the war

October 15, 2007  

When Ken Burns', The War, first aired on public television last month it became one of three great television documentaries about World War II. Each, in the context of its own time, tells the story of a war that claimed more than 60 million lives in a unique way. Together they will continue to provide a broad perspective of that epic conflict for generations to come. If you watched and enjoyed The War and you haven’t seen the other two, you should.

As a 9-year-old in St Louis, Missouri, I remember watching the first popular documentary series on World War II, the 26 episode Victory at Sea series which aired between October 1952 and May 1953. I watched it with my family on our first television set, a 13-inch black and white Philco. The series won an Emmy in 1954 as Best Public Affairs Program. It established historic documentaries as a viable television genre. When it first aired, NBC thought it so important they aired it with no commercial interruptions.

With Richard Rogers’ compelling musical score, Victory at Sea provided a heroic and patriotic perspective of naval warfare during World War II. Produced so soon after the end of the war, and in the final months of the Korean War, it was neither objective nor historically accurate. More in the genre of the “propaganda” films intended to rally support for the troops during World War II, it gave Americans old enough to remember it an opportunity to look back on what they so recently had lived through. At the onset of the Cold War, it reinforced America’s sense that standing up to the forces of tyranny, even at great cost, is worth the sacrifice.

For young 9-year-olds like me, it helped inculcate a deep sense of patriotism and love of country. In the context of the many patriotic war movies coming out of Hollywood in the 1950s, it drew a romantic and adventurous picture of military service. I watched different episodes of the series many times in reruns over the years. I still enjoy listening to Rogers’ great musical score.

The enduring legacy of Victory at Sea is not that it’s great history, but that it reveals how the generation that fought the war saw itself.

The more comprehensive 26-episode Thames Television (UK) documentary, The World at War, somberly narrated by Laurence Oliver first aired in 1973. Considered by many to be the definitive television history of World War II, it included events leading up to and following the war.

What made the series stand out were its interviews with leaders of the Allied and Axis campaigns and other well-known participants on both sides. Among them were Albert Speer, Karl Dönitz, Curtis LeMay, Lord Mountbatten, Alger Hiss, Japanese Foreign Ministry official Toshikazu Kase, Enola Gay pilot Paul Tibbets, Anthony Eden, Hitler’s personal secretary Traudl Junge, and Heinrich Himmler’s adjutant Karl Wolff. In 2000, the British Film Institute voted it number 19 in its list of the 100 Greatest British Television Programs.

Produced before the release in 1975 of classified information about the systematic breaking of German and Japanese codes and the great deception operations of the war, it nevertheless stands the test of time as a great documentary. For the missing information you only have to read Anthony Cave Brown’s 1975 landmark work on World War II deception, Bodyguard of Lies.

For me and other Americans in the final years of the Vietnam War, it provided a haunting comparison. Back from my second tour in Vietnam , with first-hand knowledge of war, as I watched it, I carefully studied the faces of men in combat and recognized the same fears and emotions I’d seen on the faces of my comrades in Vietnam. In talking to World War II, Korean War, Gulf War, and Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans over the years, I’ve learned how similar those fears and emotions are.

Like Burns’ The Civil War series, The War focuses principally on everyday people rather than generals and their grand strategies, small-town veterans and their families from Waterbury, Connecticut; Sacramento, California; Mobile, Alabama; and Luverne, Minnesota. Burns uses their heroism and sacrifices to tell personal stories of the war’s death and destruction in his own unique style.

Burns candidly acknowledges the great mistakes of World War II that cost thousands of unnecessary American deaths. Indeed, Burns calls World War II America’s “worst war” because of the war’s unprecedented death and destruction. Nevertheless, he does this without diminishing America or delivering a political anti-war message. He suggests that everyone should be anti-war till there is no better choice.

Personal experiences told to us directly by those who lived them, coupled with Burns skillful use of still photography and film, allow us to better understand what everyday Americans went through and how the war affected America .

It’s too soon to know if The War will win any awards. In today’s politically divided atmosphere and with the nation engaged in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, giving it an award may not be the politically correct thing to do.

But as Gary Kamiya, writing on Salon.com puts it, “ .  .  . this magnificent 15-hour series will stand as one of the most extraordinary accounts of war ever made. Panoramic in its sweep, unflinching in its openness to all the faces of war, crafted with rare intelligence and sensitivity, 'The War' is an epic achievement."

American World War II veterans die at the rate of a thousand a day. When they all have passed on, great documentaries like Victory at Sea, The World at War, and The War will remind future generations of their bravery and sacrifices and how they made the world a better place.