Secrets of War

I've seen seven episodes of this series and consider them informative, well-produced and smoothly narrated (by Charlton Heston). The focus is largely on World War II but the series branches out and covers the Korean War -- oops! the "police action" in Korea -- the Cold War, the Arab-Israeli Six-Day War and the U.S. invasion of Panama.

Perhaps the most interesting episode is on the "Spy Games of World War II" disc, which describes the "battlefield magic" the British used to defeat Gen. Erwin Rommel during the North African campaign.

Military and history buffs will undoubtedly eat up the material. And general audiences will unquestionably reap educational benefits.

Unfortunately, memories of these wars have faded, and young people today have little knowledge or understanding of World War II, why it was fought and its consequences. Clearly, our educational system is at fault.

Ask a high school senior what the Manhattan Project is, and he or she will guess that it's the name of a rock group. What a pity!

We humans seem instinctively wired for "what-concerns-me&mine-in- the-present", and, understandably so, since the day-to-day survival of each of us depends mainly upon dealing with immediate challenges and problems rather than reflecting upon the challenges involved in events which occurred before we were even born. While I as a sixty- year- old might find it amazing that a seventeen-year-old scarcely knows about Hitler or Stalin, I'm sure that those who were sixty when I was seventeen were equally incredulous that any seventeen- year-olds then were ignorant of Kaiser Wilhelm and Tsar Nicholas II. Most of us are busy enough with the circumstances of life in the era in which we are born to see any need to study history.

However, that said, it's a knowledge of history that can provide from-an-unexpected-perspective both hope and tranquility. Because, a study of history makes clear that none of the "evils" nor issues we face in the present are anything essentially new to humanity, and that, despite history showing that humanity isn't getting qualitatively better, history also shows that humanity is not at all getting qualitatively worse. People and situations have always been "this bad", yet, humanity is still here plodding along.

This series makes clear that people and situations today are no worse than people and situations were fifty and seventy-five years ago. For example, as this series evidences, US politicians, presidents, and military and government leaders served their personal agendas and smiled while blatantly lying to the US citizenry and the world then no less than they do today. US government used whatever technology was available then to spy on its own citizens and on other nations, and did so under the justification, "defending US interests". US corporations interfered in the governments of other nations when they felt their profits threatened. Words and phrases were deliberately crafted and manipulated by government and businesses in order to discredit competitors and malign those who disagreed with policy. The US public lived in fear then too, no less and perhaps moreso than the fear felt today. And yet, after all that and more, neither the US nor the world "ended". Despite it all, humanity manages to keep its head above water and continue on.

This series affirms that "nothing is new under the sun." Its scrutiny of history demonstrates that it's possible for humans to create some shade for ourselves at times. But, more importantly, this series impresses that the glare isn't any worse than ever, and so gives reason not to despair despite that glare being relentless. In spite of ourselves, humanity survives and presses onward.

This long and well-executed series may not amount to everything you've always wanted to know about spying and sabotage in World War II, but it's the most you're likely to get from a documentary.

It's well done too. Charlton Heston's cadenced baritone take us through the 30s into the Cold War. Heston's speech is distinctive. It is, after all, the voice of Ben Hur, Michelangelo, and Moses. But it's an actor's voice, and Heston lends some nice inflections to the usual drone. He sounds at time as if he's improvising an interesting tale, not reading from a script. Heston himself served in the Army Air Force during the war and was stationed in Alaska during preparations for the invasion of Japan that, fortunately, I suppose, didn't happen.

I'm not a historian and I've only watched a few of the episodes but I expect the series will hold up as well as it has. I much admire the objectivity of the series. The narration (and the other elements) don't sound like a giddy announcer at a high school football game. Triumphs and disasters are presented even handedly. Fictions are exposed for what they are.

Eg., the Americans didn't capture that damned Enigma machine or whatever it was from a disabled U-boat; the British did, despite Hollywood. The CIA went nuts trying to kill Castro, poisoning his cigars and whatnot, and enlisting the Mafia in the attempt. They cooperated, of course, because, along with the United Fruit Company, they OWNED Cuba. The best intelligence system in WWII was under Stalin. If his agents slacked off, he had them killed.

The entire period of the war and the Cold War that followed, even Vietnam, seems to be fading from our shared cultural data base. I agree completely with the earlier reviewer's lament. I'm not sure it's exclusively our educational system that's at fault. There seems to me to be a decreasing interest in anything that does not impact the body or its welfare. Are we getting less curious because we think we know everything that needs to be known?

From the Chicago Tribune: "Recently Ron Grossman took a survey in the newsroom, asking colleagues to identify the iconic World War II photo of the raising of the American flag on Iwo Jima. While some recognized the image, others couldn't quite place it. "I know I ought to know it. It was in the movie, Flags of Our Fathers," one co-worker said. Some, seeing military uniforms, figured out it must be a war photo. Maybe Vietnam? One suggested it was D-Day. Journalists are probably more attuned to history than many people who have less motivation to keep up with the past (almost 25% of 17-year-olds couldn't identify Adolf Hitler in a survey)." More? One third of us can't identify a photo of Vice President Joe Biden. One out of five of us don't know which country we achieved our independence from.

How about if we show the entire series in every high school senior class as a prelude to graduation? We can staple their eyelids open.

I purchased this series because it was clearance priced and because it was narrated by Charlton Heston. The 50+ shows cover intriguing topics. Heston's participation suggested solid production value and perhaps an even-handed analysis. The episodes are treatments of intelligence and psychological warfare stories from varied historic events from World War II through the Cold War. A history teacher and former Marine Corps Officer, I find the average episode to be informative and worth the time. I learn a few tidbits of back story history with each episode. However, contrary to another reviewer who scolded the series for an excessive pro-American posture, I found it to be more ambivalent in its treatments, particularly in Cold War matters. Other times it appeared to come from a leftist perspective to such a degree that I wondered if the self-described conservative Heston was less conservative than advertised or was simply uncritically reading copy. For instance, he voices narration that gives free passes to Che Guevara in one episode and, in another paints South Vietnam's Diem as a ruthless dictator without equivalent characterization of Ho Chi Minh's leadership. The same pattern is observable during the review of the Korean Conflict when harsh words are used for South Korean Syngman Rhee but not so for Kim Il Sung. This series can be useful if one comes to it with his bias filter engaged. If you so proceed, you will find it a worthwhile documentary. Listen for the factual anecdotes and the neat sidelights. But don't go here for bottom-line verdicts on the good guys and bad guys of the Cold War. If you do, you might find the familiar bias instead.

SEcrets of War takes an exceedingly complex conflict, and reduces it to a simplistic dichotomy of good and evil, with the U.S., of course, being the side of good. Most striking though is what the film omits. In addition to the aforementioned omission of civilian casualties, the film also omits that the war was started on a lie with the Gulf of Tonkin incident, the brutalities committed by U.S. forces, and the indifference of much of the Vietnamese civilian population to their own conflict. All of this in addition to over-playing the threat that was posed by the Soviets. A viewer watching this series, who received no other information about the war, would have some very one sided views of the conflict.

Unfortunately, the notion promoted by the US military to this day that in Vietnam the Americans scored all those "battlefield victories" goes unchallenged here. In truth the whole idea of what a victory is, even what constitutes a "battle", had to be re-thought in that conflict.

There also are some outright distortions, such as the reason behind Operation Linebackers I and II--the notorious "Christmas Bombing" of Hanoi. It was not Hanoi's intransigence that caused the Paris peace talks to stall. The problem was the administration in Saigon--our own side, that is--that showed a sudden and very ill- timed independence and balked at signing the accords, knowing it had no popular support in the South.