Like any subject, WWII veterans is very broad and needs focus for a work such as a documentary film or a book. To cover the issue of Japanese American veterans, for example, is a rich focus for a documentary alone because there was the issue of Japanese Americans being treated as enemy aliens, so that young men (whose families were placed in camps) would enlist and fight for a country that hasn’t treated them well is extraordinary.

On a similar note, Hispanic Americans and what they had to deal with during WWII is also one where justice would be done to it if were focused on them.

If a documentary purported iteself to be comprehensive on the subject, some criticism is fair. These vets have a right to be critical. However, but to snowball it or bowdlerize it? No.

An even better project would be a documentary on the slaughter of twenty million Chinese civilians by the Japanese during World War II, carried out with a degree of barbarity and sadism that would have nauseated Mengele.

If the question of what aspects of history can work their way into the mass public mind is determined by whether there’s “a political or business benefit to producing that story”, then it’s no wonder that people’s grasp of history is so spotty — it reminds me of the teachers who chicken out about teaching evolution as a fact in science classes lest it offend somebody.

The Japanese atrocities in China (and other occupied Asian countries) are very much a live issue which continues to affect the politics of that region today, especially since Japan (unlike Germany) has hardly acknowledged the enormity of its actions during that period.

I don’t know which is more nauseating — the interminable whining of the present-day Japanese about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or the hand-wringing of ignorant and misguided Americans on the same issue. I once asked a Chinese woman about the view some Americans hold, that the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was in some way immoral. She said that (a) this was literally the stupidest idea she had ever heard, and (b) in her opinion I could search the whole of China and not find even one person who would agree that the use of the atomic bombs was wrong. The view of the Japanese as congenitally evil persists in much of East Asia today in a way which is not paralleled in, say, present-day Russian or Polish feelings towards Germany. The Japanese sadism of World War II, compared with which Hiroshima and Nagasaki were barely pinpricks, is the main reason. You cannot understand the reality of present-day international relations in that part of the world without thoroughly grasping this point.

It’s true that Japanese society has changed its attitude to the extent that a repetition of such barbarities is pretty much unimaginable. The lion’s share of the credit for this should go to the atomic bombs and to the earlier massive bombing raids on Japanese cities (see my comment at the end of this thread). Where World War II is concerned, we have nothing to be ashamed of.

Thank you for your service Mr. Molinar and thank you for taking the time to comment. I recently republished an Open Letter to Native Americans that I originally wrote on Thanksgiving Day in 1999 where I said, “the hurdle of American history is one that you have to climb over while being fired at with a high powered rifle.” I still believe that and despite the fact that I hail from Illinois where Lincoln is still revered as a God amongst men; I believe that he was human and that he was a great man, just as Jefferson Davis was a great man, a great Senator, a great soldier and a great statesmen. The biggest walkaway I took from the masterpiece of The Civil War was that it was fought by great men on both sides. I’m sure there are countless war stories from every war that are screaming to be told but have had no voices to tell them. My whole point is an artistic one, and is not meant to denigrate the service that any individual or group of people have given for the idea that ripples behind the American flag.

The point is this: why waste time complaining about someone else’s artistic vision or product when one could be busy writing and producing their own to fill in those gaps? If Burns’s work has a gap, surely there is a Latino artist or concerned party who can produce their own film to rectify that oversight. That’s my only point and nothing anyone could say will affect my opinion of Burns or his work, which I believe is almost the perfect meld of history and popular culture (the perfect meld is a dramatic HBO show like Rome which truly makes history come alive).