#WAR OF BEACH CRITIC FULL#
But as my wife and I filed out of the theater, I wondered what they were applauding, exactly, this darkened room full of veterans and their spouses. Moved to tears by the powerful film, the audience gave it an ovation as the final credits rolled. Along with 6.5 million other Americans, I saw Saving Private Ryan its opening weekend back in 1998, joining a mostly elderly crowd of the "Greatest" generation at a suburban multiplex. The New York Times even devoted a respectful editorial to "Spielberg's War."Īnd I knew that almost everybody else agreed with them.
#WAR OF BEACH CRITIC MOVIE#
Historian Stephen Ambrose, author of D-Day and Citizen Soldiers, thought it "the finest World War II movie ever made." The Secretary of the Army presented the filmmaker with the military's highest civilian decoration, the Distinguished Civilian Service Award.
com, on Twitter.The most serious students of the Second World War shared the enthusiasm for the film. While the bulk of the book is about Long Beach in World War II, including chapters on civil defense, life under war conditions, war workers and rumors of marauding Japanese submarines, Burnett also explores some other worrisome subjects as the Pike, Zoot Suit riots, political bribery and the Black Dahlia murder.Īs always, Burnett’s research is exhaustive, with much of it bouncing right off the pages of the newspapers that reported the events - news that Burnett knows better than anyone.Ĭontact Tim Grobaty at 56. While that very real fear was keeping Long Beachers up at night - and it was an ever-growing number of Long Beachers with jobless Depression-era workers flooding the city to find war-related employment - there was still plenty to fret about with the residual corruption and gangster violence that continued to plague the city in post-Prohibition and with other organized crime activity surrounding gambling in town and in the popular offshore gambling boats. If that doesn’t sound like Sittingducksburg, USA, we can’t imagine what would. “And in the middle of Long Beach were countless oil wells fueling the ships, planes and other equipment needed to fight the war.” The (western) portion of the city housed numerous shipyards and a Navy base to the north was Douglas Aircraft Company and the Army air base at the Municipal Airport to the (east) was the Los Alamitos Naval Air Station and the Seal Beach Weapons Depot.
What enemy wouldn’t drool over the idea of knocking out the city? As Burnett notes, “It didn’t take a visionary to see that Long Beach would be a prime target for an enemy attack. Though a bigger fear, with Japan gaining strength in the Pacific, was Long Beach’s vulnerability to attack. “Fighting Fear” takes up where “Prohibition Madness” ends, though the fear of the crime and corruption surrounding Prohibition remained long after drinking was made re-legal. A longtime Long Beach librarian, she’s compiled an ambitious index to the library’s collection of Long Beach newspapers, has written numerous books about the city, including “Haunted Long Beach,” “Strange Sea Tales,” “Murderous Intent?” about killings in town in the 1880s through the 1920s, “Prohibition Madness,” and several others, in addition to the history-related blogs Historic Long Beach Blogspot and Historic Seal Beach Blogspot.” Long Beach was a pretty little target back in those days, notes Claudine Burnett in her most recent book, “Fighting Fear: Long Beach, CA in the 1940s.”īurnett, you should know by now, is our go-to historian on all matters regarding Long Beach and Seal Beach. Our first order of business would be to build planes that didn’t need to make an inconvenient stop at Pearl Harbor. Yeah, we know there’s a lot of weird science involved in this, but you were the one who wanted havoc in Long Beach. You want havoc in Long Beach? Set the clock back to the early years of World War II and make us the emperor of Japan.
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