Oliver Stone's Untold History of the United States

Hello, I'm Oliver Stone.

When I was a young boy growing up in New York City,

I thought I received a good education.

I studied history extensively, especially American history.

It made sense. We were the center of the world.

There was a manifest destiny. We were the good guys.

Well, I've traveled the world now.

I continued my education

as an infantryman in Vietnam,

made a lot of movies... Some of them about history.

And I've learned a lot more than I once knew.

And when I heard from my children

what they were learning in school,

I was perturbed to hear that they were not really getting

a more honest view of the world than I did.

We live much of our lives in a fog, all of us.

And I would like my children to have access

to something that looks beyond what I would call

the tyranny of now.

You watch the media and everyone talks

about that thing... The news of the day.

And all the subconscious, really important stuff

that's going on is being neglected.

Napoleon once said that

"History is a pack of lies agreed upon."

Well, I'm not sure I agree.

I believe history does have a meaning, does a have a purpose,

and there is a pattern to be found.

And I wanted, with my colleagues,

rather than make another feature film,

to tell the American story in a way

that it has never been told before.

There are many questions that you may not find answered here,

but you will find questions raised

that I hope will help make you more conscious.

We are going to propose, among other things,

a forgotten set of heroes...

People who suffered for their beliefs

and who have been lost to history

because they did not conform.

And we are going to debunk some of those heroes

that you believe in, not with malice,

but by restating the facts.

Unless we remind ourselves of the good that we have lost,

it's not easy to imagine a better future.

By showing you the patterns of behavior

which have come to be that you perhaps have not noticed before,

we will try to bring you back to the meaning of this country

and what so radically changed after World War II.

There have been some profound mistakes,

but we still have a chance, I strongly believe,

to correct them.

The Sangre de Cristo,

or "Blood of Christ" Mountain range,

is one of the United States' most remote

and primitive landscapes.

In an isolated ranch house, the world's top scientists,

many of them European,

gather nervously in the chill morning air.

Nearby in the darkness,

something hangs atop a steel tower...

a bomb.

Today they will test it.

The test is code-named Trinity.

The inspiration... John Donne,

Robert Oppenheimer's favorite poet.

One of the premier scientists of his age,

Oppenheimer loved literature and the desert of the Southwest.

He was a peaceful man,

who just happened to have created and coordinated

the most destructive weapon in all history.

Only a few miles away,

the project's military commander,

brigadier general Leslie Groves, is the man responsible

for building the war department's

gigantic new headquarters in Virginia

known as the Pentagon.

He doesn't like relying on unreliable civilian scientists.

His career is on the line.

Here it is, general groves... plutonium.

Well, that's the first time I've seen it,

but if you don't mind, I wish you'd hold that under it,

because, after all, there's about $50 million

in that test tube.

The automatic control has got it now.

Rob, this time the stakes are really high.

It's going to work all right, Robert.

And I'm sure we'll never be sorry for it.

Well, in 40 seconds, we'll know.

In the last few minutes, general silence is observed

as the countdown begins.

Ten, nine, eight,

seven, six, five,

four, three, two,

one.

At 5:29 and 45 seconds, the bomb detonates.

The light is brighter than the sun.

Observing the explosion,

Oppenheimer recalls a line from the hindu scripture,

"Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds."

This terrifying weapon

would launch the United States on a journey,

turning the refuge of the founding fathers

into a militarized state.

Generations of Americans have been taught

that the United States reluctantly dropped atomic bombs

at the end of World War II

to save the lives of hundreds of thousands of young men

poised to die in an invasion of Japan.

But the story is really more complicated,

more interesting, and much more disturbing.

Many Americans view World War II

nostalgically as the "good war"

in which the United States and its allies triumphed

over German nazism, Italian fascism,

and Japanese militarism.

Others, not so blessed,

remember World War II as the bloodiest war in human history.

By the time it was over,

60 to 65 million people lay dead,

including an estimated 27 million Soviets,

between 10 and 20 million Chinese,

six million Jews, over six million Germans,

three million non-Jewish poles,

2.5 million Japanese,

and 1.5 million yugoslavs.

Austria, Britain, France, Italy,

Hungary, Romania, and the United States

each counted between a quarter million and a half million dead.

Unlike World War I,

World War II began slowly and incrementally.

The opening shots were fired in 1931 when Japan,

rapidly industrializing, launched its Kwantung army into Manchuria,

overwhelming Chinese forces.

In Europe, Germany, under Nazi leader Adolf Hitler,

seeking to avenge its own devastating defeat in World War I,

was building up the German war machine.

Heil!

His ally, Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini,

invaded Ethiopia in October, 1935.

But the United States, Britain, and France

did little to protest.

And as a result, Hitler concluded

that the allies had no real stomach for war.

In March 1936,

German troops occupied the demilitarized Rhineland.

It was Hitler's biggest gamble to date and it worked.

"The 48 hours after the March

were the most nerve-wracking in my life," he said.

"The military resources at our disposal

would have been wholly inadequate for even a moderate resistance.

If the French had marched into the Rhineland,

we would have had to withdraw with our tails between our legs."

The feeble international response to the Spanish civil war

was even more disheartening.

Fighting erupted in July, 1936,

when general Francisco Franco's forces

set out to topple the elected Spanish Republic

and establish a fascist regime.

The Republic had made enemies among U.S. officials

and corporate leaders with its progressive policies

and tight regulation of business.

Many American catholics rallied to Franco's support,

as did Hitler and Mussolini,

who sent abundant aid and thousands of troops.

Hitler supplied his feared condor legion,

whose bombing of guernica was depicted by Pablo Picasso

in his famous mural.

Soviet leader Joseph Stalin

sent arms and advisors to assist the loyalists.

But neither France, England, or the United States

did anything to help.

The U.S., under president Franklin Delano Roosevelt,

banned the shipment of weapons to either side,

which weakened the outgunned government forces.

But Ford, General Motors, Firestone

and other U.S. businesses provided the fascists

with trucks, tires and machine tools.

Texaco Oil Company, headed by a pro-fascist,

promised Franco all the oil he needed on credit.

Roosevelt was furious and threatened an oil embargo

and slapped Texaco with a fine.

But Texaco persisted, undeterred,

and also supplied oil to Hitler.

The fighting dragged on for three years.

Some 2,800 brave Americans snuck into Spain

to battle the fascists,

most joining the communist-backed Abraham Lincoln brigade.

Almost 1,000 did not return.

Tell us, Ingles, why have you come so far

to fight for our Republic?

A man fights for what he believes in, Fernando.

Well, but in his own country.

Well, maybe you feel that I'm sticking my nose

into other people's business,

but I don't feel that way.

It's not only Spain fighting here, is it?

It's Germany and Italy on one side and Russia on the other,

and the Spanish people right in the middle of it all.

The Nazis and fascists are just as much against democracy