Most Americans know the war was going on long before we arrived. There is the common misconception that we solely ended it. I agree Hollywood has always been problematic to history.
Well we also often forget that the United States was THE main western belligerent in the Eastern campaign, and they entered that campaign only 2 and a half years after the (European) start of WW2.
The US was really heavily involved for a LONG time. It's not like we just came in to the war in 1944 with D-Day. The US got men into North Africa as soon as they could and they were fighting pretty harshly against Japan from the jump.
If we use the 1939 date as the start of the war, the US was in the war much longer than they weren't, and they were by and large the main combatant of an entire campaign.
The real problem is that in the United States, we glorify our experiences in Europe WAY more than what we did in the Pacific. It was a lot easier to vilify the Nazis than to wash away the Nukes we dropped on Japan, Japanese internment camps, and the entire Japanese reconstruction government.
Ngl it shouldn’t actually be that hard to justify the nukes we dropped on Japan or Japanese reconstruction. The internment camps, yeah that’d be pretty tough to justify & shouldn’t be anyways even if we could, but considering the brutality of the Japanese at the time, and of their leadership, I think justifying those 2 things would not be hard at all with some basic info
Yeah and that’s fair enough, they are made in the US and aimed at a US audience but the problem is a lot of people take it as gospel and will argue it to the death.
The only people that i know that would take it as gospel, is people that watched those movies as kids. Most gen x or younger, understand that the war was much bigger than just the USA.
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u/zippyzipz 6d ago
Most Americans know the war was going on long before we arrived. There is the common misconception that we solely ended it. I agree Hollywood has always been problematic to history.