The War
Ken Burns has deliveved another thought-provoking series on public broadcasting televison, this time on the Second World War. His earlier work on the Civil War and baseball deserved all the kudos they received.Tthe "Civil War" especially, was a groundbreaking piece of work that took a well-mined historical subject that you would have thought was as exhaustively researched as anything could be, and viewed it from a new perspective, using diaries and pictures of individuals caught up in that national tragedy.
Burns, who will be making a stop in Manchester to discuss his new work on Nov. 28, has adopted the same strategy this time, taking four disparate communities in the United States and tracking the adventures, if that is the word, of some of their citizens through the war time period of 1941-45. There's much more to it than that, of course, but here we also get the reflections these veterans had on their experiences from the vantage point of 60 years later.
Burns's production has been criticized for being too American-centric — i.e., it largely igonores the contributions of the Soviets and our allies, according to these critics, but I didn't see that during the first episode. It's the American experience after all, that Burns wants to explore, so that complaint seems a little unjustified. Anyone who takes any amount of time at all can quickly gain an appreciation for what the Soviet Union went through and how that shaped their postwar conduct as we quickly drifted from being wartime allies to Cold War foes. That this experience isn't documented to the same extent as that of a farm boy from Minnesota shouldn't be grounds for knocking the new production.
The problem of course, is that fewer and fewer Americans, young and the not-so-young, seem to be interested in knowing about not only America's role in the Second World War, but that of our allies and our antagonists. And that is why, despite the occasional tedium of Burns' new production, I'm glad he's gone ahead and done it. It's amazing how historically illiterate we are as a nation. Can you blame it on the schools? I don't know. Maybe kids today are just as uninterested in the Second World War as kids who attended schools in the 1930s were about the history of the Civil War and the ensuing decades.
Somehow, though, I don't think that's the case.
So anything that sparks interest about World War II, whose repercussions are still with us and shaping history even now, is a good thing, even if, as with the Civil War, this is a subject that has been written about, filmed about, dissected and analyzed umpteen ways to Sunday.
I thought the strongest segments were the parts about the Bataan Death March and the internment of Japanese citizens here in the U.S. The latter is a story still not well understood in its details. It's a shameful episode in an otherwise largely glorious narrative of how we as a nation responded to the challenge of totalitarianism, one worth bearing in mind as our own government seeks justification in the war against terrorism in extra-legal and heretofore considered unconstitional measures.
The Bataan Death march segment gave a real, unvarnished look at the atrocities visted upon American prisoner of war by their Japanese conquerors, one that surely must make modern day Japanese cringe with regret as well.
"The War" is worth a look, although those who are already familiar with the literature of the war and the events will find it well-trod ground.
And thank God he avoided that dreadful and now far-overused phrase, "The Greatest Generation." There's no question the Americans who came of age in the 1920's- 40s were buffetted by, and grew from, some larger-than-life events, the Depression and "The War" among them. But each generation is great, each makes its own contribution, and each is shaped by the history of its time. I think the Baby Boom Generation deserves to be - and I predict someday will be seen - as the "greatest generation." In turn, so will Generations X, Y and Z. Or was the Revolutionary War generation the greatest generation of Americans? Take your pick.