Spoonatects
Am i the only one who thinks........Average?
Breakinger
A Brilliant Conflict
TaryBiggBall
It was OK. I don't see why everyone loves it so much. It wasn't very smart or deep or well-directed.
ronkovic
This series relies on an unknown British academic (what role did they have in the war?) and a selective narrative that posits it was all the north, and soviet Russia, and China's fault. There was no support for the vietmihn in the south, and the usual "we would have won if hippie politicians would just let us win" nonsense. To this day, people still cant understand the ideology of their enemy, who fought for nationalism far more than for communism. They eventually went to war with all of their communist neighbors to preserve a Vietnam free of foreign domination, long after the US left Vietnam. First some basic facts.During World War II, the U.S. collaborated with the resistance group the Vietminh and their leader, Ho Chi Minh, in their fight against Japan. In the postwar period, however, the U.S. feared Communist expansion into Southeast Asia. In 1954, as France withdrew its forces in defeat, the Geneva Accords established the countries of Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. Vietnam was partitioned into north and south sectors until elections to be held by 1956. Fearing a victory by Ho Chi Minh, the Eisenhower administration collaborated with the South Vietnam leadership to prevent elections and subsequently sent military aid and advisors. Under President John F. Kennedy, the number of "advisers" increased to more than 16,000, some of whom engaged in counterinsurgency efforts and actual combat. Although Kennedy opposed large scale U.S. involvement, his successor, Lyndon Johnson, began regular bombings and escalated troops to more than 500,000 by 1967. Johnson's successor, Richard Nixon, scaled back to 39,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam by September 1972, but initiated bombing raids into Cambodia in 1969 and sent ground troops there in 1970. The U.S. and North Vietnam reached a cease-fire agreement in January 1973, and the South Vietnamese regime fell in April 1975. More than one million people died during the war, including an estimated 925,000 North Vietnamese, 184,000 South Vietnamese, and 57,000 American soldiers.This series holds that anti-communism was the central and all-pervasive fact of U.S. foreign policy from at least 1947 until the end of the sixties. After World War II, an ideology whose very existence seemed to threaten basic American values had combined with the national force of first Russia and then China. This combination of ideology and power brought our leaders to see the world in "we-they" terms and to insist that peace was indivisible. Going well beyond balance of power considerations, every piece of territory became critical, and every besieged nation, a potential domino. Communism came to be seen as an infection to be quarantined rather than a force to be judiciously and appropriately balanced. Vietnam, in particular, became the cockpit of confrontation between the "Free World" and Totalitarianism; it was where the action was for 20 years.U.S. involvement in Vietnam is not mainly or mostly a story of step by step, inadvertent descent into unforeseen quicksand. It is primarily a story of why U.S. leaders considered that it was vital not to lose Vietnam by force to Communism. Our leaders believed Vietnam to be vital not for itself, but for what they thought its "loss" would mean internationally and domestically. Previous involvement made further involvement more unavoidable, and, to this extent, commitments were inherited. But judgements of Vietnam's "vitalness"—beginning with the Korean War— were sufficient in themselves to set the course for escalation.Our Presidents were never actually seeking a military victory in Vietnam. They were doing only what they thought was minimally necessary at each stage to keep Indochina, and later South Vietnam, out of Communist hands. This forced our Presidents to be brakemen, to do less than those who were urging military victory and to reject proposals for disengagement. It also meant that our Presidents wanted a negotiated settlement without fully realizing (though realizing more than their critics) that a civil war cannot be ended by political compromise.Presidents and most of their lieutenants were not deluded by optimistic reports of progress and did not proceed on the basis of wishful thinking about winning a military victory in South Vietnam. They recognized that the steps they were taking were not adequate to win the war and that unless Hanoi relented, they would have to do more and more. Their strategy was to persevere in hope that their will to continue—if not the practical effects of their actions—would cause the Communists to relent.
joe santus
We humans seem instinctively wired for "what-concerns-me&mine-in- the-present", and, understandably so, since the day-to-day survival of each of us depends mainly upon dealing with immediate challenges and problems rather than reflecting upon the challenges involved in events which occurred before we were even born. While I as a sixty- year- old might find it amazing that a seventeen-year-old scarcely knows about Hitler or Stalin, I'm sure that those who were sixty when I was seventeen were equally incredulous that any seventeen- year-olds then were ignorant of Kaiser Wilhelm and Tsar Nicholas II. Most of us are busy enough with the circumstances of life in the era in which we are born to see any need to study history.However, that said, it's a knowledge of history that can provide from-an-unexpected-perspective both hope and tranquility. Because, a study of history makes clear that none of the "evils" nor issues we face in the present are anything essentially new to humanity, and that, despite history showing that humanity isn't getting qualitatively better, history also shows that humanity is not at all getting qualitatively worse. People and situations have always been "this bad", yet, humanity is still here plodding along. This series makes clear that people and situations today are no worse than people and situations were fifty and seventy-five years ago. For example, as this series evidences, US politicians, presidents, and military and government leaders served their personal agendas and smiled while blatantly lying to the US citizenry and the world then no less than they do today. US government used whatever technology was available then to spy on its own citizens and on other nations, and did so under the justification, "defending US interests". US corporations interfered in the governments of other nations when they felt their profits threatened. Words and phrases were deliberately crafted and manipulated by government and businesses in order to discredit competitors and malign those who disagreed with policy. The US public lived in fear then too, no less and perhaps moreso than the fear felt today. And yet, after all that and more, neither the US nor the world "ended". Despite it all, humanity manages to keep its head above water and continue on.This series affirms that "nothing is new under the sun." Its scrutiny of history demonstrates that it's possible for humans to create some shade for ourselves at times. But, more importantly, this series impresses that the glare isn't any worse than ever, and so gives reason not to despair despite that glare being relentless. In spite of ourselves, humanity survives and presses onward.
Robert J. Maxwell
This long and well-executed series may not amount to everything you've always wanted to know about spying and sabotage in World War II, but it's the most you're likely to get from a documentary.It's well done too. Charlton Heston's cadenced baritone take us through the 30s into the Cold War. Heston's speech is distinctive. It is, after all, the voice of Ben Hur, Michelangelo, and Moses. But it's an actor's voice, and Heston lends some nice inflections to the usual drone. He sounds at time as if he's improvising an interesting tale, not reading from a script. Heston himself served in the Army Air Force during the war and was stationed in Alaska during preparations for the invasion of Japan that, fortunately, I suppose, didn't happen.I'm not a historian and I've only watched a few of the episodes but I expect the series will hold up as well as it has. I much admire the objectivity of the series. The narration (and the other elements) don't sound like a giddy announcer at a high school football game. Triumphs and disasters are presented even handedly. Fictions are exposed for what they are. Eg., the Americans didn't capture that damned Enigma machine or whatever it was from a disabled U-boat; the British did, despite Hollywood. The CIA went nuts trying to kill Castro, poisoning his cigars and whatnot, and enlisting the Mafia in the attempt. They cooperated, of course, because, along with the United Fruit Company, they OWNED Cuba. The best intelligence system in WWII was under Stalin. If his agents slacked off, he had them killed.The entire period of the war and the Cold War that followed, even Vietnam, seems to be fading from our shared cultural data base. I agree completely with the earlier reviewer's lament. I'm not sure it's exclusively our educational system that's at fault. There seems to me to be a decreasing interest in anything that does not impact the body or its welfare. Are we getting less curious because we think we know everything that needs to be known? From the Chicago Tribune: "Recently Ron Grossman took a survey in the newsroom, asking colleagues to identify the iconic World War II photo of the raising of the American flag on Iwo Jima. While some recognized the image, others couldn't quite place it. "I know I ought to know it. It was in the movie, Flags of Our Fathers," one co-worker said. Some, seeing military uniforms, figured out it must be a war photo. Maybe Vietnam? One suggested it was D-Day. Journalists are probably more attuned to history than many people who have less motivation to keep up with the past (almost 25% of 17-year-olds couldn't identify Adolf Hitler in a survey)." More? One third of us can't identify a photo of Vice President Joe Biden. One out of five of us don't know which country we achieved our independence from. How about if we show the entire series in every high school senior class as a prelude to graduation? We can staple their eyelids open.
gjampol
I've seen seven episodes of this series and consider them informative, well-produced and smoothly narrated (by Charlton Heston). The focus is largely on World War II but the series branches out and covers the Korean War -- oops! the "police action" in Korea -- the Cold War, the Arab-Israeli Six-Day War and the U.S. invasion of Panama.Perhaps the most interesting episode is on the "Spy Games of World War II" disc, which describes the "battlefield magic" the British used to defeat Gen. Erwin Rommel during the North African campaign.Military and history buffs will undoubtedly eat up the material. And general audiences will unquestionably reap educational benefits.Unfortunately, memories of these wars have faded, and young people today have little knowledge or understanding of World War II, why it was fought and its consequences. Clearly, our educational system is at fault.Ask a high school senior what the Manhattan Project is, and he or she will guess that it's the name of a rock group. What a pity!
