In this episode of the ProvCast, Mark Melton and Marc LiVecche bring back the “Dark Ops,” Providence’s podcast movie reviews. They discuss the Netflix series The Liberator, which came out on Veterans Day last month. It’s an animated series with four episodes and is based on a book by Alex Kershaw. The miniseries tells the story of Felix Sparks and the 157th Infantry Regiment as they campaign in Italy before landing in Provence, France, and then into Germany. In total, Sparks served 511 days in combat, and after World War II became a Brigadier General and the Ground Commander for the Colorado Army Guard. He also served on the Colorado Supreme Court.

Amongst other topics, Melton and LiVecche cover whether the animation helps or hurts the storytelling, how the miniseries covers racism, the history behind the Battle of Aschaffenburg and the Dachau massacre, and what moral courage looks like. They conclude by explaining why movies and shows about the Second World War are still important.

Rough Transcript

Mark Melton  

Welcome back to the Foreign Policy ProvCast. My name is Mark Melton. I am the managing editor for Providence. And today we are bringing back the Dark Ops Provcast. Back in the day we did a -I don’t know how many episodes we did- but we did some movie reviews. I think the last one I really remember is Dunkirk. 

Marc LiVecche  

Oh… we didn’t do enough. 

Mark Melton  

Yeah, so we’re bringing it back. The movie reviews seem to do pretty well on the website. So I thought that some listeners might like to hear some more of those. And so today I am speaking with Marc LiVecche, who loves war movies, and today we’re going to talk about The Liberator which is a Netflix series that came out on Veteran’s Day last month. 

It’s an animated miniseries with four episodes and is based on a book by Alex Kershaw. Jeb Stuart, who is known for writing the screenplays of Diehard and The Fugitive, created and wrote this series. So The Liberator tells this story about Felix Sparks as they campaign in Italy during World War Two, before they go into Provence, France, and then into Germany. In total Sparks served 511 days in combat. And after World War Two, he became a Brigadier general, and the Ground Commander for the Colorado Army Guard. He also served on the Colorado Supreme Court. So after that long introduction, LiVecche, thank you so much for joining us today. 

Marc LiVecche  

Hey, thrilled to be here, thrilled to be back. 

Mark Melton  

For those listeners who don’t already know, Mark LiVecche was the original managing editor for Providence and now is an executive editor. And he is at the Stockdale Center at the US Navy War College. Is that right? 

Marc LiVecche  

Naval War College, yeah. Same branch, so that’s it. 

Mark Melton  

So LiVecche, why did you pick this animated film for the Dark Ops?

Marc LiVecche  

It’s a great story. So, you’ve already alluded it’s a story of Felix Sparks, primarily. But more than that, both the book -which I admit to only having skimmed in preparation for this- but both the book and especially the miniseries focuses not just on Felix Sparks, but the the role he played in leading an incredibly diverse infantry division made up of Mexicans and Native Americans and cowboys and folks who back home, wouldn’t necessarily drink together. But as you’ve said, for 511 days, they fought and they bled, and they served together, helping to bring liberation to Europe. So, it’s an extraordinary story. That’s the primary reason. And this love I have for war stories, it’s, you know, it’s because they’re extraordinary human tales of courage and cowardice, and good and evil and all sorts of other things. And I find them incredibly captivating.

Mark Melton  

And what do you think about the fact that it was animated? Do you think that helps? Do you think that hurts the mini-series?

Marc LiVecche  

I suspect it’s not gonna hurt it. You know, I mean possibly. Like, I think maybe my father, he wouldn’t watch it… he would have watched it otherwise. But I sort of don’t believe that. I think, in aggregate, it may attract people who might be intrigued either by the new technologies… because it’s a weird animation, right? I mean you look at certain scenes, especially landscapes, and it’s hard to tell in certain moments, whether or not you know, what you’re watching is live action or animation. I think it’s an intriguing look, it’s a beautiful look. It gives it a slightly bizarre graphic novel look to it, which I suppose again on balance, I think that might serve it well. I suppose at various points, I was worried that it was giving it an artificiality which I don’t think bears out in the end. I think you know, it works. It’s not an especially bloody animated film so I thought maybe they did this to try to tone down the graphic violence but that didn’t seem to be the the idea. I’m really not sure what to think of it. I don’t know if it’s just pandering to people as young as you. Do you feel pandered to Melton? What do you think? 

Mark Melton  

Well, I don’t know if I feel pandered. It reminded me of some anime that an old roommate forced me to watch way back in my college days, which it wasn’t my first choice to watch. But honestly, it wasn’t a bad series. It was a very captivating tale. And yeah, it’s a different medium. And it’s probably not my first choice, I would want to go back and watch it. But my understanding, so looking at the article here about it, it says that it was the first ever produced in this type of hybrid animation which used CGI technology and live action performance. I think just the art of it, the trying to create this new type of medium is… it’s an interesting first step and I’ll be intrigued to see if it’s used again later and how it’s improved upon. 

Marc LiVecche  

Yeah, sure, I could go with it. 

Mark Melton  

I’m not sure how other people… I know I watched it with some people who didn’t appreciate that aspect as much, but, you know, c’est la vie. 

Marc LiVecche  

Right. I suppose the criticism that I would expect to hear -I don’t know that I have- is that it’s somehow given the story and the content of that story… it’s somehow disrespectful. Like, why are you goofing around with new art forms or anime when you should be telling a, you know, incredibly sobering story? I don’t buy that, but I could see that critique being made.

Mark Melton  

And even some of the anime that I saw, like, it can be a very sobering tale like it’s not made for children cartoon that you would expect in the US.

Marc LiVecche  

Yeah, correct. I remember you raised the question of anime. There’s a Japanese anime called Grave of the Fireflies. Or something close to that. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen this. And it is, in that particular story, you can imagine why the anime actually serves the story because the story is about a pair of Japanese children, brother and a sister who lose their entire family in a firebombing of their city in the dying days of World War Two. And the rest of the story is more or less a chronicle of their slow death. It is a horrible movie. In many ways, it’s sort of like a Japanese version of The Road, where it’s just this scenario that is every parent’s worst nightmare of leaving your children abandoned in this world. And the anime is almost a mercy because you don’t have to watch the story unfolding on, you know, live children. And it allows a certain degree of distance while still effectively telling the story. So I don’t know if that’s going on here. But here it’s a little bit more, less horrific a tale I suppose.

Mark Melton  

And also, just the nature of like Netflix, where Netflix can really target a particular small audience who would really love that type of medium and genre. Whereas if you put this on to NBC for four weeks, that’s not going to probably… it’s probably not for a wide general audience. 

Marc LiVecche  

Right. No, I agree. Part of the glory of Netflix. You know, when they do things well, or even Amazon, any of these streaming services that can do short miniseries, just fantastic. Golden age of television in some ways.

Mark Melton  

So, it’s kind of get into the story a little bit. One of the things you just mentioned earlier was the fact that this emphasis on the Native and Mexican Americans and their story of the fighting. And one of the things I thought, you know, I’m not very familiar with those stories. What was it? Was it Codetalkers with Nicolas Cage a few years ago?

Marc LiVecche  

Windtalkers maybe, but yeah.

Mark Melton  

Right, Windtalkers. And so other than that, I haven’t seen those stories told a lot. I think it was in the first episode, kind of spoilers here, but when there’s a German interrogator talking to one of the soldiers, and he’s bringing up this, ‘what-about-ism’ argument about, you know, ‘yes, Nazi Germany is bad, but America isn’t that great either.’ And it kind of brings up the racism problems. And I’ve seen this motif play out in a few other movies. And I just finished reading a book called A Gentleman in Moscow where there’s a scene with this too. And so, to kind of talk about A Gentleman Moscow for just a couple seconds: like, as the Russian Revolution was over and this transition from kind of the aristocrat character moving into being more of a commoner, and he is training and talking to a Soviet official… and the Soviet official kind of brings up the same argument about ‘yes, Soviet Union isn’t good but look at all the problems that America has in the racism.’ But in that story the Soviet official is talking about how… they’re looking at movies and he’s pointing out this like film noir and he is baffled that the Americans would allow this film noir, which shows the depravity of mankind and the corruption in American government. And he’s like, ‘I don’t understand why they would allow government… why the government would allow this to happen, because they’re undermining their own ability to govern.’

So, his view was like, in order for the state to govern, they have to silence the opposition. And he kind of forgets the United States has strength because we are able to look at our past and we are able to critique it, and that produces a stability that will outlast the Soviets, that will outlast the Fascists. And so, in that first scene, or in one of those earlier scenes with the interrogation, as they’re bringing up this ‘what-about-ism,’ I think it brought up an interesting contrast that kind of shows both like the problems of race in America while at the same time -because we can talk about it- I think should offer some hope for the future. What are your thoughts on some of that?

Marc LiVecche  

Yeah, I mean, I think that’s right. I think America is constantly attempting to atone for its own shortcomings. You know, we don’t live up to ourselves. And, you know, you can say, as a Christian, we don’t live up to godly standards, all that. That’s fine and true. But America is also cognizant that we don’t live up to our own ideals. And you know, it’s never good to be a hypocrite. But what one of the virtues of being a hypocrite is at least you have some values that you have said, ‘these we hold dear and these we aspire to. And I don’t live up to them, but we try to.’ Yeah, the ‘what-about-ism’ from an SS officer is something that I think most Americans can endure, I think we can prevail over that.

Mark Melton  

And another thing I appreciate in this movie is how it shows battles that are not normally shown on American movies. It feels like most American movies about World War Two will focus on D-Day, Normandy, focus on Iwo Jima, and some of those other, you know, similar battles: Pearl Harbor. But they don’t really talk about the campaign in Italy or southern France, and especially like the Battle of Anzio. Like I wasn’t, you know, roughly familiar, but it was interesting to kind of like after seeing this and going and doing some more research and reading on it. So why don’t you think that we show these types of battles more?

Marc LiVecche  

It’s a good question. I mean in a certain way, those are, you know, those are the… you know, if you’re watching a musical, they’re the set piece, you know, the curtain dropper song. You know, that’s Normandy, these are the major battles, as you say Iwo Jima. The 45th Infantry Division really didn’t participate, arguably, in any sort of set piece of World War Two. They invaded Sicily. They were in Salerno. Who knows about either of those battles, except experts or, you know, devotees? Anzio, as you say, many more people know about Anzio, because it was so horrific. It was an incredibly costly battle that, you know, could have gone in a couple of different directions, some of them far more efficient, and far more effective than what actually transpired, due to possibly the fog of war, but just some boneheaded decisions that were made.

But it was, you know, for a while, it was reminiscent of World War One with people entrenched and essentially the stalemate. So, you know, on the one hand, you could imagine, ‘well, you know, the entrenched stalemate or, you know, dropping out of a landing vehicle and running across a bomb strewn beach and pushing the Nazis off the shoreline,’ you know, ‘which is going to be more exciting? Which is going to be more interesting to see filmed?’ You know, this was a battle of attrition that the 45th Infantry Division faced very often, you know. So after Anzio, they don’t get Normandy, they get operation Dragoon, which is, you know, on the southern bit of France off the Mediterranean and it’s an uncontested landing. You know, it’s not a great film moment. There are moments that they faced that I think are extraordinary. Aschaffenburg; we were talking about the battle that took place you know, in the snow swept Alps that would make for gripping cinema and I think are effective pieces in this miniseries. But these just aren’t the headliners. You know, this isn’t where the… you know, Italy was an important tactical element of the war, but it’s not as obviously important as something like Normandy, which you don’t need to be a military expert to understand why Normandy was magnificent, or critical. It’s the supporting role, I suppose, that the 45th Infantry Division and the Italian campaigns played in the war that puts it sort of on the back burner of most people’s imagination. 

Mark Melton  

And you… I know you wanted to say something about Aschaffenburg, if I’m pronouncing that correctly, which is I believe in the -was it the fourth episode or third episode? Third… fourth episode, that they talked about that battle. Do you want to talk about what happened there? 

Marc LiVecche  

Yeah, are there four episodes or five episodes total? 

Mark Melton  

There are four. I think there should be five, but they made four. I feel like the fifth episode could have been Dachau, which we’ll get to in a little bit here by itself. But I guess for production reasons they just did four.

Marc LiVecche  

They did four, okay. I thought this was part three but maybe it is the last one. Aschaffenburg, what I find striking about this is this was just supposed to be a, you know, a simple German city sort of in the middle of nowhere, that the 45th Division took. The Nazis that were still there ended up conscripting essentially the entire town and forcing every able bodied, and in some cases non able-bodied persons, to defend the town. And in the movie and bearing out a little bit, at least in the history as I understand it, the point of this seemed to be to use their own citizens, essentially as human shields. Those who didn’t fight, you know, were still holed up in homes from which the German SS troops would fire upon the Americans. Even in the film, one guy says, ‘wow, you know why are they doing this? Let’s just bypass the town. It’s of no real military importance.’ And Felix Sparks and his commanding officer recognize that they’re at a critical decision point here. And they could give in to what is sensible and simply bypass the town, and not do the hard work that’s going to be required to liberate it. Or not to liberate it, to defeat it. But if they do that, then they have just taught the Germans that conscripting civilians or using them as human shields is a great idea. And so, for every German city they come to in the future, they’re going to face the same tactics. And so, in the series, the commanding officer says, ‘so we’re going to have to do what they think we don’t, sort of have the strength to do.’ And somebody says, ‘what is that?’ And he says, ‘raze the town.’ And they don’t exactly raze the town historically, but they come quite close. 

And it’s brutal door to door fighting, street by street. They bring in heavy artillery. You know, they blow apart structures, point blank range. They decimate the town. And the frustrating bit of this is the town is destroyed and many civilians killed unnecessarily. Like this did not have to happen this way. But because we don’t always fight wars the way we want to, but very often because of the way our enemies want to, the town was destroyed. And I think it’s a good example of the kinds of horrific decisions that have to be made in battle, because our enemies have a say in how we fight. And as you know, and as a lot of the listeners probably know, I’m writing a book right now defending the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima. And again, there you find a scenario in which we have to fight a war, in large measure, in the way that our enemy demands that war be fought. Or we make other decisions that are just not in the interests of the common good. That particular battle is I think, just a good example of the kind of horrific decisions that have to be made in combat. 

Just because somebody knows, and Germany by this point knew that they had been defeated, that defeat does not always equal surrender. And some unnecessarily grim decisions are very often made and that episode, I think at numerous points, draws it out. And plus, it should be said that, because Aschaffenburg’s battle took place before the liberation of Dachau, one supposes that the experiences the 45th Division had in Aschaffenburg, in some ways, primed their behavior in Dachau. Lines can be drawn between the two.

Mark Melton  

And speaking about the liberation of Dachau, do you want to kind of explain to the listeners what happened there and in the coal yard incident?

Marc LiVecche  

Yes, for sure. We are now in, what I think in the book is listed as Felix Sparks’ 501st day in active combat, and they are ordered to a particular location. They don’t quite know what they’re going to find. But as they approach what looks to be some kind of prison or camp, the first thing they encounter are railroad lines and a series of rail cars. And these have been come to be called the death trains. And Felix Sparks, I think this comes out of the book, but the details are that they find in these cars approximately 3000 rotting corpses. You know, this alerts them that what they were about to experience on the other side of the camp walls is going to be unlike anything they had seen before. So, they enter the camp, and they are introduced to Hitler’s war against the Jews. And Dachau is not an annihilation camp, not on the lines of you know, a place like Treblinka. Or an annihilation work camp like Auschwitz-Birkenau. It wasn’t that massive. But this was one in the heart of Germany, where Jews and other political prisoners were killed. And in the history, some of this doesn’t occur, I think, in the mini-series… so they enter the camp, and they find the prisoners, you know, in horrific condition: emaciated, starving, wounded, all of that. They find piles of corpses everywhere. Because you will see in a moment there’s a coal yard there, but the coal yard is empty. And the reason the coal yard is empty, is the Nazis have used all the coal to incinerate corpses, and they’ve run out. So, toward the end of the war, they’re just piling the gassed or otherwise dead corpses just in piles throughout the compound. There’s also -this is described in detail in the book- Felix Sparks and some of his men, first they find the surrendered guards. And not all the guards attempt to surrender, successfully surrender. Some of them are shot. Some of them are shot because, you know, again, it’s a complex situation, you don’t know what’s happening. Others are shot because the Americans are now well and truly pissed. But most of them are taken prisoner. And then they empty out a couple of hospitals where there are convalescing, wounded SS troops. And all of these are moved into the coal yard, because there’s high walls there and they’re going to be easily contained, and Felix Sparks leaves them under guard. And he continues his tour of the camp. And in the book, the details continue: You know, there’s one grim scenario for instance, where they enter the crematoria, which were still operating. When they got there the crematoria of course, being the places where they would burn the bodies of the dead, there were bodies half consumed in the ovens. So, the purpose of the ovens was very plain. 

There’s one point where they find a kennel, and there is over 100 some odd German dogs: you know, camp dogs, guard dogs. And the Nazis of course, being sort of the bastards that they are, would relieve boredom by tying prisoners in the dog yard and sic the dogs on them in the dogs’ sort of specialty was castrating the prisoners with their teeth. And so, the Americans could see evidence of this. And so, all of these things now are boiling up inside and Felix Sparks hears gunfire, and the gunfire he knows is coming from the coal yard. And he presumably knows exactly what’s happening and he runs to the coal yard. 

Now back up a bit. Felix Sparks, part of his mission here was to apprehend Hitler. And I can’t remember the exact sequence of events but because he was one of the units designated with trying to track down Hitler, he had a sort of an entourage of photographers. Plus, the fact that I think they knew something was going on at Dachau, they wanted photographers there. For one reason or another, a lot of photographs were taken. And one particular photographer who was in the coal yard at the time the shooting began, had a movie camera, and was shooting what we call video, was filming. And what happened is that the Americans lined the German prisoners -SS prisoners specifically- up against the wall of the coal yard and opened fire. And Felix Sparks rushes in and dozens of them have already been gunned down. But he rushes in and we have on video of him running up to the machine gun, firing his own pistol in the air and holding up his hand and shouting for them to stop. And so, this is… and the shooting did stop. Words were exchanged and the massacre ended at that point. But historically, Felix Sparks and several other men were charged with war crimes for shooting unarmed prisoners. They never went to trial. General Patton eventually had the charges dismissed. But it’s, obviously it’s a controversy to this day.

Mark Melton  

And so, from a just war perspective, like that is clearly a violation.

Marc LiVecche  

Yep. It’s a violation. I mean, you know, international law, just war principles, the art of gentlemanliness, whatever sort of moral barometer you want to use. One is generally not expected or permitted to shoot prisoners. In an interesting video which maybe we should link to, Alex Kershaw -who as you noted is the author of the book, The Liberator, from which the miniseries is drawn- he’s quite equivocating. And he’s a Brit. He’s not an American. But he goes back and forth in his description of this event. At one moment he calls it a massacre, at another moment he calls it a shooting. At one moment, he says ‘the massacre, or more specifically, the shooting’ something to this effect, where there is a certain equivocation. Like you know, he’s not necessarily condoning what they did, but he understands it. He has no qualms about what wondering whether or not the SS deserved it. 

This isn’t Alex Kershaw, this is now me: You know, one would have to say, I think, that if after touring Dachau, you don’t… At least let’s put it this way, let’s put it the most sort of […] that I can: if after touring Dachau, you don’t want to gun down the Nazi guards, your motivation is not, you know, it’s not justice, it’s an extreme kind of mercy. Because any sort of Johnny-on-the-spot judgment would suggest to you that these people deserve to be executed. 

Now, of course, reason steps in and you realize you don’t know what these individual guards have done. You don’t know who directly is responsible. You don’t know if any of these particular guys are. Some of them it’s more clear than others. But the ones you know, convalescing in the hospital, do they have anything to do with this? Do they have an SS insignia on their jacket? If they do, then you could suggest ‘yes, they have everything to do with this.’ But obviously, in this situation it’s unwarranted. There’s no imminent danger. You know, there’s no just cause to gun these people down. That might come in a day after a trial. Yeah, on the spot it ought not to be done. But I think one can understand the motivations. What say you?

Mark Melton  

Well one of the things I thought about when I saw this was, you know, reading back in the day, oral history of Germany, and it talked about the way that the Soviets treated Germans as they were coming into Germany and the way that the Americans treated the Germans were, was quite different. Where the Americans and the British, my understanding is they were much more humane in their treatment of the Germans. And so, the Germans actually wanted to surrender to the Americans and not to the Soviets, because the Soviets… I mean, just horrendous things that were happening. 

Marc LiVecche  

Right.

Mark Melton  

And really shocking things. The first time I kind of understood just that bit of the story was reading that book, way back in the day. And so, it does seem that the American way of fighting should be one that errs on the side of caution on that front. And I think that is obviously better for the just war tradition and better for, I mean if your enemy is more likely to surrender to you because they know that they won’t be immediately gunned down, it’s a lot better than if they fight to the death.

Marc LiVecche  

Right. Now, of course World War Two, probably any battle in any war is strewn with examples where people really try to fudge those margins, right? Where you fight to the bitter end. And then just before your position is overrun, you throw down your weapon and hold up your hands. 

You know, some of that becomes even more complicated. And you see a lot of people who simply said, you know, ‘we’re not going to take those kinds of surrenders.’ There’s a point that some soldiers feel like you ought already to have surrendered, when you knew you were going to be overrun, you knew the position was lost. But instead, he took it to the nth degree, which another person would say, ‘well, that’s their job. That’s their duty.’ 

You know, as I said this comes hard on the heels… it’s the 501st day. So, they’ve seen it all. They’re exhausted. They’ve just come out of Aschaffenburg, which should have been a walkover. The Germans fought an unnecessarily brutal battle there, compelling the Americans to make horrific decisions. Now, they come to this place called Dachau. They’re not ready for this. You know, we got to remember, these aren’t, you know, seasoned adults. These are 17, 18, 19-year-old kids, by and large. Not all of them. But you know, the old men of these units are, you know, 23, 24 years old. You know, they recognize that when they’re in Dachau, one of the things Felix Sparks has noted, or had noted, is that by the time they get to Dachau and they look back, it’s something like Aschaffenburg. And they realize the unnecessary delay that the clearly defeated Germans imposed on the Americans, meant that every day, given that delay, more and more prisoners were dying in concentration camps just like this one. And again, it does not justify what they did to those guards, but it does, I think, make it understandable. 

But as you say, this is always understandable. That’s always the desire, you know, to exact retribution for real and perceived moral crimes. But it’s the rising above that instinctive desire for revenge, that does mark one army apart from another. You know, as you say that on the Soviet side, the Germans and the Soviets tended not to surrender to one another because they knew that that was a death sentence. In the Asian-Pacific War, you see very often much the same thing: not a lot of surrender. 

I think you know, it is you could say… this is a little bit late, but you could say that American character is still demonstrated in the sheer fact that these men were court martialed. And even though Patton sort of breezily dismissed the charges, the fact that they were court martialed at all, does still signal that even after an atrocity like this, that sort of American moral fiber remains. You see that after Abu Ghraib, you see that after you know, any of the violations that Americans do in the field. You know, there are charges often levied, the matter is disputed in court, and then judgments are rendered. And very often Americans go to jail, for doing things that contravene the laws of war.

Mark Melton  

To me, it also shows the necessity of having a professional military because of course, the United States had a very small military at the beginning of the war, and they had to suddenly ramp up after Pearl Harbor. So yeah, then you’re bringing in, like you said, 18-year-olds, into this type of situation, you know, when they’ve haven’t been trained that long. So yeah, it’s an interesting case study. And it’s something obviously, that will be discussed for a long time. 

Marc LiVecche  

Right. That’s right. There’s a line, in the story in the miniseries, there’s a fictitious character. I can’t remember his name, but he’s the Navajo Sergeant. 

Mark Melton  

Coldfoot? 

Marc LiVecche  

Yeah, I think that’s right. He’s an amalgamation of several real-life characters drawn together, at least for the film. But at one point, I think when they’re in Anzio on the via Anziate, when they’re holding the line against the Germans, one of the men says to him, ‘I’m,’ you know, ‘I’m afraid.’ Something like that. And the sergeant’s response is that fear is a reaction, courage, a decision. And that phrase, you could play with the terms. And you look at something like Dachau, and you can say that rage is a reaction and then something like moral courage, a decision. Right? 

That what those men experience in Dachau, I mean, for them not to want to shoot those Nazi guards, I think would have been inhuman. For them not to want to shoot those Nazi guards would have signaled some sort of, you know, almost moral callousness after what they had seen in Dachau. So, the rage is a reaction, and it’s even a reasonable and natural and expected and even desired reaction. But then human beings, moral human beings, overcome those instinctive reactions and make reasonable rational choices about them. So moral courage being that decision. And I think the movie bears that out. You know, there’s the father son scenario, which apparently really happened. You know, so there’s a father and a son who both enlist in the same fighting unit, which I sort of can’t imagine that that’s something I would want to do. 

Mark Melton  

It’d be kind of terrifying. 

Marc LiVecche  

It’d be horrifying.

Mark Melton  

Yeah, some of these stories, I’m like, oh, did that happen? And it’s like, oh, yeah, that happened.

Marc LiVecche  

I mean, I guess the only thing more horrible than that would be not being together. 

But there’s the scene where the son is beginning to break down. And I won’t give it away, but he has a humanizing moment where, you know, he goes from one moment wanting to see all the Germans -I was about to say the Nazis, not the Nazis- wants to see all the Germans, making no distinctions, killed. And then he has a humanizing moment where he’s able to ratchet that back. You see that kind of thing over and over. And I think the miniseries holds or tells those stories well.

Mark Melton  

So, what do you think about doing these movies about World War Two? What’s the benefit of going back to this same well that so many other movies have drawn upon? Or, you know, is there much more to be drawn upon in this era?

Marc LiVecche  

Yeah, I think there are. I mean, you know, a part for me is, you know, that I do a lot of work on moral injury. I think, you know, moral injury is doing something that goes against a deeply held moral conviction. So, you can bet that those men who gunned down those Nazis in that coal yard, suffered for it. Felix Sparks suffers for some of the things he did, even the things he did within the laws of war. 

But I think these stories are continually important, because they help set moral standards. They build a national mythology, and I don’t mean to say like a national fiction. But they mythologize the things that we’ve done in the past. They tell the stories that need to be told. It’s, you know, it’s Bilbo Baggins’ Red Book. These are stories that have to be told again and again because human beings have a capacity to forget. And you know, you look at these crybabies running around the streets of America, and not every issue is, you know, it’s a silly fixation… there’s real injustices out there, that some of them are rightly complaining about. But I think we’ve become soft, you know, which is crazy after 20 years of near constant military deployment. But so few Americans are involved in that, that I think we start miscalling things; we get terms like ‘love’ wrong, we get terms like ‘good,’ wrong, ‘evil,’ wrong. And ideally, you start telling stories, like the stories that emerge out of great human conflict and some of the old platitudes begin to, you know, begin to reconstitute. You learn what courage is, you learn what brotherhood is, what self-donation, other centeredness, what things like this are, what love is. So, I think these stories have to be told, because to not tell them is to forget. And we will forget them at our peril, because things like Dachau are every bit as bad as those men from the 45th Infantry Division saw them to be. And the rage that they felt at these things was rightly placed. 

And if we forget how to rage at the right things, then I think we’re truly in peril. And I look at, you know, I look at the national conversations or the national, you know, screams that are being thrown back and forth. And there’s an awful lot of people raging about an awful lot of wrong things, and not raging at the things they ought to be raging about. So I’m just an old fart who thinks these old stories need to be told again and again.

Mark Melton  

Well, LiVecche, thank you so much for talking with us about this series, and I’m looking forward to the next one. 

Marc LiVecche  

Is there another one? 

Mark Melton  

I don’t know. I mean, just the next whatever movie show…

Marc LiVecche  

Next Dark Ops.

Mark Melton  

Next Dark Ops. 

Marc LiVecche  

Woo! Me too. 

Mark Melton  

Alright.

Marc LiVecche  

Melton, thanks a lot.