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Oliver Stone's Untold History of the United States
redandwhiterob
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Done a quick search and couldn't find a thread.
Anyone watch this last Friday on Sky atlantic?
Just caught up with the first episode and enjoyed it although it just seemed like a history lesson on World war two more than out else. I guess its aimed at those Yanks who think they won the war single handily;)
Looking forward to seeing what other subjects are going to get covered. Not sure if it will be going back over at anytime or just things that are post WW2
Anyone watch this last Friday on Sky atlantic?
Just caught up with the first episode and enjoyed it although it just seemed like a history lesson on World war two more than out else. I guess its aimed at those Yanks who think they won the war single handily;)
Looking forward to seeing what other subjects are going to get covered. Not sure if it will be going back over at anytime or just things that are post WW2
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I heard Stone on Radio 5 the other week and to be honest his grasp of WW2 seemed rather flaky.
Stone stated that the allies should have launched the invasion of France earlier and that invading Italy was a mistake.
Whilst you can argue the value of the Italy campaign, what it did do is give the allies experience of amphibious landings.
The allied attack on Dieppe showed up that they were totally unfit to launch a major attack on France and a lot of the lessons from that shambles were put into practice on the later landings.
Additionally, Stone failed to mention (I don't know if this came up in the series) that one of the main reasons for NOT being able to launch an invasion of France earlier was that the U-boat threat in the Atlantic needed to be defeated, there was no way you should ship the number of troops across from Canada and the USA until the allies got he U-boats on the run, that was not just destroying them but there was a time (the Germans called it the second happy time which was most of 1942) when the allies were up against it again and it wasn't until better methods of detecting and destroying U-boats (like Hedgehog) came along that started to put pressure on Germany.
Also it wasn't until later in the war that the RAF had the bombs to smash the U-boat pens in France and Coastal Command could close the Atlantic gap.
Not only that but no invasion could take place without air superiority over France and that didn't happen until the Mustang fighter came along in large numbers, again that wasn't until later in the war (late 43 early 44). No invasion could take place without that air superiority and the RAF didn't have a fighter with the ability linger over the target, especially over Normandy which was a long way from RAF bases in the UK. The Germans had suffered exactly the same problems when trying to invade Britain.
I really don't see how Stone could say an invasion of France could have taken place earlier, the invasion would have to have been in the summer because of the weather so if it was launched in 1943, the allies would have to have been building up from 1942 and the USA didn't get involved in the European war until well into 1942.
US troops were raw and not battle hardened and their fight engagements were in the middle east where they took a lot of casualties until they got that experience.
Stone to me came across as a bit of a bitter lefty who seemed upset that we didn't do more to help Stalin out.
We as a nation did what we could, the now forgotten Arctic convoys and of course the mass bombing of Germany (now so despised by the BBC) which was done to divert men, guns and planes away from the Russian front was all that was possible at the time.
Oliver Stone was write in one respect, he said that it was the Soviets that won the war in Europe and he's right. The German army was impaled on the soviet army in the east and the soviets bled it to death.
Unfortunately Hollywood has forgotten that and also that on D-day more British and Canadian soldiers were landed than Americans.
Such as WWII really starting in 1931 when Japan invaded China rather than 1942 when Japan attacked Peral Harbor.
That the USSR T-34 and the Russian winter is what stopped the Nazis not the Americans landing on the Normandy beaches.
That the Americans were really very reluctant participants in the war rather than rushing to Europe's aid.
I suspect also a President Wallace would perhaps not have been as different from Truman (who he went out of his way to ridicule) as he would like to believe, and would have made many of the same decisions, but Stone mythologises him into a king over the water figure.
of it by Sean Wilentz in the New York Review of Books:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/feb/21/oliver-stone-cherry-picking-our-history/
And Stone and Peter Kuznick's response here:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/mar/21/untold-history-exchange/
(I remember last year managing to buy copies of both the NYRB and The New Yorker
while on a day trip to the Big Apple. They felt sort of special since they were actually
from New York itself).
Chapter 2: Roosevelt, Truman & Wallace
Chapter 3: The Bomb
Chapter 4: The Cold War: 1945–1950
Chapter 5: The 50s Eisenhower, the Bomb & the Third World.
Chapter 6: JFK: To the Brink
Chapter 7: Johnson, Nixon & Vietnam: Reversal of Fortune
Chapter 8: Reagan, Gorbachev & Third World: Revival of Fortune
Chapter 9: Bush & Clinton: Squandered Peace - New World Order
Chapter 10: Bush & Obama: Age of Terror
He seemed to criticise FDR for being too trusting of Stalin (calling him uncle Joe) and distrusting Churchill (not backing his plan to start a second front in the Balkans).
He certainly showed the brutality of the soviets, how they stood back and let the nazis destroy poland and when they did capture polish officers the soviets killed thousands.
Although he did say something along the lines of Stalin was no worse than the Tsars were...