America in WWII - (Page 63) Ken Burns and The‘Good’ War by Tom Huntington ten to the radio. The invasion has started.’ We sat by the radio for over an hour, listening to the breathtaking announcements. And then we went to bed, to lie there for a long time, wide-eyed in the darkness, thinking, ‘What Rock County boys are landing on French soil tonight?’” of American lives, the outcome would have been very different. We, and to a much lesser extent the British, were truly fighting a world war, and the only one of the combatants who was doing that. And we went from having an army in 1940 the size of Romania’s—smaller than Romania’s—to being the greatest power on earth. It was a huge, huge transformation.” To get a handle on the mass of material, Burns and his team narrowed their focus to four American communities: Mobile, Alabama; Waterbury, Connecticut; Luverne, Minnesota; and Sacramento, California. The War takes the stories of 50 individuals from these four towns and intertwines them into one story, an “epic poem,” as Burns describes it, one that he intends to represent the entire American experience. “These four towns could have been any four towns,” he says. “These people could have been anybody. In fact, what we tried to get at were universal human concerns…. By getting to know not only them but the town, the people they left behind, the movie palaces where their loved ones would anxiously look at the newsreels, you get the sense of the country at work, transforming itself from the Depression into this vast, mighty war machine.” Some of the stories come from the mouths of those who witnessed them. “You get to meet 50 people, 40 of whom are alive. That is to say we have interviews with them,” explains Burns. “Another 10 did not survive to the present, so we’ve had to characterize them with voices read by actors, like Tom Hanks and Samuel L. Jackson, Josh Lucas, Eli Wallach, Kevin Conway, Bobby Cannavale, Adam Arkin, a really great, stellar cast to bring these 10 people to life.” Burns characterizes The War as an ensemble piece, with no central character dominating the proceedings the way historian Shelby Foote did in The Civil War. Still, he says, “if there is a Greek chorus, a one-man Greek chorus, it’s Al McIntosh, and Tom Hanks’s performance, to me, should be Emmy-winning.” Al McIntosh was the owner and editor of the Rock County Star Herald in Luverne. Throughout the war he provided insightful commentary about life on the home front. In episode four, Hanks reads McIntosh’s words about how news of the D-Day invasion of Normandy reached the small Minnesota town on June 6, 1944. “When we stumbled sleepily down the hall to answer the ringing telephone, we made a mental note that it was shortly before 3 A.M.,” Hanks reads, sounding suitably weary. “We picked up the receiver thinking it was Sheriff Roberts calling to say there had been an accident. Instead, it was Mrs. Lloyd Long, playing the feminine counterpart of Paul Revere, saying ‘Get up, Al, and lis- T HE WAR TELLS STORIES ABOUT other people like McIntosh, people who never came within a thousand miles of a battlefield, who worked in war factories, watched newsreels about the battles, and followed the arrows on the world maps in their newspapers. Too often, they received telegrams from the War Department that suddenly, tragically, brought home the cost of making those map arrows move. The entire nation was at war. “We have to understand it as the greatest concerted effort in American history,” says Burns. “There were no red states. There were no blue states. Everybody had their oar in the water, pulling the same direction…. And I think the lessons of the Second World War, without beating anyone over the head, are very much about how we agreed to cohere as a country.” But The War is not just about the home front. Burns sought also to provide an intimate view of battle, through film footage and the recollections of people who fought on the battlefields of Europe and the Pacific. “We wrap our wars, as they recede into the distance, with bloodless, gallant myth, obscuring its causes and its outcomes, but more important, what it was actually like to be in that war,” Burns says. With The War, he wanted to bring home the experience of war, with all its paradoxes and horrors. “In fact the Second World War, for the past few decades, has been called the Good War. How could it possibly be the Good War? It’s the worst war ever. It’s the greatest event in human history and the greatest cataclysm in human history, resulting in the deaths of nearly 60 million human beings.” Still, there’s undeniably something about war that fascinates us. “When I did the Civil War series 17 years ago,” says Burns, “the opening quote was from Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., who was wounded six times in that war and later went on to become a justice of the United States Supreme Court. He was talking about the war and he said, ‘We have shared the incommunicable experience of war. We have felt, we still feel, the passion of life at its top. In our youths, our hearts were touched with fire.’ Holmes was trying to put into words what every soldier who has ever faced combat knows in his or her guts: that, paradoxically, when your life is most threatened, when violent death is possible at any moment, everything is vivified, the intensity and experience of life are PHOTOS THIS SPREAD: NATIONAL ARCHIVES Burns says The War approaches the history of World War II through intimate personal stories set in the context of the larger events they reflect. The series features a wealth of candid photos of American common soldiers, like these GIs sneaking a smoke behind a tank in Geich, Germany, on December 11, 1944 (opposite), and this worn-out soldier on Saipan in 1944 (above). OCTOBER 2007 AMERICA IN WWII 63
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