No Price Too High Essay, Research Paper

April 1st

Documentary: No Price Too High

Essay

By Golnar Mazaheripour

When I found out that I had to watch a six hour movie on World War II and then write an essay about it, let’s just say that I was less than thrilled? This essay was due the day after Easter Monday, and as you would know it, I procrastinated this essay until that Monday. So finally, I got the tape and I inserted it into the VCR and I thought to myself: “There has got to be a better way of spending my Easter Monday?” At that precise moment, I looked up at the screen to see a great battle going on at Vimmy Ridge where 100 000 French men and 30 000 British had died. Then came four Canadian divisions who risked their lives for the first time in a victorious massive launch attack at Vimmy Ridge in 1917 where 4000 died and 7000 were wounded. This event just happened to take place on Easter Monday? I then realized how selfish I had been. All these people who were probably around my age were in battles risking their lives at war and worrying about dying and I was worried about an essay that I have to write about them.

I was so intrigued by the movie that from then on that the six hours I was worried about wasting my time with just flew by. I had this belief beforehand that watching grass grow would be more interesting than a war. After watching that video, I realized that that war was a remarkable piece of history. In some ways I have to admit that I admire Hitler. He single-handedly assumed power over one nation and went out to conquer the world. If that kind of determination had been put towards good then the world might have been a better place.

My cognition of Hitler was very different before I saw this movie. I always thought that he was a cruel and senseless man. The way that Chamberlain described Hitler was very different than the perception I had of him. He was described as a man with kind eyes, sympathetic and good-hearted. But asking some people what their views about Hitler are, the answers are quite the opposite than of the former. I never knew that Chamberlain had so much respect for Hitler. When Chamberlain went to Germany, he admired the neatness of the German army. He loved the way Hitler was so organized. Chamberlain wished that Canada had an organized army like the one ruled in Germany. I had seen the movie Shindler’s List ahead of No Price Too High, that might have been one of the factors that accounted to my hated opinion of Hitler. In Shindler’s List, I saw the pain that Jewish people went through during world war II because of Hitler and his actions to attempt creating a society based on “racial purity” by means of using genocide. In that movie I also realized that not all Germans had the same opinion as Hitler. Various movies show the different perspectives of a war. A war is never black and white, it has a lot of gray.

Something about most documentaries on World War II disturb me. All the commotion was made on the loss and suffering that the Jewish people went through? What about the people in the United Soviet Socialist Republic? Approximately, 5 million Jews were killed. The human cost of the war fell heaviest on the USSR, for which the official total, military and civilian, is given as more than 20 million killed. The Allied military and civilian losses were 44 million; those of the Axis, 11 million. The military deaths on both sides in Europe numbered 19 million and in the war against Japan, 6 million. The U.S., which had no significant civilian losses, sustained 292,131 battle deaths and 115,187 deaths from other causes. The highest numbers of deaths, military and civilian, were as follows: USSR more than 13,000,000 military and 7,000,000 civilian; China 3,500,000 and 10,000,000; Germany 3,500,000 and 3,800,000; Poland 120,000 and 5,300,000; Japan 1,700,000 and 380,000; Yugoslavia 300,000 and 1,300,000; Romania 200,000 and 465,000; France 250,000 and 360,000; British Empire and Commonwealth 452,000 and 60,000; Italy 330,000 and 80,000; Hungary 120,000 and 280,000; and Czechoslovakia 10,000 and 330,000.

I found that the war was well portrayed in No Price Too High. There were lots of good aspects in the movie. For one, I liked the way the movie was all in black and white, it added character to the movie. I also liked how there were original clips of the war. It was nice in the way that each clip had an intermission with the historian telling his point of view. In the documentary, I noticed that Hitler was not a very tall or bulky man. That surprised me very much, with all that power that he had over everyone you would have expected someone in the range of a heavy weight champion. That just goes to show that the pen is mightier than the sword.

In conclusion, I have to say that the war was more enlightening than I had thought. This video helped me change my view of the war. I now see the war as having been an important piece of history as opposed to a couple of pointless years of people shooting each other. You could say that appearances can be deceiving. This documentary has got me to look further into the history of this war, it has really fascinated me in many ways.

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