America in WWII - (Page 60) Ken Burns and The ‘Good’ War Ken Burns’s PBS series The War presents World War II as earth’s darkest hour —and the Americans who endured it as people whose stories we need to hear. by Tom Huntington N O ONE CAN SAY KEN BURNS LACKS AMBITION. He has a history of tackling big subjects in sweeping, multi-part documentaries like The Civil War, Jazz, and Baseball. His new film fits that mold. Premiering on PBS on September 23, The War is a seven-part epic on the biggest subject Burns has taken on yet: the global conflict he calls “the greatest cataclysm in human history.” That would be World War II, of course, and it is indeed a big topic, one perfectly suitable for a typically big Ken Burns documentary. But even after viewers have watched all 141/2 hours of the documentary, they shouldn’t expect to walk away with an encyclopedic knowledge of the war. “At the end of this you’ll know the essential parameters of the Second World War, and you’ll also know maybe 40 battles, but there will be a lot of stuff left out,” Burns says, talking on the phone from his home in New Hampshire. “I’ve described myself as an emotional archaeologist,” he says. “I’m not interested in excavating the dry dates and facts and events of the past. That’s boring. That’s homework. I’m interested in this kind of rich, powerful, emotional stew that comes out from understanding how similar those lives were to our own in terms of their hopes and their wishes and their dreams, their disappointments and tragedies.” When he was a boy, Burns fought the Nazis, like kids his age all over the country (he was born in 1953). “I dug trenches, much to my mother’s dismay, in my backyard in the ’50s, and killed Germans with my brother,” he says. When he embarked on The War, though, Burns lacked a deep knowledge of World War II. “I didn’t know that much about it,” he says. “In fact, all of my films—I have not tried to make a film about something I know, because there could be nothing more boring than somebody telling you what they already know, an essay or a lecture or a seminar.” Like the Civil War, the Second World War has been studied and scrutinized in painstaking detail over the years. The sheer weight of what came before “might have exempted us from trying” a new exploration of the subject, admits Burns. But previous histories were different from what he wanted to do, he says; they tended to be either intimate or contextual. “The intimate ones dropped you into a specific moment—an intimate moment—but gave you no context, and the ones that gave you context didn’t give you the intimacy,” he says. “So we set out to try to do both.” Another difference between existing WWII histories and The War is that Burns tells his story from a specifically American perspective, even though the war had been raging in Europe and Asia for more than two years before the United States entered it. “We make it very clear that the most consequential battles, the greatest loss of life, are taking place in the Soviet Union on the Eastern Front, and then, of course, in Eastern Europe,” says Burns. “But it is true, also, that without American power, without the sacrifice LEFT: SACRAMENTO BEE COLLECTION, SACRAMENTO ARCHIVES & MUSEUM COLLECTION CENTER. OPPOSITE: NATIONAL ARCHIVES Ken Burns’s PBS series The War explores World War II through the experiences of people from Mobile, Alabama; Waterbury, Connecticut; Luverne, Minnesota; and Sacramento, California (above)—at home and in places such as Acerno, Italy, where a GI views a ruined altar in September 1943 (opposite). 60 AMERICA IN WWII OCTOBER 2007
For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.