You have to work very hard, and take yourself very seriously as the keeper of the keys to America, to make a tedious documentary about the Second World War. But that is what Ken Burns and Lynn Novick have done with their fifteen-hour series “The War,” which will begin on September 23rd, on PBS. They’ve taken a subject that is inexhaustible and made it merely exhausting. Scene by scene, interview by interview, the series doesn’t bore, if you are of the school that believes that everyone’s experiences are at least somewhat interesting, and that the experiences of those who went through the Second World War are more interesting than most. What’s off-putting is Burns’s approach to the material, and by that I don’t mean what has come to be known over the years since his 1990 opus on the Civil War as “the Ken Burns effect”—the pan-and-zoom technique with which Burns creates a sense of life and movement in still images and squeezes emotional juice from them. During the months-long promotional run-up to “The War,” Burns emphasized that his documentary would be different from the usual treatment of the Second World War. It would highlight the experiences of people from four towns (Waterbury, Connecticut; Sacramento, California; Mobile, Alabama; and Luverne, Minnesota, a small farming community about thirty miles from Sioux Falls, South Dakota) and would be a “bottom-up” look at the war—concentrating on the people who actually did the fighting (and the waiting at home)—as opposed to a top-down perspective featuring generals and politicians. In addition, there would be no “experts”—no military analysts, no historians. (There will also be, in some places, no swearing; local stations worried about F.C.C. fines for offensive language are being offered a version of the series which removes the four instances of tangy language that unaccountably made their way into a documentary about what it’s like to kill, to see your friends be killed, and to spend endless days and nights in unrelieved fear of being killed yourself.)
The Civil War, jazz, baseball, and now the Second World War—all of Ken Burns’s subjects have been worthy (whether something a little less self-evidently worthy from him might be refreshing is another matter), but it’s appropriate to examine his approach, because he is now essentially TV’s designated historian (in January, Burns and PBS extended their contractual love connection through 2022), and his take on a subject is usually the final take. Earlier this year, Hispanic groups, aided by the Hispanic Congressional Caucus, put pressure on Burns and PBS to include some stories of Latinos in the film, which was already finished, after six years of work, involving dozens of interviews, hundreds of hours of research, reading, travelling, filming, editing, and writing (including the inevitable companion volume, by Burns and Geoffrey C. Ward, who also wrote the series). To be excluded was to be written out of history, they insisted. Burns eventually added twenty-eight minutes to the film, which, however, do not add much; the scenes—the extra material throws a Native American veteran into the mix, as well as two Hispanics—feel tacked-on, because they are. Burns had originally said that reëditing the film “would be destructive, like trying to graft an arm onto your child.” It turns out that not reëditing the film was also like grafting an arm onto your child.
Burns proposes to create portraits of the towns he chose—what they gained during the war and what they lost. Sacramento seems to have been picked because it had a large Japanese-American population and could provide a platform for telling viewers about the internment camps. Mobile became an overcrowded hub for defense jobs, and its degree of racial tension increased accordingly. One of the interviewees from Waterbury, Ray Leopold, talks about what it meant to be Jewish and about the high level of craftsmanship that used to be found in the city’s factories, and that’s about as vivid as Waterbury gets. But that’s fine—Burns wastes too much time trying to establish the localness of his vision, anyway. Virtually every time you see newsreel footage, you first see a shot of a theatre marquee in one of the towns, and then a stock shot of people inside a theatre. The four-towns device just doesn’t work, and Burns doesn’t even really stick to it. If he did, he couldn’t have included the wonderful Daniel Inouye, the senator from Hawaii, and his tale of seeing the bombers fly over on December 7, 1941, and his description of fighting in Europe. (Burns is using a tried-and-true source: Inouye is one of the people whose wartime experiences are recounted in Tom Brokaw’s “The Greatest Generation.”) Luverne comes across the most clearly, because of the inclusion of newspaper columns by the local paper’s owner and editor, Al McIntosh, who is the very model of a small-town newspaperman and a real find. His columns, read by Tom Hanks, on the comings and goings of the soldiers, the seasons, and his neighbors are like the monologues of the Stage Manager in “Our Town.”
Notwithstanding the disclaimer at the beginning of each episode—“The Second World War was fought in thousands of places, too many for any one accounting”—“The War” does try to tell the complete story of the American war. It covers Pearl Harbor right through V-E Day and on to victory in Japan, and includes plentiful footage of engagements that are often slighted in such programs—the Italian, North African, and Philippine campaigns—all the while jumping back and forth between towns and interviewees and diaries and letters. It’s hard to keep track of which well-groomed, well-spoken octogenarian is from which town and where he fought. With the women, it’s easier: there aren’t very many of them. The two seen most often are rather striking: Katharine Phillips, a charming Mobilian from a comfortably insulated family, and Sascha Weinzheimer, from a wealthy Sacramento farm family that had “enormous holdings” in the Philippines. Weinzheimer was living there as an eight-year-old with her family when the Japanese took over, and spent the war in a prison camp. Glenn Frazier, from Fort Deposit, Alabama, was also a prisoner in the Philippines, where he’d chosen to be posted before the war, figuring that, if war did break out, it would be with Germany, and he’d beat the odds. Instead, he ended up on the Bataan death march and remained a prisoner for the duration of the war.
