Well, I don’t know what kind of experience you guys are looking for. We are living in a partitioned society and apparently its important to find veterans from every ethnic group and race so that the show appeals to everybody. Okay, fair enough, I can work around that. As I know from looking at my kids history text thats the way they write history now. I tell him I remember when Sojourner Truth wasn’t considered an important American historic character.
After watching a couple of these episodes now I guess I understand what the Mexican-American community was complaining about. They didn’t get their fair share of representation. If we are going to feature white, black, red, and yellow Americans we damn well better feature some brown. I’m sure there were a lot more people of Hispanic heritage in the U.S. military than Japanese. Its hard to believe that the PBS crew would screw up racial math since they invented it.
The “four towns” approach doesn’t really ring true to me. The woman, (researcher?) who appeared said that method wasn’t working for them so they decided to find some notable World War II survivors like Paul Fussel and hang the story on them, find out where they were from and then work the 4 town angle down from there. They just picked the home towns of their featured veterans.
I mean, its clearly a PBS product, but for all of that it doesn’t seem unwatchable. I’m fascinated by personal stories and memoirs and this does a pretty good job of bringing some pretty interesting stories to the screen. You guys complaing seem like you are really reaching to find something wrong with this.
Paul Fussell is a well known anti-war leftist. He is no more the voice of WWII infantrymen than Elton John would be. Just because he served doesn’t mean that his distorted view of what happened has to be accepted.
The one good thing that Fussell has done in his miserable life is to collect and publish war poetry, primarily from WWI. Beyond that I have no use for him and his opinion. I suspect that he was a pretty poor platoon leader.