Here's a further review from today's New York Times.
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Letting World War II Unfold as a Story From the Heart, Not the Maps
During the closing months of World War II, Eric Sevareid, the CBS radio correspondent, felt dismayed at how inadequate his broadcasts had been in conveying the experience of war. He had parachuted into Burma, witnessed the fall and then the liberation of France and seen much of battle. But he was a journalist, he said, and that was a limitation: “Only the soldier really lives the war.”
“War happens,” he explained, “inside a man.”
And that is mostly where Ken Burns decides to look for it in his 15-hour documentary about the Second World War, “The War,” directed with Lynn Novick, now being broadcast on PBS (and to be released on DVD tomorrow). Invoking Mr. Sevareid, Mr. Burns says that his documentary — an “epic poem,” he has called it — is “created in that spirit.” Nearly 50 men and women talk about their wartime experiences, their testimonies punctuated by historical footage and somber narration.
The intention, apparently, was to see the war anew, to see it not from the vistas of generals’ maps and geopolitics, not from the perspective given by the doctrines of nations and the lures of ideologies, not even from the war’s context in history. The intention was to view it from the experiences of those who fought in it and those who knew them. If war happens “inside a man,” Mr. Burns wants to bring it home.
But what a strange history results from this approach, and what a strange effect it creates! Some things we get to know very well, some not at all. We learn about human emotions and suffering, about death and bravery. Other matters, though, retreat to the background, and that unfortunately makes a tremendous difference in understanding war — particularly this war.
The overall approach is not a novelty. While historians have traditionally soared above the battlefield with their accounts, novelists have plunged into its midst, imagining (or recalling) the feelings of the foxhole, dialogue under fire, dramas of loss and pain.
But in recent decades historians have begun to write not just from within but ‘’from below”: history as experienced by infantry not generals, by citizens not rulers. This approach often has a political edge, meant to give voice to those once shunted aside.
This can lead to expanded perspectives. Mr. Burns, for example, incorporates the experiences of Japanese-Americans in internment camps and in a segregated military unit. There is also an impassioned story told by the black historian John Hope Franklin, who, when he went to enlist, was told he would be more valuable if a different color.
But Mr. Burns is not interested in this style of history primarily for its ideology. He is interested in it for its sentiment, because it seems to him to be most real, because it embraces feeling. The documentary (as well as its companion book, “The War: An Intimate History, 1941-1945,” written by Mr. Burns and Geoffrey C. Ward) even begins with the intonation, “The greatest cataclysm in history grew out of ancient and ordinary human emotions: anger and arrogance and bigotry, victimhood and the lust for power.”
Human emotions abound here, and however fractured the narrative, some extraordinary war stories take shape. One soldier, Glenn Frazier, sure of his imminent death and worried that his parents might never learn his anonymous fate, threw his dog tags into a mass grave where they might be found. And so they were. His family was informed of his death. But after experiencing the jungles of Bataan, the notorious “death march” and years of near-starvation in a Japanese prison camp, the soldier returned home as if in resurrection.
In a rare story with larger implications, another soldier, Ray Leopold, captured a young German soldier during the Battle of the Bulge who spoke almost perfect, unaccented English. The prisoner not only knew of Mr. Leopold’s town of Waterbury, Conn., but could also name a stream that ran by it. “I was in training for the administration,” the prisoner explained, “the administration of the territories.” Hitler was planning an American occupation.
But the stories become miscellaneous, a montage of scenes: the home front, the battle front, the love lives, the tragedies, the war within, history from below. So intent is Mr. Burns on seeming to show “typical” soldiers that he never informs us that some of the central interviewees are in fact distinguished academics and writers. And so intent is he on emphasizing private experience over public considerations that he seems to have filtered out other kinds of accounts.
The musical soundtrack can also bluntly signal an attitude, sometimes to the point of cliché. Sparkling selections from Count Basie and Benny Goodman overlay accounts of somber events, as if rebuking the carnage for its crudity. Bing Crosby sings “White Christmas” over a montage showing the war’s brutality during the winter of 1942-3.
So we learn, again and again, about the trauma of war, about the maggots that a doctor used to devour the infected bone matter from a soldier’s arm, of the chilling battle-weariness that set in among soldiers, or how even the moans of an injured comrade could, in extremes of fear and shock, spur callous wishes for his death. We learn about the pain of parents losing their loving sons, of the strategies for dealing with starvation, of the numbing numbers of dead and injured.
Yet for all the particularity, these are the generic facts of war, not very different from those chronicled by Homer almost 3,000 years ago. They tell us nothing about why this fighting was going on; they give us little information to judge or understand it.
There are efforts to show the barbarity of the two empires the Allies faced. The war was necessary, we are told again and again. But these assertions are isolated, lacking emotional force and interpretive detail, as are other facts — even about the Nazi death camps. We learn little about our Allies or about England’s near-death experience, or even about our enemies. Understanding more history from above would have made the suffering more profound and more noble as well, since it would have been made palpable that something was being fought for, that there was an unavoidable purpose beyond the pain.
Instead, necessity is eclipsed by trauma, history by emotion. We learn much about the extraordinary sacrifices and experiences of these soldiers. But the elegiac song “American Anthem” recurs throughout the film and declares, “America, America, I gave my best to you” — an assertion of private sacrifice, not public purpose.
By selectively telling history from below, by highlighting emotion and sketching everything else, Mr. Burns privatizes war. He takes one of the most necessary wars ever fought and leaves viewers wondering whether any public goal can be worth its price. Occasionally, we learn that during the war the government kept details about loss or film footage of suffering secret, out of fear that they would shake public purpose; here, such details and footage seem to serve that very effect. In interviews, Mr. Burns has suggested that his views of today’s American warfare affected his portrayal of the Second World War. Here too, though, he is letting feelings eclipse history.
“The greatest sense I have about the war,” says one character at its end, is “relief we wouldn’t have to do any of that stuff again.” That is the teaching of this history from below. History from above tells us that unfortunately and terribly, we will.
