I had recently finished watching Ken Burns' documentary series on the Second World War. 'The War' - A 14 hour-long series consisting of 2-hours per episode. All episodes were told from the perspectives of American citizens and warriors. The film recounts the experiences of a number of individuals from four American towns as they fight through the Pacific, European and North African theatres.
The thing that managed to surprise me about this documentary was the huge volume of sound effects implemented, over 300 different sounds of each gun, tank and plane that had been carefully edited into the raw combat footage; the results had an effect on me. The more I watched the footage of Marines charging the beaches in waves of tens of thousands of men, and heard the constant barrage of guns, artillery, destruction and death. All of this made me realise just how brutally mad this war was, a bunch of statistics simply doesn't do it justice; but once you actually watch a documentary like this in-which you can actually see and hear what was going on, it feels closer and more surreal.
Yet, the volume and scale of what was involved during the war, and the number of men assigned to even the smallest of campaigns and operations, and the death toll accumulated from all of these operations has made my own perspective of this war feel as if it were a distant dream beyond my memory. I know I will never truly understand what it was like to be on those horrific battlefields, but the surreal nature can only be described when watching footage of young men that dress and look (sparing minor details) like we would today in our 21st Century world we would consider far above and beyond those times. I am starting to view it very differently; those men already looked modern. Their behaviour and body language is exactly how I or anyone on this forum would assume was the societal norm. The surreal thing about this is that we have never experienced this scale of destruction and ratio of death in our lifetimes, so we attempt to adjust our perspective of what a modern world should look like by judging the nature of the society during the war via combat footage (the grainy picture, the lack of sound, the black and white) - but that was because all of humanity's efforts in that time were only spent on one thing: weapons that were designed to kill other people, and we did it well. Just watching the video I will link below will hopefully give the forum a fresh perspective. All of that fire-power concentrated into one direction for days without stopping. The destruction never seemed to end, and the men that fought this war saw the most awful examples of human suffering every witnessed by anyone in human history. Total war was infinite; it engulfed the skies, the ocean and every inch of land it touched turned into a series of ash-craters filled with bodies and cold blood. The sheer scale of the technology which was created light-years ahead of its time was now being used for full destructive effect; just imagine seeing over 150 ships firing all of their guns onto the island of Okinawa, for example. This was a time in history in-which all of the might of technological advances met the impenetrable wall of ideological demagoguery: this is, and proved to be, a recipe for total destruction.
The Pacific war was brutal. I especially become overwhelmed when, after watching all of that destruction engulf the shores of Iwo Jima, a still photograph of a Marine slumped into the sand is staring right into the lens of the camera; utterly bewildered by what he just experienced. I am far from a pacifist, but I sincerely hope this video makes us all wish that nothing on this scale ever happens again.
Included here are three segments from the series: the introduction, the battle of Iwo Jima, and the veterans discovering what genocide looks like for the first time.
[video=youtube;BZG537wYZBo]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZG537wYZBo[/video]
[video=youtube;Ifk_h2JArnc]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ifk_h2JArnc[/video]
[video=youtube;XyIoUi5XQGs]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyIoUi5XQGs[/video]
The thing that managed to surprise me about this documentary was the huge volume of sound effects implemented, over 300 different sounds of each gun, tank and plane that had been carefully edited into the raw combat footage; the results had an effect on me. The more I watched the footage of Marines charging the beaches in waves of tens of thousands of men, and heard the constant barrage of guns, artillery, destruction and death. All of this made me realise just how brutally mad this war was, a bunch of statistics simply doesn't do it justice; but once you actually watch a documentary like this in-which you can actually see and hear what was going on, it feels closer and more surreal.
Yet, the volume and scale of what was involved during the war, and the number of men assigned to even the smallest of campaigns and operations, and the death toll accumulated from all of these operations has made my own perspective of this war feel as if it were a distant dream beyond my memory. I know I will never truly understand what it was like to be on those horrific battlefields, but the surreal nature can only be described when watching footage of young men that dress and look (sparing minor details) like we would today in our 21st Century world we would consider far above and beyond those times. I am starting to view it very differently; those men already looked modern. Their behaviour and body language is exactly how I or anyone on this forum would assume was the societal norm. The surreal thing about this is that we have never experienced this scale of destruction and ratio of death in our lifetimes, so we attempt to adjust our perspective of what a modern world should look like by judging the nature of the society during the war via combat footage (the grainy picture, the lack of sound, the black and white) - but that was because all of humanity's efforts in that time were only spent on one thing: weapons that were designed to kill other people, and we did it well. Just watching the video I will link below will hopefully give the forum a fresh perspective. All of that fire-power concentrated into one direction for days without stopping. The destruction never seemed to end, and the men that fought this war saw the most awful examples of human suffering every witnessed by anyone in human history. Total war was infinite; it engulfed the skies, the ocean and every inch of land it touched turned into a series of ash-craters filled with bodies and cold blood. The sheer scale of the technology which was created light-years ahead of its time was now being used for full destructive effect; just imagine seeing over 150 ships firing all of their guns onto the island of Okinawa, for example. This was a time in history in-which all of the might of technological advances met the impenetrable wall of ideological demagoguery: this is, and proved to be, a recipe for total destruction.
The Pacific war was brutal. I especially become overwhelmed when, after watching all of that destruction engulf the shores of Iwo Jima, a still photograph of a Marine slumped into the sand is staring right into the lens of the camera; utterly bewildered by what he just experienced. I am far from a pacifist, but I sincerely hope this video makes us all wish that nothing on this scale ever happens again.
Included here are three segments from the series: the introduction, the battle of Iwo Jima, and the veterans discovering what genocide looks like for the first time.
[video=youtube;BZG537wYZBo]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZG537wYZBo[/video]
[video=youtube;Ifk_h2JArnc]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ifk_h2JArnc[/video]
[video=youtube;XyIoUi5XQGs]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyIoUi5XQGs[/video]
