This list would change all the time, but here for now. First, nice catch on Stalag 17. I love it but I have to put Escape over it today.
Everything remotely related counts. Not being picky. For example, I almost included Hunt for Red October and Last of the Mohicans.
I can pretty much watch any war movie and be interested, no matter how bad or how many times I've seen it.
I was just going to edit mine to include that one.
Not sure how I didn’t think of Schindler’s List.
I have to admit, Vietnam movies bum me out. WW II movies, even the ones that are brutal, lift me up.
If we are counting Burns, then I would have had him and Band of Brothers. Brothers is hands down my favorite, just do not think of it as a movie
Sharpe series and Hornblower series.
I second that motion on Band of Brothers. I included Burns but forgot B of B. Another one I enjoy is Good Morning, Vietnam. It’s kind of hard to pull off a war comedy, but Robin Williams was a genius.
WWII movies tended to portray the Japanese as being sub human.
Have you read A Man Called Intrepid. Great Read about secret stuff that wasn’t known until the 1970’s. Also 1942, The year That Tried Men’s Souls.
Have you read accounts of the Bataan Death March and the Japanese Occupation of SE Asia? The atrocities are very difficult to read. Can’t imagine living through that or doing that to other human beings. How about Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima and Okinawa? We literally were forced to kill every last Japanese soldier. There is a reason why we had German POW’s but never Japanese POW’s to any appreciable extent.
An entirely different scenario being in occupation forces after the war was over than what they did during the war.
Dan Carlin did a great job describing what led to the Japanese committing such atrocities in his Supernova in the East series that he should be finishing up soon. He explains it, and tries to humanize the experience, but doesn't justify it. I might write him in on my next presidential ballot.
What’s the executive summary of what led to the atrocities? I left out China. Nanking and what they did to the Chinese who helped the Doolittle raiders also is inexplicably horrible in my view.
The refusal to surrender by Japanese soldiers made the prospect of treating them with anything other than abject brutality pretty much untenable.
I'm two bourbons in and it's been a year (more?) since that first episode, but I'll take a stab: it's a combination of a culture that inculcated their own racial superiority, obedience to the emperor, and military training that punished mercy if displayed by their soldiers.
www.dancarlin.com
I think for me it’s a matter of being slightly aware of the war when it was still ongoing is why I find it interesting…and sad. I have vague memories of being in the car on the way home from my grandparents’ house. It was about an hour drive. I remember hearing them talking about it on the radio and my parents discussing it. Plus knowing people who fought. One of our moderators, Cajun, fought in Vietnam.
Western Hemisphere? Germany and Japan were equally vile
Okay, well, what I meant were that there were equally “evil” people who didn’t start world wars. Pol Pot exterminated 1/4th of Cambodia’s population. That goes into the Eastern Hemisphere category.
