New Burns Documentary Captures
Social History During ‘The War’
By DAVID W. MUNNS, Associate Editor
Ken Burns will release in
September “The War,” a
seven-part Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) series chronicling World
War II through the lives of
Americans from four towns: Mobile,
Ala.; Sacramento, Calif.; Waterbury,
Conn.; and Luverne, Minn.
In “The War,” Burns uses the
documentary formula proven successful in his renowned prior PBS
series, including “The Civil War,”
“Baseball” and “Jazz.” Here, he
introduces the viewer to the
blurred boundaries between good
and evil, right and wrong, rich and
poor, and hate and ignorance.
In the context of the American
household, Burns’ documentary
captures the essence of social history during the war. No easy feat, but
the series, in seven two-hour
episodes, confronts a variety of
issues that a once-insular American
public could no longer ignore.
He takes the viewer into the war
with first-person accounts from
Americans whose lives were inextricably altered during the period
between December 1941, when the
Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor,
through August 1945, when Japan surrendered after
the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima
and Nagasaki.
The seven episodes also contain Burns’ commentary
on many major political personalities during that time,
namely Gen. Douglas MacArthur.
At the outset, Burns introduces the viewer to the relatively simple lives of people in each of the four featured towns. Their reactions to the war, recorded some
60 years later, reveal how deeply affected they were,
showing emotions that still resonate today.
“This isn’t good,” one Japanese-American woman
said, crying, noting the attack on Pearl Harbor was the
first time she had ever taken note of her race.
Pearl Harbor was the first attack on domestic soil in
NATIONAL ARCHIVES
A U.S. Marine in Saipan in 1944, from the PBS documentary series “The War,”
which airs beginning in late September.
more than a century, instantly making the war both
very real and very personal for Americans. And the use
of newsreels and other media to recruit a fighting force
once the United States became involved showed the
public the atrocities of war. They could not ignore, for
example, the 1943 Life magazine image of three dead
U.S. servicemen on Buna Beach, New Guinea.
The residents of Mobile, Sacramento, Waterbury
and Luverne were chosen by Burns to reflect the diversity of the American experience going into and coming
out of the war.
A racially divided Mobile is in the midst of a population boom. The documentary notes that its population almost doubles during the first year of the war as
the defense industrial complex begins to mobilize.
