Results tagged “History” from Big Money Tony

It was not intentional slight, it was just that Halberstam never crossed my radar.  I had no idea the depth of this man's work.  When I searched for a new book to read, I ran across this in a Kindle edition.  Perfect, I thought, as I could read this at my own pace without needing a physical copy.  The Korean War was something I had not really studied since high school.  It seems to be a much forgotten war in America, known only as the event that split Korea into the North and the South.  Or the comedy that is MASH.

Halberstam weaves stories from Washington insiders, foreign hands, and the men on the ground in a story that tells the Korean War from pre-war to post-war and Cold War implications.  The stories from the boots on the ground and how they dealt with it once back home were the strongest, deepest memories.  The pain of going through the war and how some of them had just been through WWII and had to return to foreign lands to fight yet another war.  In a way, Halberstam shows us how Korea was the original Vietnam, a war that nobody really wanted to fight.  Only Korea had no real public face, unlike Vietnams protests.

In the end however, the most fascinating part was the game MacArthur was playing with Washington.  Many military careers and lives were lost over the things that MacArthur supposedly did.  We can only judge from what was stated by those who were there and the sight does not seem pretty.  This is part of the story I had either never learned or had completely forgotten, but Halberstam's book has put it all in perspective for me.

Overall, if you are a history buff like me, you will want to read The Coldest Winter.  It might be a little too much detail for your casual reader.  But fascinating nonetheless.

Prior to seeing it, the biggest obstacle in liking this movie was probably Tom Cruise.  It was hard to imagine him as Col. Claus von Stauffenberg, the key to the Hitler assassination plot.  After seeing it, that remains the biggest issue with the movie.  The dancing old man from Tropic Thunder, Risky Business, Cocktail and Mission Impossible, all seem to come to mind before him being a serious, real-life character.  Probably did not help that ESPN's Bill Simmons dubbed him "der Maverick" in a podcast as an homage to Top Gun.

Many World War II movies use Europeans to play Nazis.  That would have helped here, since Cruise employed his American accent throughout the 120 minutes.  Not that putting a fake German accent would have done better, so the point should have been, don't use Tom Cruise here.

Aside from Cruise, the movie still lacked some storyline.  While we are told early on about von Stauffenberg's reasons to participate in the plot, we are not told how he got there.  The first 45 minutes or so appear to set up the big event, but watching the whole movie, you realize none of it was necessary as you would understand just as much if it weren't there.  Watching it with The Sports Freak, from the DC Sports Page, he noted that the movie could have been helped by reminding the audience of other key events happening in the war.  We are only given a sparse timeline.  With it, we are not sure if the plot took a week, a month, or a year to get in place.

While Valkyrie did not satisfy, it was still good to see a World War II movie.  If you are a history buff, you should consider renting it.  There are excellent actors in the movie, like Tom Wilkinson (Ben Franklin from HBO's John Adams) and Eddie Izzard, among other recognizable faces.  Just ignore the fact that Tom Cruise is there.