Battle of the Bulge: Phase II

On December 17th 1944, from what I can tell so far, the 100th Infantry Division was ordered to the Bastogne, Noville, and Bras areas to stop the sudden attack by German forces. The 28th Infantry division found itself on its second day fighting for its survival as their entire divisional front was under attack, and member of the division, 1st Lt. Carl Hughes of the 102nd Cavalry Recon Squadron continued to make his way through enemy lines. The Battle of the Bulge was in full force in Germany and Belgium, and would continue to rage on for over a month.

The anniversary of the beginning of the battle saw the start of the second phase of my project documenting the Norwich University alumni who fought there. I had hoped to have finished the writing by this point, but that hasn't happened yet, but the research and collection of raw data has largely wound down for the project. From the data that I was able to collect, I've assembled a list of just under a hundred and fifty people from a variety of sources: publications, records, mentions, with thirty people confirmed with sources that they were present at some point, another 73 people who might have been there based on their unit, ten people who can be written off, with a further 30 people who may or may not have been there, but with very little to go on, other than a country reference.

This collection of raw data has some additional bits of information that goes along with each student: their rank, unit, whether they were wounded or killed, what medals they earned, and any other additional notes. As a whole, it's a wealth of information that only tells me a couple of certain points that help lead to the next stage.

Raw data by itself is somewhat useless. I can tell you ten things about Carl Hughes. He was a first lieutenant in the 28th Infantry division with the 102nd Cavalry Recon Squadron, that he graduated from Norwich in 1942, that he received the Bronze and Silver Stars in addition to a purple heart, and that he walked through enemy lines for three days following the attack when his unit was surrounded. The next step involves adding context to the situation.

Going unit by unit, this next step involves adding that context. With it, I've learned that the 28th Infantry Division had taken the first impact of the German advance on December 16th, along a 25 mile stretch that enveloped the division, and that from the 16th through the 22nd, the unit was involved in heavy fighting before pulling back on the 22nd to Neufchateau to reorganize. This additional layer helps to put the individual experiences of the soldiers into better context.

With rare exceptions, student information on their individual experiences during the battle are rare, and in those instances, I have a paragraph at the most, or a brief sentence at the least that indicates that an alum was present at any part of the battle. The additional information as to what the units as a whole were up to help to fill in the blanks and gives me a general idea of what any given student might have been doing at the time. Furthermore, the individual data points that make up Norwich Students on the timeline helps to etch out a clearer understanding of how the battle worked: it was complicated, with numerous fronts, battles and units involved. Approaching the battle from the people who studied at Norwich also helps to demonstrate the impact that Norwich itself played during the battle, much like I discovered with the Operation Overload paper that I wrote in 2007. There was a collective Norwich experience that was widespread throughout the conflict.

This next step is far from done - quick passes through the Army Historical blurbs allow me to pin point some key dates for units, and a second pass will help to put in more detail for some of the larger units, such as the 2nd and 3rd Armored Divisions and the 17th Airborne Division, which seems to have a larger collection of Norwich men within it. With a codified timeline in place, the events of the battle can be put down into more detail, and a larger story of the Battle of the Bulge will appear, seen through the eyes of the school's alumni.

It's an exciting bit of work as I am able to gather more and more information on individual units and to see the battle emerge from the raw data points that I've collected. One thing is for sure so far: Norwich University was present on the front lines (and in one case, above them) and undoubtably, given some of the notations, medals and units that these men earned and occupied, it had some hand in the outcome of the battle, providing a basis for the actions of the men who fought in 1944 and 1945.

The Pacific

Last Sunday, HBO began their World War II miniseries on the Pacific Theater of Operations, simply titled The Pacific, as their long awaited follow-up to Band of Brothers. Band of Brothers was one of my earlier influences in the history field, and ever since high school, seven years ago, I've been awaiting for such a follow-up, which has been worked on in the ensuing years. The series already has paid off in the long wait between 2002 and now. In the past couple of years, I've graduated with two degrees in history (one was specifically in Military History), and as such, my views on commercial history have changed a lot since I first saw it.

The Pacific follows three soldiers, Robert Leckie, John Basilone and Eugene Sledge, and where Band of Brothers is based off of the book by the same title, this series is following the memoirs of Leckie and Sledge (Helmet for my Pillow and With the Old Breed, respectively), while Basilone is a well known figure in the Pacific War history. As such, the series has a somewhat different feel, apart from the differences in location and military units. Instead, the series has started off with much more of a personal story, rather than the story of an entire unit.

The Band of Brothers comparisons is something that the Pacific will be unable to really escape from, and that carries with it a need for some changes in how the stories will be told, as well as certain expectations with its appearance and what sort of story that it will be telling. To be bluntly honest, this isn't a historical story in the slightest - it features real stories and actions, but care should be taken to remember that primarily, this is a dramatic war movie, stretched out over ten nights. It'll be highly accurate, with a lot of care in that department, but history it is not.

What I really appreciate about this sort of series is the ability to get younger students (upper high school and the like) interested in World War II history, which in turn can act as a sort of gateway to other conflicts. In my own studies, I was highly interested in the Second World War, for all of its complexities and differences, and things to study. It's something that continues to fascinate me to the present day, and I'm sure that I'll be fascinated for a long time down the road. Band of Brothers, when it was released, most certainly hooked a number of people, getting them interested in the character stories, and going from that point onwards to other happenings.

This miniseries focuses extensively on the Pacific theater, with the Marines who fought in the island hopping campaigns that dug into Japanese territory. While the European theater has been extensively covered with movies, the Pacific has had a lesser degree of interest, for whatever reason, and I'll be interested to see how well this comes off in the series. From the first episode, it's clear that there's quite a lot of attention being paid to the characters and their own stories. This first episode is centered around Robert Leckie and the 1st Marine Regiment as they land on the first engagement at Guadalcanal as part of the Battle of the Tenaru, the opening actions for the Guadalcanal campaign. The U.S. Marines landed and secured the islands, but were surprised when the Japanese defeated their supporting ships off shore. The Marines secured the airstrip on the island, and engaged Japanese soldiers on August 21st, in the middle of the night, when the Japanese came across their lines. The first assault was turned back, and the second attack was once again turned back by mortars and heavy machine gun fire. In the morning, the U.S. Forces counter attacked, and over the course of the 21st, the US killed most of the Japanese forces, with just a handful withdrawing.

This first episode shares a pretty limited view of this battle, with Robert Leckie taking part in the first assault over the night and through to the next day. Leckie was part of this battle in real life, as a machine gunner, and the episode captures, fairly effectively, the horrors of that first engagement, from both the determination of the Japanese soldiers in the 17th Army (attacking or committing suicide after they were injured, taking American soldiers with them) and the measures that the U.S. forces took in retaliation.

The Pacific is very different from Band of Brothers, as the Pacific Campaign was vastly different than the European one. There were numerous lessons to be learned in these differences, and I'm eager to see how the remaining aspects of the campaign play out for this series.

History and Social Networking

Okay, this is just plain cool. Someone has started up a photo account that features pictures from the Normandy invasion. These seem to be period pictures, I'm guessing from press photographers who landed on the beaches and with the invasion force during Operation Overlord.

The entire photoset can be seen here, but be warned, there are some pretty graphic shots. The account has a number of other photosets, with thousands of pictures.

I find this interesting on a couple of levels. The first, as a history geek - these are pictures that seem to me to be pretty candid of the invasion - I'm guessing that most of these weren't staged - as some Civil War photographs have been - and show a side of the Normandy invasion that really looks past the invasion component. We see the civilians caught in the path of war here, a lot of the devastation that the war left behind, and some of the very brutal elements as well.

The second thing that makes me interested here is that this helps to illustrate how the internet is potentially changing things. I came across these pictures via random search, something that I might not have come across otherwise. Social Networking sites such as Flickr have the potential to really link up some historical content together. Imagine an interactive historical site that allows for uploads of various events, written historical content and user comments about the event. This could really bring about some interesting changes in the way that historical events are studied, researched and interpreted, especially with events that are currently happening.

I've posted pictures up on flickr as well - when I was working on my Normandy Project back in 2007, I uploaded my shots of the Norwich students who fought at Normandy. I've since taken them down because they were only up there because I had forgotten a thumb drive, but I can see the benefit of having content such as this online.

What would be facinating would be a way to look over the entire Iraq war from its beginning, and watching how opinions change over time, but also to get first hand comments from people who were there. First-hand accounts, from the moment, are extremely handy, especially without the use of hindsight and interpretation from people at the scene.

There are some obvious problems with something like this, and other user-generated content sources, such as Wikipedia, as items can be updated, but they can be updated incorrectly at the same time. At the Society for Military History conference that I attended earlier this year, this seems like it has become, and will be a very contentious issue. Thus, items such as this can only be trusted so far, as incorrect information is a really bad thing to have when doing research.

I suspect that as the internet gains even more prominance when it comes to research in the near future, this will become more of an issue, but we will also see more historical content being published via sites such as this. It should be very interesting.

Rant: Nothing is Sacred

This article has me really annoyed. It's not the subject of the article, another documentary on World War 2, one that is somewhat revisionist, looking at the war in the greater context of the 20th Century. It's the comment at the bottom of the article:

"And once again, it is demonstrated that nothing is sacred - not even World War II. "

What?

This instance highlights the problems that I have with the popular aspects of military history, and probably to some extent, why the subject has a very difficult time in the broader academic field - big, blockbuster books, films and television projects go a very long way reinforcing the idea of the 'Greatest Generation' or the 'Last Good War', essentially sterilizing the image of the Second World War.

Ken Burns, in his recent documentary, The War, looked at the war not as the last great war, but as one of the most horrible conflicts that the world has seen to date. He looks at a number of aspects of the war, from the bombing of civilians, the atomic bombs, the concentration camps, everything. Even before this, its been largely my impression that War is bad. There are good outcomes to warfare, especially in the case of the Second World War, don't get me wrong. The Allies were able to take out the military states, some of the worst that we've ever seen, and end their regimes. I highly doubt that this documentary says otherwise.

In the context of the 20th Century, we have been embroiled by conflict. The First World War leads directly to the Second, and I would suspect that given a hundred or two hundred year's time, it will be viewed as one extended conflict. The Second World War led to the Cold War's confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union throughout much of the century, as well as sparked major conflicts such as the Korean and Vietnam Wars. In that context, it's hard to see an overall success of the second World War, other than the dispatching of Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany.

We did ally ourselves with Joseph Stalin, who is arguably worse than Hitler. When it comes to numbers, Stalin wiped out more people than Hitler ever did, and because of his help, we were able to in the Second World War. We couldn't have done it without them - Stalin's forces kept numerous German divisions tied up in a two front war that sapped manpower from places where it was needed. And Americans did their share, as hard as it is to admit for some. Bombing campaigns were directly targeted against civilians, ship yards, factories, all in the effort to end the war. Necessary? Yes. Horrible? Yes.

What really bothers me is that this reviewer, and likely, veterans and random viewers alike, don't take this into consideration, and because of the labeling of the Second World War as the 'Last Good War', people are reluctant to see it as anything different.

In my studies in history, I've found that there is nothing sacred in history. Nothing. Everything can, and should be looked at, turned on its head, interrogated intensively and smacked around a little. There are so many reasons for the Second World War that it's impossible to find any pure, clear end goal without a number of other smaller motives. Did Truman drop the bomb to end the war with Imperial Japan? Undoubtedly. Did he do the same to hit Russia on the nose and think about what was next? Most likely. Things of this magnitude have numerous facets, not an easy to digest reasoning that will explain itself within the span of a short American attention span.

This is why I don't like popular history - it starts up way too many misconceptions and turning the public around to the actual story is like turning a huge ship around - it takes a lot of time and energy, with a lot of resistance. World War II shouldn't be, can't be and isn't a sacred topic. Because when that happens, and history and the truth is covered up, it's not history at all, it's a story.

Operation Overlord

Today is June 6th, the anniversary of the beginning of Operation Overlord, which began the end of the German hold on mainland Europe. It's also been a little over a year since I traveled to Normandy and got to see it for myself with a couple highly qualified tour guides, and it's been over a year since I finished my final paper on the Norwich Students who fought at Normandy.

The past year has marked some changes since I went abroad. Last December, the last Norwich veteran of the day, Arthur Harrington, passed away. I've since begun my master's degree in Military History, largely guided by my experiences in the country. Since then, I've done a lot of reading on the campaign.

Studying Normandy is an incredibly complex and difficult thing to comprehend. It was one of the largest military operations in history, even through to today. Millions of Allied and Axis soldiers were involved in the operation, which successfully liberated Paris on August 25, 1944. The sheer logistics of this is mind boggling.

World War II, in my mind, is one of the wars that shouldn't be labeled as the Last Good War, or something along those lines. I'd label it as the Last Popular War. The sheer amount of media attention on the conflict in recent years is immense, and while such information is good, it's overwhelming at times, and popular history tends to perpetuate things, like the labeling that WWII has received. In my mind, it's a shame that some of the other conflicts, such as Korea, World War I, and others haven't received the same attention, as this not only draws more people to the field of history, but it also helps uncover a lot of baseline data from people who were there.

Overlord and D-Day still hold a great deal of interest to me, as it's a fairly easy thing for me to research, study but most of all conceptualize. I'm hoping that I'll be able to revisit my Normandy project again and continue to research what the Norwich people did there, in more detail. For that, I'll be visiting the National Archives, which should still have the original mission reports from various units, which will give me all the information that I need.

D-Day was a success. I've read accounts of where people have said that it was a horrible disaster, based on how many people had perished and how long it took to push further into France. I would argue that, when you look at the War in context, and think about just how complicated the situation was, and how everything came together. There were issues, and problems during the invasion. Many people died, some needlessly, but by doing so, they helped bring an end to Hitler's hold on Europe.

In the meantime, it's a good time to reflect on the invasion. It's one of the few points in history where there is a really clear tipping point in a conflict, and the successes of this operation really changed the way the world operated in and helped shape today.

RIP - Arthur Harringon

I just received an e-letter from Norwich from the alumni office, something that they've recently started doing. While looking through the obituary list, I came across one name - Arthur Harrington - that I recognized.

Some of you might remember that I did my final thesis on Norwich alumni who fought at Normandy, France during D-Day. Of the 43 people that I was able to find, I was only able to speak with one, Arthur Harrington, who landed on Omaha Beach on D+0 H + 6.

He was assigned to the 5th Special Engineering Brigade, where he was tasked with linking up communications between the 1st Infantry Division and the 29th Infantry division. He landed on Easy One, under enemy fire.

D-Day was the only time that Harrington took fire. He spent the rest of the war on the beaches, tasked to another special communications group that helped coordinate communications between the various branches (Army, Army Air Corp, Navy and Coast Guard), while helping set up a port at Normandy to supply the soldiers fighting further inland.

Prior to the invasion, he was involved with the planning of Overlord by analyzing reconnaissance photographs to help place equipment. Just before that, he was stationed in Iceland.

When I spoke with him a little under a year ago, he was happy to speak with me about my work, and about his role in the invasion. He told me then that he would not likely live to see the school again, and sent me a package of some papers relating to D-Day for the library's special collections. I mailed him a copy of my final paper, and never heard back from him again. I gathered that he was fairly active where he lived in North Carolina. He was 89 years old.

His official obituary can be found here.

The War

Over the past five weeks, I've been running a series of screenings for the recent Ken Burns series, The War, on the Norwich campus. I had hoped that this would be a fairly popular draw for the Norwich community. Unfortunently, there wasn't as much in the way of interest as I'd hoped, for students or teachers here. On average, we had probably four or five students during the bi-weekly screenings, with only one or two instructors turning up each time. I reviewed The War here earlier, shortly after I purchased the companion book, from what I had come up with when I finished reading it. Having seen the entire fourteen-hour series, most of my opinions of the event remain, but there are a number of things that really struck me. My first introduction to Ken Burns was years ago with his series, The Civil War, which my parents had taped, being highly interested in the Civil War, and looking back, it's likely that this was something that helped get me interested in history, and in paticular, military history. The series used thousands of photographs and letters to illustrate the series. Burn's new series used photographs, but now had access to video footage - hours of it. The footage that they used was in color, black and white, of the soldiers from each side of the war, before combat, and during combat. This was the most shocking thing that I've really seen, and I think that there's a general dismissal of 'real' footage that is highly misplaced. Prior to the series' premire on television, there was quite a lot of controversy over the FCC and stations airing a 'clean' version of the series. Looking back over the past viewings that I've been holding, I can see the reasoning behind it. It was an incredibly hard thing to watch at times - unlike a movie, the violence here was real. When you see a person fall over, they were killed or wounded. When you see an explosion, more people were really killed, and it's not something that I've thought about lightly. The dynamic use of footage here really brings the events of World War II to life, quite literally. Along the way, there are letters, photographs and interviews with people who had been there. This is possibly one of the most accessible, and most complete documents out there for the Second World War, encompasing all of the major conflicts and the home front in vivid detail. Almost every conflict has a survivor talk about the events that they had to live through, and we watch as they relive the battles, and they smile, laugh, scowl and at times cry as they remember the men and events that passed by them. The battles are looked at in both a bird's - eye view of the war and on the personal level, something that is not easily or often done well. Watching through this entire series provides an excellent background to the Second World War, something that is really needed in a country that really only knows about Pearl Harbor, D-Day, Iwo Jima and Hiroshima. Often, in the after discussions that I helped run, inevitably, there was a "I didn't know ..." this or that, about various aspects of the war. I didn't know much about Anzio, North Africa, Italy, various elements of the Pacific and some elements of the home front. The series does gloss over elements, but this is certainly to be expected with a conflict as large as the Second World War. As I mentioned before, there is little on the build-up to the War, but there is quite a bit on the homefront reactions to V-J Day, although not much in the overall view. More than likely, those would comprise a documentary in and of themselves, given the complexity of the issues. Burns does dispell the notion of the Good War that is pounded in to the viewer. Often, the tolls of the wars are told again and again, and we really see what the effects of war is, something that we probably don't pay much attention to as often as we should. It's a something that is probably easier to forget or overlook in the aftermath and end result of the war - that the United States came out on top in the world. We won, and probably because of that, it was the good war. I don't doubt or argue with the notion that it wasn't a just war, given what the American, French, British, Polish, Belgium, Russian, New Zealand, Australian and other allied forces went up against, a massive and unspeakable evil that showed what some people could do to others. It may not have been a good war, but it was fought for very good reasons and Burns goes a long way towards showing that to us.

Paul Tibbets

I just heard the news via the AP - Paul Tibbets, the pilot of the B-29 Enola Gay, died earlier today at the age of 92. The Enola Gay was the plane that dropped the first atomic warhead on the city of Hiroshima, Japan on August 8th, 1945. An estimated 70,000 to 100,000 people died in the initial blast.

I first read his book that he wrote - I'm blanking on the title at the moment, but it was an interesting insight to the training and the dropping of the bombs. Interestingly, Tibbets said that under the same circumstances, he would do it again. Also interestingly, he has requested no service or head stone for his body.

History vs. Hollywood

I just read this column about the War and how columnist felt that it needed to be livened up a bit:

In Ken Burns' 'War,' passion is MIA Next time PBS has enough cash to hire Ken Burns for a project like the 15-hour World War II series that ended last night on Ch. 13, here's a suggestion: See if it's enough to buy Steven Spielberg. Burns is skilled and knows what elements tell a story. But Spielberg - who, okay, would be unlikely to take the gig - could bring it some heart. There's a sense of sterility to Burns' "The War," a kind of academic detachment that undercuts its goal of conveying the impact of the most lethal conflict in human history on the American towns that sent their sons and daughters to fight it. Burns finds plenty of people to tell their stories, and he knows the stories to explore, including racial tension. But while having well-spoken people in elegant rooms makes for a fine history symposium, it distances the viewer from the raw impact of the horrors the series nominally is trying to bring home. Spielberg's "Saving Private Ryan" sent viewers home shaking. "The War" often feels like preparation for a quiz. Read the full column here.

In my opinion, the strongest point of the War is it’s academic detachment from the stories that the public is much more likely to be familiar with, such as Saving Private Ryan or Band of Brothers. Burns, as a historian, has brought the public a very accessible and comprehensive look at the second world war – no mean feat, given the enormous size and complexity of the war. Omitting some elements that are more humanizing was probably not possible given the already massive nature of the project and not as relevant to the overall picture. The complete story of World War II is impossible to tell in 15 hours, impossible to tell in 24, 48 or more, it’s just so big.

Introducing someone like Steven Spielberg to “bring it some heart” would be a disaster. Saving Private Ryan was interesting as a war film, given the technical difficulties in capturing the look and feel of war, but from a historic point of view, was absolutely horrible. It gets details wrong and pulls it all together into a story that is so over-melodramatic that it’s laughable. It’s not history, it’s entertainment. There’s a huge difference, and in a documentary, history should not be sacrificed for a little more liveliness for the audience’s sake. They should be, and deserve to see what happened, not what someone from Hollywood thinks might look cool on the screen.

The War

Over the weekend, I picked up the companion book for Ken Burn's The War, written by Burns and longtime collaborator Geoffrey C. Ward. The book, along with other companion books, is a literary mirror to the multiple hours long documentaries that Burns is well known for producing and writing. The War is a 14 hour long documentary that's to air on PBS starting September 23rd. The book is an outstanding and highly detailed look at the Second World War.The War is practically comprehensive. Covering an exhaustive amount time, from the entry of the United States on December 8th after the attack on Pearl Harbor through to the extensive campaigns in Europe, North Africa, the Mediterranian and the Pacific and to the dropping of the two atomic bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Most books and authors hardly dare to cover that amount of ground in the amount of detail that this pair of authors go into.

The War focuses on the entire campaign through the eyes of four towns in the United States- Luverne Minnesota, Sacramento California, Waterbury Conneticut and Mobile Alamaba. This is a war that is shown through the eyes of ordinary Americans, high school graduates and people who had hoped to serve their country in what is considered by many to be the last great war. However, from the start, Burns shows us that war is not great, no matter what the causes and reasons behind it. He opens with a quote:

I don't think there is such a thing as a good war. There are sometimes necessary wars. And I think one might way "just" wars. I never questioned the necessity of that war. And I still do not question it. It was something that had to be done. - Sam Hynes.

This is the tone that the rest of the book follows. Burns sets out to show what war looks like, and backs it up with hundreds of photographs, throughout the 451 pages. Some of these pictures are familiar to history buffs. Others, most of them, are completely new to me, and they really show a side of the war that's the same. The book also covers a lot of ground that doesn't really get lumped together. The book not only covers the battlefields and the times that the soldiers spent on the ground between gunshots, but also the home front, from the woes of the families waiting to hear from their sons, fathers, children and husbands, the rationings, as well as the racial tensions among workers and the internment of African and Japanese decendants living in the United States, as well as their plight to get recognized as real people and soldiers. The book and presumably, the documentary along with it, are not without their flaws. While they provide some stunning work on the war, there are parts that are missing, mainly the years leading up to the US's entry to the war. The book picks up and drops off with Japan, at Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima. There's very little on the buildup of Japanese, Italian German agression, militarily and politically, as well as the Russian relations. Similarly, there's very little on the aftermath of the war, which is one of the biggest factors in creating the modern world, after the United States and Russia carved up Europe that would essentially plunge the world in to another World conflict. But that's not the focus of the book or documentary. This story looks at the war, but from the eyes of the soldiers. We get the personal stories of the people from those four towns. And they've done that spectacularly. The War is an outstanding work of popular history. With any luck, Burns will succeed in bringing the Second World War to a public that really only knows it through the films Band of Brothers, Saving Private Ryan, Windtalkers or Flags of Our Fathers, or the books of Stephen Ambrose. Hopefully, the War will be a much more accurate version of what happened those 60 years ago. Hopefully, it'll go a long way towards telling the public those stories that will soon be lost. This is really something to check out.

The War

Last weekend was the alumni weekend on campus. I got around to seeing some old friends who were able to make it up, which was fun, to catch up and see how people have moved on a bit. It's been an interesting weekend. Yesterday, a new exhibit on the Mountain Cold Weather division opened, to celebrate their 30th anniversary this year. Part of that was a screening of a documentary on the 10th Mountain Division, which is similar in nature to the MCW. The documentary was mainly on the 10th work in World War II, which fit with the next hour of the event. The Sullivan Museum coordinated with PBS, and they did a one hour preview of Ken Burn's newest documentary, The War.

From that preview, I'm amazed. It's a fantastic look at the second World War. Burns is a fantastic documentary film maker - his prior works - the ones that I've seen - Civil War and Jazz, are fantastic, very in depth looks at each subject, to a near comprehensive level. The War is a look at the second World War through four towns in the US.

Where Burns has used photographs in prior documentaries, he uses video footage, to create an unparalleled portrait of the War. The project was started shortly after Burns learned two statistics - That nearly a thousand World War II veterans die each day, when they started the work six years ago, and that number's only risen. And secondly, 40 % of graduating high school seniors thought that the U.S. and Germany fought in the Second World War together, against Russia.

Hopefully, this will be a bit of a step in bringing the history of what happened to more people, so that number is reduced somewhat- it's a disturbing statistic. It'll also be nice to see something about WWII besides what people see in films.

The War will be starting on Sunday, September 23rd, at 8:00 pm on PBS, and will be running through the week. The entire thing will be about 14 hours long, and at least in Vermont, we'll be getting the original edition, not the censored version that some places will be airing. Later on, after the first original airing, the censored version will be aired during family friendly times. I'm not thrilled with a censored war documentary. I know I can't wait to see it though.