danajohnhill.org

I wrote a bit yesterday about Ken Burns’ latest film broadcast on PBS, and how it made me feel, but I thought I’d write now about my thoughts on the film itself.

The War probably does accomplish what it set out to achieve, namely offer the viewer a sense of what life in America was like between 1941 and 1945, when millions of men left their homes for far off places most had never heard of, and the lives of every other person in this country were disrupted in a most profound way. It isn’t easy to forget the images of heroic men storming Omaha Beach under a hail of gunfire, or raising the flag on Iwo Jima; it is, perhaps, easier for those of us too young to have endured the daily realities of life during the Second World War to forget how something as mundane as an evening meal or routine as travel were so radically affected. The War describes all of this well.

But the filmmakers chose to concentrate exclusively on the experiences of citizens from four cities only: Mobile, Alabama; Sacramento, California; Waterbury, Connecticut; and Luverne, Minnesota. In so doing they obviously missed out on countless stories. They no doubt realized that any attempt at a comprehensive telling of the American experience of World War II would be impossible for a film, even one over 14 hours in length. (For something like that you’ll have to turn to the Library of Congress’s Veterans History Project.) Better to give an impression, I suppose, with a fair warning that the picture was not aspiring to be a complete telling of the story of the war, or even close to it. For a more international approach, and one which includes interviews with historians as well as combatants, see The World at War.

Still, the selection of towns and individual interviewees proved remarkable for their breadth of experience: men from these four cities were everywhere from Pearl Harbor to Bataan to D-Day to the USS Indianapolis as it carried “Little Boy” to Tinian Island en route to Hiroshima. And many of their stories were poignant. The one that most touched me was of an American POW in Japan, who had endured years of harsh treatment and near starvation with little expectation he’d live to see home again. His parents in the States had long before received a telegram in which he was declared dead. He did not know this, however, and when he was liberated on VJ Day and sent by ship to San Francisco where he made a telephone call to his house in Alabama, his mother fainted upon hearing his voice. And there were plenty of heartbreaking tales of servicemen who, after being introduced to viewers with family photographs and interviews with relatives, were followed from battle to battle, and made real with excerpts of letters home to parents or sweethearts, and whose deaths were revealed in matter-of-fact telegrams.

And, as has been the case with every Ken Burns film, the soundtrack of The War is apt, with a profoundly beautiful song called “American Anthem” this series’ equivalent of The Civil War’s “Ashokan Farewell”. It is crushingly nostalgic. Here is the first verse:

Ultimately, The War demonstrates something I hold to be a truth: there is nothing more dramatic than real life.