The War

• Watched the seven part series "The War"(2007) on Netflix.
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_(miniseries) 
• Each episode is around two hours long.
• It is worth watching.
• It shows the story of Second World War from an American perspective.
• Mainly it shows the perspective from four American towns Waterbury, Sacramento, Mobile and Luverne.
• Before each episode they show clearly that Second World War was fought in thousands of places too many for any one accounting.
• It is too good.
• Worth watching.
• I will say there is plenty of learning in the series.
• I am afraid I will not be able to reproduce all that I have learnt in this blogpost.
• All I can say I learnt plenty of things which I was not aware of before.
• I can give examples.
• How Japanese Americans were transferred to camps and then some of them were given a chance to prove the loyalty by going into the war.
• How Americans were held as prisoners by Japanese and a staggering figure of 168,000 prisoners.
• How in a few hours bombing hundred thousand were killed in Tokyo and Dresden in Germany.
• How the nuclear bomb made Japan surrender else the invasion of Japanese homeland would have cost upto 500,000 American lives and seven million Japanese.
• Compared to that 250,000 lives were lost immediately when the nuclear bombs wer dropped.
• Also USA did not have any more atom bombs but Japan did not know that and hence they surrendered. Producing new bombs could have taken months.
• Germany was systematically degraded and Nazi rule was wiped out. What they thought would last for a 1000 years could only make it to 12.
• Germany was squeezed slowly but surely from all sides.
• The Battle of Bulge was perhaps the last push Germany could manage to make but it was catastrophic for them. It was a Winter War on the border of France Germany and Belgium.
• When Sasha Weizheimer a prisoner in Santo Tomas camp in Manila began to narrate her story related to hunger we dismissed it but as the story went on and on we realised the horror of the prison camp.
• Another story of John Frazier how he was held as prisoner in four different locations in Japan after capture in Philipines and when the war ended the guards simply went away and he and other prisoner just boarded train to Tokyo and then got on ship to San Francisco.
• Japan like Germany was also similarly degraded slowly and slowly and it too capitulated.
• Island after island changed hands from Japan to US.
• Looking back we realise that Vietnam War was was an indirect result of Second World War because American military was already there mobilised in Pacific and Philipines post Second World War and they hit the land mass of Asia in full force at Vietnam and then they withdrew and focussed on Middle East but that is a different story.
• How problem between African Americans and Whites were still there in those days.
• Several decades more would be required for the integration of the communities.
• Even now there is not a perfect integration. Problems of race still exist.
• It is also clear that Second World War could not have been won without American Support and involvement.
• Also in American heartland women contributed as much as men in industry and so on.
• Without women involvement no war can ever be won.
• Also a particular German Prisoner of War also could make out when the American Soldier came from and had minute details (like the junction of two rivers one of which was like a stream) which means Hitler had made a "Committee of America" (like Ministry) and it was Hitlers plan to move on to America after Europe.
• Also nuclear bomb was actually made for Germany but Germany surrendered and there was no need to use it. And hence it got diverted to Japan which had not surrendered.
• The joy when the war ended was also too much everywhere.
• Towards the end they show that currently a thousand Second World War veterans are dying everyday. And that I guess is part of being human.