While I agree with stilleto's blanket assesment that the Russians "chewed up" 200 German divisions, that mastication would have been impossible without the aid sent to them by the United States. Without the vehicles, supplies and even SPAM that the allies sent over, the Russians would have been forced to stay on a static defence, allowing themselves to be rolled over again and again by the Wermacht. Russian productivity didn't and couldn't rebound until after 1943.

I understand, on a purely production level, why Burns wanted to do this -- the WWII vets are, as you wrote, dying by the thousands, every day. Burns wanted to capture as much of them as he could before they retreated into ghostly history.

WWII was surely America's finest hour on the world stage -- in broad strokes, we wore the white hat, fought the Good Fight(tm). It made this country, and will break this country, if it hasn't already broken us, and we're just slow to realize it.

It'll break us because we'll forever use WWII as justification for any intervention abroad, no matter how hard we have to squint to find the parallels -- the rhetoric gets dusted off and suddenly we're fighting appeasement and isolationism all over again.

WWII paved the way for a permanent wartime economy, the price of which will be the albatross around the necks of generations of unborn Americans to come, as the money spent on the war machine doesn't get invested into improvements in our own country, but gets farmed out in endless wars over the sea.

WWII cemented the doctrines of American exceptionalism, inherent virtue, interventionism, and unilateralism in the pop cultural psyche, whether one is mainstream liberal or conservative, the difference is only in degree of intervention, how much force you use, never a question of our motives -- we're still wearing the white hat, at least in the view of the mainstream. Never mind that it's dusty and worn out; nobody else gets to wear the white hat -- we earned it in WWII, and we'll take it to our national grave.

The rest of the world has moved out from under WWII's shadow -- certainly helped by things like the Marshall Plan -- but WWII still stays with this country. We're like the high school quarterback at middle age, loudly remembering the Big Game we won, while everybody else around the table is squirming in their seats, wondering why we have a paunch, bloodshot eyes, a receding hairline, and what we've been doing since then. Oh, sure, we stumbled in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq -- but we've still got the white hat, see?

So, I see the Burns documentary as a last curtain call for the living, the actual participants in WWII, but the legacy of that war is going to forever haunt us, as we futilely try to recreate the glory of it, over and over again, with ever-diminishing returns. One more Hail Mary pass, and the world'll love us again! We're going to throw a long bomb to Iran, waiting for the roar of the crowd.

Ever since Tom Brokaw committed literary fellatio, we have had a flood of WWII fiction and alleged nonfiction. "Saving Private Ryan" was a grownup version of the black and white films Spielberg made as a kid (which yo can see on the DVD) of himself and his playmates playing war.

Everyone loves a war with real, bona fide "bad guys" we can demonize and feel good about killing. Much more comfortable than today's morally ambiguous conflicts.

If the generation that fought WWII was so great, why were their kids so angry in the 1960s? Why have the boomers popularized psychotherapy and self-help groups?

Some of the right-wing trolls will reply, "Because they were spoiled, ungrateful...." Before you do that, ask yourself why they were so spoiled or whatever other adjective you use.

That is my point: People respond to whatever stimuli are in their environment. People are people. Human nature is what it is.

Until we are able to look past the propaganda, we will continue to get suckered by the Bushes and Cheneys of the world.

Get over it already.

War sucks, unless you are a defense contractor.

It's called "The War" because that's what Americans of a certain age (my parents, aunts & uncles) have always called it! Doesn't matter that there were lots of wars before 1941, or several since then. When my mom explained to me (yes, a post-war Boomer) that my dad's friend was killed in "the war" and three uncles and a cousin served in "the war" I understood that she meant WWII, not WWI, not Korea.

Significantly, perhaps, my peers tend to refer to our own generation's overseas conflict as simply "Nam," refraining for whatever reason to employ the w-word.

Readers are free to speculate as to the reasons why.

I think those who criticize the documentary for being so parochially American, although they're correct in the sense that it was WORLD War II, they're missing what I think Burns was trying to get at. My friends fought in 'Nam. My cousins in Korea, some of the youngins I work with were in Desert Storm, my grandparents fought in The Great War. But my parents fought in the war. NO title, no ETO, nothing. Just the war. When you said "the war", there was no explanation needed.

I don't think he's demeaning those who fought by our side, or other's roles in the war. I think he's trying to get across what all out war's impact is on a given society. In this case, ours. And we didn't even have a single shot fired on our soil.

But we (our forebearers actually, but you know what I mean) went to war in a way that those who say we're at war today cannot fathom. And it is still "the war".

I'm sick of them. They voted themselves the biggest bag of free stuff in the history of the world. They neglected their own parents (nursing homes) and their children (school loans) so they could sail off into the age 50 retirement on their bass boats and free medical care, GI loans, VA loans, hyperinflated realestate market, pension plans, and the like. All of course at the expense of everyone else. What's 'great' about them is the massive robbery they got away with. Just because a few white guys (non integrated Army) fought the krauts and the nips?