such magnificent feats of arms and industry as those that my father’s generation manged, needed another airing.
Strip away our gadgets, our scientific wonders, and all the cultural, economic, and social touchstones that make up America today and ask yourself; How much like them are we? There’s no doubt that we are quite different in some respects. But like Robert Graves, the great essayist of the World War I generation who saw extraordinary love in the sacrifice of soldiers who marched lockstep into the most murderous fire, is there that kind of feeling for America today that would allow us to meet such huge challenges?
By World War II standards, our military is tiny. More than 16,000,000 Americans wore their country’s uniform in the Second World War. But there is little doubt that our current military is every bit as good, soldier for soldier, as those who beat the Nazis and the Japanese. So the question isn’t really a military one. It is a question of character. The real question should be; How similar is the character of today’s American to that of the World War II generation? Are we made of the same stuff? Do we believe in America as passionately as they did – enough to put aside our political differences and unite to see the job through to its conclusion?
I have my doubts. The whole idea of American sovereignty is fast disappearing – or at least the sort of sovereignty the WWII generation believed in. Call it a blind faith if you will, or perhaps you think it small minded and childish to harbor such notions that sometimes, there is only one side to take and that is the side of the country of your birth. It’s called “chauvinism” today and is quite unfashionable. But without it, we might have quit in 1944. Without that absolute certainty that we were in the right felt by the overwhelming majority of Americans whether at the battlefront or the homefront – whether fighting with a gun, or laboring in the factories and fields – I don’t think we could have done it.
There are many who would celebrate this loss of faith as the inevitable result of America “growing up” or worse, the consequence of a government that has betrayed the people time and again whether it was Viet Nam, Watergate, or some other national event that showed our leaders using us, lying to us, or betraying the principles on which the country was founded.
And yet…
We don’t know, do we? As implacable a foe as radical Islamism, it can’t come close to the existential threat of Hitler and his thugs or the economic threat to our emerging commercial empire in the Far East by Japan. And remember, all of this played out with the backdrop of a national depression where unemployment was still over 10% and most people hurting economically.
I want to believe we’d be up to those kinds of threats regardless of about which generation of Americans you want to talk. I don’t think it would matter what era you choose, I still see Americans as comprising a specific, exceptional “race” if you will. There are national characteristics unique to people who live here that are found nowhere else. We simply couldn’t have achieved what we have achieved, overcome what we’ve been able to overcome (self-inflicted or otherwise) without some spark deep within us that makes us “Americans.”
The conventional answer might be that we wouldn’t stand a chance fighting a long war like WWII today. But one thing is for sure; if I were a foreign power, I wouldn’t make the mistake that the Kaiser made in 1917, Tojo and Hitler made in 1941, or Saddam made in 1991.
And that is underestimate the United States of America.
Rick Moran is Associate Editor of The American Thinker and Chicago Editor of Pajamas Media. His personal blog is Right Wing Nuthouse.