Burns has said that he hoped by making “The War” to understand something about being in battle, and he has been able to elicit from many of the men descriptions of their moment of conversion, as it were, to being dutiful soldiers who were willing and sometimes eager to kill. Frazier, dignified in suit and tie, with a trim white mustache, talks about the day a Japanese plane strafed a field hospital on Luzon and hit a friend next to him, and “all I ever found of him was his left foot and a shoe.” Frazier looked up and saw the pilot of the plane smiling, “and at that point I had no problem with killing.” Sometimes the men speak of what that conversion cost them, and Burns lets the camera linger when they stop recounting such horrible moments, and their faces tell you everything—that no one who wasn’t there will ever really understand. (These are also the few moments of silence in “The War,” which has a nagging, peskily ever-present sound-track by Wynton Marsalis and a monotonous voice-of-doom narration by the actor Keith David.)
At fifteen hours, “The War” is too much of a not good enough thing. A spark is missing—a spark that you almost always find in even the most unassuming documentary on the History Channel. A few years ago, for example, I saw one about a battle on a Pacific island I had never heard of. Guam, Guadalcanal, Bougainville, Iwo Jima I knew, of course, but not Peleliu—the site of a horrendous, prolonged, and unnecessary battle that resulted in thousands of casualties. The story was told largely by men who had fought there, and it was unforgettable. PBS has also presented good work: a documentary in its P.O.V. series, “Of Civil Wrongs and Rights,” tells the story of Fred Korematsu, a Japanese-American who fought the internment order in 1942 and was arrested; his case went all the way to the Supreme Court and remained an open wound for decades, until his conviction was vacated in 1983. Three years ago, Seattle Public Television produced “The Perilous Fight,” a documentary that chronicled the war with color footage that had never been seen before, and with dozens of letters and diary entries and some news reports by Ernie Pyle; it happened to air in New York a few weeks ago, and I couldn’t help noticing that Burns had used a surprising amount of the same material, despite having a multimillion-dollar budget and a crack research team.
Burns said that one of the motivations for the project was hearing, in the late nineties, that something like a thousand veterans of the Second World War were dying every day. That gave him a sense of urgency, without giving him any good ideas. During the publicity juggernaut for “The War” (and let history record that the ten-million-dollar marketing campaign includes “commemorative” cans of Budweiser and, as I live and breathe, oranges and eggs branded with station and time-of-broadcast information), Burns talked about focussing on “ordinary” people, while adding that he came to realize that, as it says on the Bud can, “in extraordinary times there are no ordinary lives.” This kind of burbling fatuousness does not aid the cause of getting to the truths of war, and Burns should know better.
He does know better. As he did in “The Civil War,” Burns brings to the fore an uncannily gifted storyteller and synthesizer, someone who combines emotion and intelligence in seemingly perfect proportions. In fact, he brings two of them to light: Samuel Hynes, a fighter pilot from Minneapolis, and Quentin Aanenson, an Army pilot from Luverne. These two soft-spoken, thoughtful men anchor the series. Burns, coyly, never identifies them fully. Hynes is a distinguished professor (now emeritus) of literature at Princeton, and the author of a highly regarded memoir of the war. Aanenson made a documentary about his experiences in the Pacific, which was shown on PBS in the nineties; he was a panelist on Charlie Rose’s show on the fiftieth anniversary of D Day, and the airport in Luverne is named for him. Together, they are the Shelby Foote of “The War.” ♦
