WWII in HD: Striking Distance (2009)
Season 1, Episode 7
9/10
Attacks From A Different King Of Enemy
25 November 2009
Warning: Spoilers
This seventh episode may not have all the blood, guts and gore the first six had, but in many respects it is just as brutal. That's because of the incredibly tense situations some of the guys were in. These range from several different death marches to sailors having to abandon their blown-up ship and survive in shark-invested waters, men shot down in planes and landing in mountainous enemy territory, etc., etc.

Boy, each episode in this 10-part series reminds you, big-time, of how much war is hell and how much hell people went through fighting World War II. One particular shark story is really horrifying. Actually, my dad tells me this was a problem with many men who had to abandon ship in the Pacific.

As far as the presentation.......duh, I found out something that was fairly evident from the start but I failed to see it. That is the fact that almost all of this "WWII In HD" series is shot in color, and it's this footage I presume being the main reason this new series was shown in the first place.

I had assumed a small percentage of this is new, but not so. Most of this series, with all this color, is being presented for the first time to the public. It explains why there was so little on the Normandy invasion. Obviously, those Utah and Omaha beach scenes were not shot in color and it's not part of the newly-discovered footage that makes up this series.

All of this came to light in this episode when narrator Gary Sinise remarks several times that film of the Japanese-American soldiers and the Tuskeegee Airman shots, are in black-and-white, obviously because they were not important enough due to the color of the skin of those soldiers. Thank goodness we are finally long past that kind of thing.

Anyway, in this episode the action goes back-and-forth between at least three situations and they don't stay long in any part. All of it is fascinating, but brutal to contemplate.
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