Ken Burns Takes Us to "War"

Ken Burns is an amazing guy. I don't really know how much of the actual documentaries that he creates he actually puts together, but he must have just the right team with just the right access to just the right information. He manages to find footage of some of the most amazing things that you are ever likely to see.

It is a fact that we are losing our World War Two vets at an alarming rate. As such, it seems that there is an endless supply of documentaries and movies available about the war. Certainly, you probably think, you must have seen and learned everything you could about that war. It turns out, that isn't the case.

The way there are so many movies and documentaries, you would think that World War Two lasted for fifteen years or more. In fact, the part of World War Two that we usually think of, the part where you can imagine John Wayne striding across a beach, only lasted about four years. However, the war so completely changed an entire generation and turned the United States into a major world power that it seems like it was much longer.

Burns takes an interesting look at the war. He freely admits that so many thousands of people participated in the war, it is impossible to tell all of their stories. As such, he has chosen four cities or towns scattered throughout the united states and focused on them and the impacts the war had on them. There is Sacramento California, Luverne Minnesota, Waterbury Connecticut and Mobile Alabama. The documentary attempts to show how the war affected everyone, including those back home.

The 15-hour documentary will start airing October 3 on PBS. It is a remarkable thing. The footage he manages to find is just amazing. Some of it is in color. There are lots and lots and lots of shots of dead people too. Some of the footage is the most brutal that you are ever likely to see. This is the war as it really was and it gives you just some understanding of what happened and what these people went through.

The documentary opens by stating that World War Two was not the "great war" or the "good war" as it is often claimed to be. No war is good no matter what. No World War Two was a "necessary war." The fact that so many of the soldiers (in fact just about all of them) had no idea just how necessary the war was makes what they did all that more remarkable. Many of the soldiers would not see the true horrors of Nazi Germany until they started liberating the concentration camps.

We follow infantrymen. We follow pilots. We learn how they learned to live with the horrors that they lived with every day. I never thought much about those fighter pilots charged with strafing the columns of Germans caught on the open road. Certainly they could see their bullets tearing the bodies apart. Yet they did that, went to sleep, then did it again, day after day for years.

At the same time this documentary also looks at the Japanese citizens who were forced into internment camps here in the United States. Then how Japanese men were at first not allowed to join the Army. Then, when men were needed, that was changed and one of the best units in the Army was created solely of Japanese Americans.

There are heroes throughout this documentary. There are heroes at home and there are heroes on the front lines. Each of them saw things that they still live with every day. "The War" takes the time to talk about how these men came back to normal life and tried to deal with the things they had seen. Not all of them did so successfully.

One of the men in the documentary survived the Bataan Death March and then imprisonment in Japan itself. There is another who was on the USS Indianapolis and you know what happened there if you have ever seen the movie "Jaws." There are the black soldiers who came back to a country that was as divided as it was when they left. There is the soldier who was trained to be a sniper and then became a medic. There are at least three soldiers who saw, first hand, what happened to the Jews within Germany and say that anyone who says it never happened need only speak to them.

They all saw horrors beyond imagining. They, essentially, saved the world. Then they returned to their lives, managed to pick things up, carry on, and carry the country into and through the Cold War.

Ken Burns shows all of it. Just like he did with his Civil War series, he shows still pictures but he manages to mix in some moving pictures. He also has narration by celebrities like Tom Hanks and Samuel L. Jackson. You soon realize how this war managed to make poets out of so many, including those who fought within the trenches.

This is a documentary that should be seen. It should be shown in history classes. It should be memorized and learned. Then, anyone who sees it, should walk up and thank any veterans that they may know. If they don't they should look one up and then do it.