The War

This review is dedicated with love and respect to the memory of my dad, William Cauthen Williams (1915-2002), and all of the heroes of the greatest generation in our history.

When I think about my dad, I think about the times he shared with me how he became involved in World War II. He told me how, as a student at Mississippi State University, he heard of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on the radio in the library and how he decided to enlist in the Army as a result of the attack. As a youth I would see yearbooks and pictures of him and his military unit as they ventured throughout Germany and France in those years, and to this day I have a couple of pictures of him in Germany from 1945.

As the saying goes, everyone has a story to tell. While my dad is no longer around to share more of those stories with me, there are still some left today who share their tales of their involvements in World War II either on the front lines or back home. It’s been over 60 years since the end of the war, and as each day passes we lose more and more of those precious souls to time, at an average of a thousand a day, so it becomes more and more critical to preserve these stories for future generations before all of these survivors are lost to history. Filmmaker Ken Burns has accomplished such a task in “The War”, a 15-hour, seven-part documentary (currently running on PBS) that looks at the four darkest years of the United States’ involvement in World War II through the accounts of not only those involved in the war but also of the effects back home.

Burns, whose accomplishments include the PBS documentaries “Baseball”, “Jazz”, and the highly acclaimed groundbreaking “Civil War” series, spent six years with co-director and co-producer Lynn Novick researching and documenting the personal accounts of 50 such individuals from four different locales – Sacramento, California; Mobile, Alabama; Waterbury, Connecticut; and Luverne, Minnesota – and getting the right feel for what happened both at home and overseas. In the first chapter “A Necessary War”, lives across these towns and the nation are shattered on December 7, 1941 as the United States is thrust into the deadly conflict. In the second chapter “When Things Get Tough”, Americans mobilize for war, factories work around the clock, inexperienced soldiers learn how to fight, and thousands of U.S. airmen gamble their lives against deadly odds in a series of dangerous daylight bombing raids. The third chapter “A Deadly Calling” analyzes the shocking losses suffered at Tarawa, the stalling of Allied forces at Monte Cassino, and the failure of a risky landing at Anzio; while at home things begin to get ugly with racial violence and confrontations as a result of economic growth.

In the fourth chapter “Pride of Our Nation”, over 1.5 million Allied troops participate in the incredible D-Day surge at Normandy, only to become bogged down in the Norman hedges for weeks at a time. Saipan proves to be one of the deadliest Pacific battles to date, while back home concerned citizens begin receiving telegrams from the War Department at an alarming rate. In the fifth chapter “Fubar”, over several different war fronts, American and Allied troops learn the deadly truth that sometimes mistakes happen in war, while on the island of Peleliu the Marines fight one of the bloodiest and most unnecessary battles of the war. In the sixth chapter “The Ghost Front” Americans are shocked at Adolf Hitler’s massive counterattack, but by the spring of 1945 they have the German and Russian forces on the run. Iwo Jima is secured, and American bombers begin their air assault on Japan. In the final chapter “A World without War”, President Franklin Roosevelt passes away, Germany surrenders, American soldiers and sailors endure the Okinawa attack, and Japan ultimately surrenders after American bomber pilots unleash the most terrifying weapon of destruction upon them. With the war now over, millions of military forces return home and attempt to learn to live without war.

In “The War”, Burns pulls no punches. He mixes up documentary footage from the various battles and war fronts with personal stories of the soldiers involved in each conflict and of those back home affected by war in both great and small ways. World War II was a deadly conflict that affected millions on every continent, and just when it seemed hopeless at times, things bounced back for the U.S. military. You see the atrocities perpetrated by the enemies on both military forces and innocent civilians in all its horror and intensity. If you think any slasher flick out there could exceed what actually happened 60-65 years ago, this documentary will make you re-think your definition of what horror and death is truly like. It is a sobering, somber, stark, and touching reminder of where we were as a nation back in the 1940’s and a stark parallel to where we are now in the 21st century. The original music provided by Wynton Marsalis and Norah Jones, coupled with era pieces from Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, and Nat “King” Cole, provide the beautiful and longing musical backdrop for this spectacular program.

Burns also looks at two very overlooked aspects of the war that many Americans of this generation are typically unaware of: the African-American aspect, which experienced further racism and neglect (seen in films like “A Soldier’s Story”), and the Japanese-American aspect, which saw many American-born citizens of Japanese heritage impounded and imprisoned in a labor camp in Rohwer, Arkansas. As the saying goes, those who will not learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat it.

However, as with all documentaries, there is some obvious material left out. Instead of the all-encompassing documentary of a world at war and its beginnings in 1939, the focus is on the effects of the war on the small American towns profiled and the firsthand accounts from those veterans involved during America’s four-year involvement. Furthermore, Burns had received a number of concerns that the Latin American experience had not been adequately profiled, which forced him to include an additional 28 minutes of footage and stories from the Latin perspective. This footage, while a nice addition, feels a bit shoehorned into and distracted from an otherwise outstanding documentary film.

PBS Home Video and Paramount Home Video have issued “The War” in a stunning six-disc collection that takes advantage of the DVD format and brings the horrors and heroism of World War II to the viewer in a fresh and yet personal way. This in itself is a first, at least in my opinion, releasing the DVD before the TV premiere (if there’s been any other disc that can lay claim to it, I certainly don’t know about it). Each chapter of the 15-hour film is presented in its original 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen format and in your choice of English Dolby 5.1 digital or 2.0 surround tracks, with optional English subtitles. Each chapter is presented on its own individual disc, with Disc Two containing the second and third chapters. To watch this series is to step back in time to what our nation endured as a whole, and what entire families and communities would hear and endure. Their generation didn’t have the benefit of 24-hour news channels or the Internet to inform them of the latest reports; all they had were the radio and movie newsreels, so the wait for any word from the government was just as strenuous and painful as it was a century before during the Civil War. The sound and images fully engross you in this horror and stress, more than any visually graphic movie of today’s time. While some of the actual war footage is referenced from the best possible existing sources, the soundtracks are newly remixed in 5.1 digital sound with an intensity similar to the opening Normandy reenactment in “Saving Private Ryan”.

In addition, PBS and Paramount have included a nice collection of supplements to “The War” that further expand upon the viewing experience. First off we have audio commentaries from Ken Burns and Lynn Novick on Discs 1 and 3, which further analyze the making of the documentary, the “less is more” approach to the storytelling, and the horrors of the war that everyone endured in the 1940’s. The only problem with the audio commentaries is that by listening to these commentaries, you know what’s coming up in later installments. My advice is to listen to these commentaries after you’ve watched the documentary in its entirety.

On Disc 1 there is a 36-minute feature entitled “Making ‘The War’”, which attempts to answer the question of how necessary it was to chronicle these accounts. Burns mentions that at first he had no intention of pursuing another war documentary after “The Civil War”, but he kept hearing story after story from people of their fathers, mothers, siblings, and relatives and their participation in World War II. The question that looms over this feature, as well as the entire documentary, is a sobering one: why do 18-year-olds go to war? This is what Burns and Novick attempt to answer in both “The War” and this production feature. Also on Disc 1 we have a photo gallery of 28 different pictures from 1941-1945 showing various aspects of the war and its effect back home, as well as text biographies of those participants profiled in the documentary.

On Disc 6 we have a 24-minute collection of deleted scenes cut from the documentary. These deleted scenes, culled from a work print version of the documentary, looks at additional aspects of World War II from the news correspondents’ points of view, among them Andy Rooney (of “60 Minutes” fame); further insights from the war veterans interviewed for the documentary, including thoughts on sacrifice, attacks on Aachen and Metz, and battling through the hedgerows in Normandy, among others; and other tales to be told. In addition, on Disc 6 we have 55 minutes of additional, uncensored interviews with many of the participants profiled, also culled from a work print version of the documentary. Both the deleted scenes and the additional documentary could easily form another chapter for this program. Kudos to PBS Video for including this insightful information!

Finally, because this is a historical documentary, PBS and Ken Burns have prepared a list of educational resources for utilizing this DVD set in the classroom. This includes a brief video from Burns, who offers his thoughts on using “The War” and the many PBS resources as tools in the classroom; a collection of still photographs and their credited sources; PDF access to episode descriptions and further comments from Burns and Novick; information on the Veterans History Project; and PBS web links to lesson plans and instructional curriculum. As a former high school teacher, had this came out a decade before, I would have referenced those online sources and materials exhaustively. References to these educational resources can be found on Discs 1 and 6 of the set.

I highly and unquestionably recommend “The War” as essential viewing for all families, not only for the production and storytelling qualities Ken Burns brings to the documentary, but also for the way it paints a portrait of Americana and the world in the 1940’s. It’s a chilling parallel into our times today and what we can and may possibly face if we don’t get our act together. While this is certainly intended for mature audiences because of the violence, profanity, and disturbing content, it is nonetheless as educational a chronicle as “Schindler’s List” or the Naudet brothers’ 9/11 documentary, and it is must viewing for all students in high schools and colleges everywhere. While my wife doesn’t get into material like this, it’s important for our daughters and future generations to learn from the past. I only wish my dad were alive to share more accounts from this period in his life as the participants do here. Very seldom does it get better than this.