Fall TV: The War

Ken Burns has done it again. "The War", a 14-hour PBS documentary airing over the next two weeks, is a unique, up-close-and-personal look at the world's most horrific global conflict.

Part I, aptly titled "A Necessary War," features the attack on Pearl Harbor. The episode contains the usual archival stills, footage, and crackling radio broadcasts, but it is the interviews with surviving veterans and their families that make it especially riveting. Future episodes focus on D-Day, the Battle of the Bulge, Iwo Jima, and the liberation of the concentration camps.

Punctuated by period music ranging from somber to jubilant, and superbly narrated by actor Keith David, the series begins by showcasing four slices of small-town Americana: Luverne, Minnesota; Waterbury, Connecticut; Mobile, Alabama; and Sacramento, California. David's furnishing the street addresses of each interviewee enhances the intimate atmosphere.

Daniel Inouye, an American of Japanese ancestry who later became a United States Senator in Hawaii, describes how his peaceful Sunday morning at Pearl Harbor was shattered by the appearance of hundreds of Japanese Zeroes overhead: "I knew what was happening. I thought that my world had just come to an end."

World War II America was starkly different from the America of 2007. One of the ways in which "The War" drives this home is with reminders of strictly enforced military secrecy unimaginable today. The attack on Pearl Harbor killed 2,403 Americans and severely crippled the US Navy, but the War Department kept details of the destruction hidden from the public for years in order to minimize demoralization. The full extent of the Japanese routing of Americans throughout the Pacific until the summer of 1942 was also withheld.

"The War" creatively explores racial bigotry. The rabid anti-Semitism of Adolf Hitler and Japanese atrocities against the Chinese are starkly depicted while America's own problems with ethnicity are plumbed.

David talks about John Gray, a young black man from Mobile: "He would soon be asked to fight a war for freedom for a country whose definition of freedom didn't include him." With a few notable exceptions, blacks in the service were relegated to menial positions, and there was near-universal segregation. Blood supplies were kept separate. Yet back home, the "Black Bears", a negro baseball team, played a double header in a packed stadium to raise $100,000 in war bonds.

A Japanese-American woman recalls the social climate in the US shortly after Pearl Harbor: "For the first time in my life, I was conscious of my ethnicity."

Says Inouye, a Medal of Honor recipient, of Japanese internment camps and 4C classification that kept most Japanese out of the military: "I considered myself a good American, but here I was considered an enemy."

Ray Leopold, a Jewish combat veteran, took Hitler's aggression personally but also realized that the threat went far beyond racial animus. "Hitler had to be stopped. Not only for the Jews, but for everyone in the world."

For Glenn Frazier, an infantryman who served under MacArthur, Pearl Harbor eliminated his religious qualms about war. The only things left of his friend after being hit by a Japanese Zero was the man's left foot and shoe. "I could see the pilot smiling," recalls Frazier. "After that, I had no problem killing Japanese. In fact, I started hunting them."

But there was another reason besides revenge that Americans went to war. For Sam Hynes, joining the Army was a way to escape the humdrum life of a small Minnestoa town. "It was melodramatic, exciting...like the movies. It was an opportunity to be more exciting than the kid you are."

But war is hell, and footage of the Battle of Guadalcanal vividly brings that point home. Sid Phillips, a Marine from Mobile, was among the force fighting on that island for weeks without support and few supplies. "We really felt expendable," notes Phillips. "The average Marine on Guadalcanal ran a fever, wore infested dungarees, loathed twilight, and wondered if the US Navy still existed." By the time the battle was over, Phillps had lost 25 pounds, was wearing rags, and was covered with sores.

Narrator David observes that the US mainland was never directly attacked, and its citizens did not suffer the horrors of foreign occupation as did those in Europe and Asia. But we came surprisingly close. One evening in January 1942, a German U-Boat surfaced off the coast of Manhattan. She sunk several American ships and then slithered off into the darkness. During the war, U-Boats sunk 25 tankers on the East Coast. Intones David: "For a time, the waters from Jacksonville, Florida to Galveston, Texas were considered the most dangerous in the world."

This series is a must-see, especially for those of us who have not served. From our comfortable 21st century vantage points, the level of sacrifice is almost unimaginable, and "The War" is probably the closest we'll ever come to appreciating it. Katharine Phillips, Sid's wife, talks about the death of her husband's uncle, a combat pilot: "When we lost Charlie, that made it very real for us. We started losing people in the neighborhood. Everyone started disappearing." An eerie scene features color footage of small town USA interspersed with the hot, brutal jungles of Guadalcanal and bodies piled up on the snowy Russian Front while Bing Crosby's mellow baritone croons "White Christmas".

"The War" can be seen on PBS Sunday through Thursday evenings this week and Sunday through Tuesday next week. Check local listings for times.