War Documentary

This weekend I have movie extra work in a film being shot here in New Orleans. I will be gone from home early morning until whenever, each day. No dialogue, just background shots but it's fun and for the 12 days of work over the next month I will be paid about $1000, nice spending money. Working these movies is always interesting. One thing that I have learned is that Hollywood directors are smart men and women, the actors and actresses usually on the dumb side and the technical crews very efficient.
This week there is a series running on educational TV here (PBS Network) called 'War' about W.W. II. The most famed producer/director of biographies, Ken Burns, has spent years doing research and finding film, pictures, records, personal testimony from four cities in the U.S. in four different states. The film uses four surviving soldiers reflections of their days in W.W. II battle and the atmosphere, and of the cities survivors to explain what happened in those four cities during the war. It gives one of the endless perspectives about the war's effects on people in the U.S. and of the outcome of the war abroad.
I have seen four of the series 2 hour episodes and think it is what TV should be doing (as opposed to the stupidity of what most people are fed and addle their brains about). This documentary tells so many fascinating and uncensored reflections from the war that it is more a social commentary on people and their ways of dealing with crisis on a battlefield and of how loved ones in their home towns far away from the actual fighting coped with their love ones struggles in the war. I can't begin to relate specifics about what I have seen because there are too many to mention.
But if this documentary ever appears on your TV I do recommend it and assure you that you will be fascinated in watching it. One portion of the documentary followed a soldier who fought in North Africa against the German troops there that were using the area for oil needed to keep the German army war machinery afloat.
This was of special interest to me because during the war my father was stationed in Morocco and Algeria. I could see how some of the soldiers there handled the conditions in those deserts battlefields and try to imagine my own father's experiences. My dad was a quiet man who talked little about the war. His story is of interest because like the many told in the film, my dad had an unusual path to being assigned to a secret unit in the desert of North Africa. To the horror of his father, my dad dropped out of Tulane University during the war to enroll in the army air corps, but it didn't work as he planned.
My father wanted to fly planes in the war and was assured that he could when he enlisted. But, alas! He failed the eye exam due to a colorblind condition he previously did n to know existed. Colorblind soldiers were never permitted to fly as pilots. His plan to be a pilot in combat was over, and the army said it would make him a gunner's mate (the fellow in the bottom of the plane who fires machine guns at the enemy planes who are attempting to shoot down the craft). On hearing of this plan my dad did a very smart thing. He told the officer in personnel, "Shoot me now, because I refuse to do that." The mortality rate of pilots in that war was about 50%, but for gunner's mates it was more than 90%, a near death sentence. The army attempted to put anyone into the gunner's mate position because those who knew the danger would resist that job and it was very difficult to entice a soldier into a suicide role.
Obviously, my presence here today tells that the army did not shoot him and he was reassigned to another rate. Ironically, his reassignment was to one of the most elite units in the military, a cryptography unit created for and assigned to the task of breaking German military code in North Africa. My father's superior intelligence (I have been told that the military tested his IQ to be nearly at 200 points, necessitated the opportunity for him to be in the unit), probably saved his life and is why I am here haunting your mail. Hehe.
During the war, my dad was behind enemy lines, guarded and only responsible for work on deciphering the code. He never fired or even cleaned his rifle. Unit members were sworn to secrecy by the military, threatened with jail is not honoring that pledge, and so until the day my dad died he told me nothing of its operations. But my mother did say the unit's work to decode German tank communication was the reason German General Rommel's elite tank corps was destroyed in a surprise attack by the U.S. forces. Had they not been, Germany would have had the fuel needed to continue the war for years longer than it did fight it.
The documentary helped me remember some of the personal ties my family (which ironically, emigrated here from Germany) had to that war, to be thankful my father escaped combat, being a pilot, or any danger that might have killed him. About 350,000 American soldiers died fighting in that war. Knowing my father was one of the lucky ones not to be killed makes the history of the war and the significance of the documentary more special to me.