The 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.

I 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.

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 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.

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.

I have to say 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 the Bhagavad Gita.

"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 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...

...6 million Jews, over 6 million Germans...

...3 million non-Jewish Poles...

...two and a half million Japanese, and one and a half 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.

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 Rhine/and.

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 Rhine/and...

...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 2800 brave Americans...

...snuck into Spain to battle the fascists...

...most joining the communist-backed Abraham Lincoln Brigade.

Almost 1000 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 peoples' 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 as much against democracy as they are against the communists.

They're using your country as a proving ground for their new war machine...

...their tanks and dive bombers and stuff like that...

...so they can get the jump on the democracies and knock off England and France...

...and my country before we get armed and ready to fight.

But Franco triumphed and the republic fell in the spring of 1939...

...burying not only over 100,000 republican soldiers and 5000 foreign volunteers...

...but the hopes and dreams of many progressives.

By 1939, Roosevelt told his cabinet that his policies in Spain had been a grave mistake...

...and warned that they all soon would pay the price.

But that policy convinced Stalin that the western powers had no real interest...

...in a collective action to slow the Nazi advance.

For years, the Soviet dictator had implored the west...

...to unite against Hitler and Mussolini, even joining The League of Nations in 1934.

But Soviet pleas were repeatedly ignored.

And then, in 1937, full-scale war erupted in China...

...as the powerful Japanese army captured city after city.

With Jiang Jieshi's nationalist forces fleeing in retreat...

...Japanese soldiers brutalized the citizens of Nanjing in December 1937...

...killing 200,000 to 300, 000 civilians and raping tens of thousands of women.

Japan soon controlled the east coast of China with its population of 200 million.

The international situation deteriorated further in 1938...

...with German annexation of Austria...

...and the Allies' capitulation to Hitler at Munich...

...dismembering Czechoslovakia and giving Germany the Czech Sudetenland.

British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain...

...infamously proclaimed that the settlement had brought peace in our time.

Nor did the U.S. and its allies officially do much...

...to help Germany's desperate Jewish community...

...when, in late 1938, an orgy of violence was let loose on Krista/inacht.

Rape and murder of the ancient Jewish population escalated.

As in Europe, the U.S.A. did little to help...

...only admitting approximately 200,000 Jews...

...between 1933 and 1945.

Emboldened, Hitler struck again in March '39...

...breaking his promise and invading the rest of Czechoslovakia.

Stalin recognized the truth. His country was facing its most deadly enemy alone.

He needed to buy time. And fearing a German-Polish alliance to attack the USSR...

...he shocked the west when he signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler...

...dividing Eastern Europe between them.

Here were the admitted arch-enemies...

...in a state of apparent friendship.

Stalin's primary concern was the security of his own nation.

In fact, the Soviet dictator had proposed the same alliance with Britain and France...

...but neither would accept Stalin's demand...

...to place Soviet troops on Polish soil as a way of blocking the Germans.

Less than two weeks after the pact was signed...

...Hitler invaded Poland from the west.

Britain and France, allied with Poland, finally stood up to Hitler and declared war.

Two weeks later, on September 17th, Stalin also invaded Poland.

The Soviets soon thereafter asserted control over the Baltic states...

...of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, and invaded Finland.

The world was at war once again.

World War II has begun.

In rapid succession, the invincible German army...

...conquered Denmark, Norway, Holland, and Belgium.

The French army of World War I, its younger generation decimated in that slaughter...