One of the best documentaries about World War Two. A fresh way of looking at the war.
You will never again see a documentary or docudrama on D-Day without noticing the complete absence of photographic support concerning Omaha and Utah beaches. Or the sad re-use of the few seconds of footage that did survive from the second or third waves.
The famous and atrocious footage taken on Okinawa of the mother throwing her baby and then herself off a cliff, while painful to watch, is remarkable.
Now that embedding journalists with US servicemen has become standard operational procedure,now that every soldier walks around with a cell phone capable of recording and re-transmitting battle footage instantaneously, it is well worth going back to a time when it was not so.
This documentary records a time when images of the war were special, be it recording the horrific images of the holocaust so that it's lessons will never be forgotten, or the sad and stricken faces of Japanese civilians suffering through the aftermath of the first Atomic bombs.
This is really the beginning of man's realization of the cost of war. It soon became impossible for those responsible for sending young men to war to suppress for their loved ones the photographic truth of the horrors of war.
Unfortunate that total exposure 24-7-365 has made so jaded that we barely even look at the images coming back from the many wars in the world, much less allow those images to move us to act in any meaningful way to stop further needless conflict.
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