Ken Burns’ The War: Moving, But Strangely Unsatisfying. By Bobby Davis

Like anyone with an interest in history, I was excited when Ken Burns’ latest documentary event, this time about World War II, premiered in September. Much of The War justifies that enthusiasm; Burns’ trademark montage of period film footage, sound effects, and poignant interviews and documents read aloud vividly depicts the American experience of war. Somehow he succeeded in finding scads of combat footage not seen a dozen times, and he explores stories not often told, such as the Japanese-American soldiers of the Nisei 442nd Regimental Combat Team, which became the most highly-decorated unit in the history of the U.S. Army, even though their families were confined in detention camps, and the prisoners of war in the Philippines and Japan. He effectively examines both the fetid misery of combat and some of the revolutionary changes in American domestic life engendered by the war. Burns brings us to tears at times and altogether bolsters patriotic feelings for the people who endured and triumphed in the most terrible war in history.

Yet The War often feels cursory and incomplete. It is parochial by choice, focusing almost exclusively on the American experience. Although some critics have condemned this exclusivity, it is a defensible choice. Pragmatically, it allows Burns to keep his creation to a manageable size, and historically, he can focus on the war’s unique impact on the United States. Even if you grant Burns the right to leave out the Soviet, British, French, German, Chinese, and Japanese experiences, however, and accept that he explains almost nothing of the causes and consequences of World War II, The War does not do even its more limited topic justice. Ultimately, it panders to a nation’s need to feel good about itself rather than probe in depth and look critically at its real history.

Unlike his greatest documentary, The Civil War, Burns skimps on essential aspects of the conflict, frequently mentioning important events or people but providing little background or context. The War would have been greatly strengthened by setting the stage before Pearl Harbor of a battered nation suffering in the dregs of the Depression, wrought by fierce disagreement over whether to get involved in the widening global conflict. One would never know from The War that American hero Charles Lindbergh was pro-Nazi and vociferously opposed involvement in the war, or that rumors of submarines operating along American coasts and subversion by German and Japanese spies provided an anxious undercurrent to pre-war life. American life before 1941 wasn’t all apple-cheeked innocence, nor were all Americans were as ignorant of world affairs as Burns would have us believe. Some Americans had already joined up in England to fight Fascism before the Pearl Harbor attack, while a few thousand German-Americans joined Hitler’s war machine.

Burns avoids addressing key historical controversies, such as whether American leaders itching to participate in the war knew of the Pearl Harbor attack plan beforehand and let it happen, or the supposed “sellout” of Eastern Europe to Stalin at the Yalta Conference. He certainly could have added an episode on the aftermath of the war and the immediate post-war events that helped determine the political legacy of that world-changing event. It is rather bizarre to see a documentary on World War II that does not mention the Nuremburg Trials, the occupation of Germany and Japan and transformation into democracies, the birth of the Cold War, or the Baby Boom. It is true that Burns purposely chose to omit aspects of the war that have been covered extensively elsewhere, but many of his editorial choices did not work.

He tells his story mostly from the viewpoint of ordinary people from four American towns – Mobile, Alabama; Waterbury, Connecticut; Luverne, Minnesota; and Sacramento, California. Their testimony immerses us in the drama of common people thrust against their will into a terrible political conflagration, and their words provide the backbone of this documentary. No one can be unaffected by Glenn Frazier’s recollections of being interned at Bataan and then Japan itself, knowing his captors would murder all prisoners as soon as the Americans attacked, and how his mother, aunt, and sister all fainted when he called home in 1945 because they had been officially notified of his death a year before. Or the Italian-American infantryman writing sweet, optimistic letters home from Italy to his doting mother and family, sparing them mention of the hardships he was facing. When his sister tearfully reads on camera his last letter home, you realize that he was killed before his family read it—just days before his twenty-first birthday. To hear a pilot from Luverne talk about how he stopped making friends because so many of his friends died in battle, or a Jewish sniper-turned-medic still overwhelmed by the scenes from Nazi death camps, makes one understand how, to paraphrase Marine pilot Sam Hynes, this may have been a necessary war, but never a good war. Burns appeals to deep emotions, and does it well, but The War illustrates the limitations of this approach.

Burns sacrifices broad historical perspective and analysis in favor of individual stories, so that viewers share the limited understanding of participants, who did not know the ultimate outcome. In doing so, however, The War too often goes no further than these blinkered views. He could have interviewed many more historians of the war to provide context, as he did masterfully in The Civil War. Also in contrast to The Civil War, Burns provides no thumbnail sketches of the major political and military leaders. One learns nothing substantive about the man who led us through nearly the entire conflict, Franklin Roosevelt, and Harry Truman might as well have been a minor military aide for all the attention he merited. Truman’s ascension to the presidency upon the death of Roosevelt is barely discussed, except to say that many soldiers didn’t even know his name. Burns does little to evoke the political genius of Eisenhower as a general leading an egotistical, nationalistic band of generals from different countries, Patton’s tenacity and tactical skills, Curtis LeMay’s “bomb them into the Stone Age” strategy of air warfare, the myriad abilities of our Pacific naval commanders, Admirals Nimitz and Halsey, or their constant battles with the egomaniac MacArthur. Such pastiches would have helped to humanize these men who played such a vital role in the action described so vividly on screen.

Burns frequently glosses over important issues, most critically the development of the atomic bomb and the decision to drop it. There is no discussion of economic issues, or the fear among American leaders of taking on enormous federal debt to pay for the gigantic costs of waging war on two fronts thousands of miles apart. Burns made the curious decision, given China’s current development into a Great Power, to ignore completely the China and Burma theaters of action. Other than to note the loss of war industry jobs in Mobile and Waterbury after the war, he fails to convey the great anxiety of returning service men and women that the Depression would resume once the war ended. And, even though the story of Japanese citizens unjustly interned as potential spies occupy an important part of the film, Burns never mentions the whites in California who saw an opportunity to acquire their valuable property at a steep discount. In the end, Burns leads us to assume, they simply reoccupied their lost properties. In fact, many never got their homes and businesses back. This is the worst sort of whitewashing.

For a documentary that focuses so heavily on the home front, The War leaves out a great deal. The United States experienced three great social revolutions born in the war years in ensuing decades: the Civil Rights movement, the Women’s movement, and the Sexual Revolution. Burns does a poor job of explaining how the war helped create these revolutions, and he could easily have done so using interviews with survivors. Given his sensitivity to issues of race in The Civil War, Baseball, and Jazz, he spends shockingly little time discussing the role of African Americans in the war and its tremendous impact in building an army of men and women who would later fight their own war at home to destroy Jim Crow. He never mentions the great union leader A. Philip Randolph standing down FDR on the issue of giving blacks equal wages in war industries by threatening to lead an embarrassing March on Washington. He alludes to but does not explore the changing social relations of white and black workers working together in war industries, which created both racial tension and racial progress. The Tuskegee Airmen are mentioned, a few black faces are seen in battle scenes, but the Japanese 442^nd Combat Team merited far more attention in The War than the much more numerous and important black soldiers. Burns could have more deeply explored the fascinating tension between men willing to die for their country on foreign soil and a hypocritical country that treated them as subhuman. Black American soldiers have frequently commented bitterly on the experience of being denied service while in uniform by restaurants that served food to German POWs. Burns interviews only one black former soldier to illuminate the issue of racial prejudice.

He gives equally short shrift to the revolutionary changes in the roles and expectations of women. People like Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem are most commonly hailed as feminist heroes, but the millions of women who went to work and served in the armed forces in World War II provided the shock troops of social change in the American household. Without that experience, feminism would have remained the province of an intellectual and social elite. They are shown going to work in great numbers and in the usual factory scenes, they receive due “credit” in Burns litany of heroism, but the real stresses and challenges women faced as industrial workers and caregivers are given scant attention. Watch Connie Field’s wonderful documentary The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter (1980), with its eye-opening interviews with strong and diverse women, to get a deeper sense of what women really experienced. The vast numbers of women who escaped the household and proved capable workers in men’s occupations changed relations with men forever in this country, yet none of the interviews touch on this. It is also not unfair to mention that Burns never discusses the important role of women in the armed services, many of whom died for their country.

The documentary alludes obliquely to the very active sexual lives of servicemen and women, but Burns never explores their broader social implications. Millions of young men and women were shipped all over the United States and twelve million went overseas, where they experienced a sexual freedom and activity unheard of back in Luverne, Minnesota. Millions of women were suddenly liberated from family and neighborhood restraints and placed in contact with a horde of sometimes attractive strangers. “Victory girls” became a type, women whose idea of urgent patriotic duty included sexually servicing the men who might not survive combat. Soldiers received fairly frank sex education from the armed services, and military officials accepted the sexual needs of the men. The pinup girls and USO tours of World War II led to Playboy Magazine in 1953, led to the sexual revolution of the 1960s and the pornography culture of today.

Two essential self-limitations handicap The War: Burns focuses primarily on small towns rather than cities, and he wants to present Americans of that era as supremely united. His work suffers badly from trying to fulfill “The Greatest Generation” myth. Mobile and Waterbury certainly were representative of small cities suddenly becoming boom towns for war industry, but New York, Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Washington DC also welcomed tens, even hundreds, of thousands of new people into their crowded tenements and factories. California, Florida, and the entire “Sunbelt” changed tremendously as result of the population boom that started during the war and continues today. Washington DC in the 1930s and ‘40s went almost overnight from a sleepy Southern town to a major American city in which most of the nation’s power brokers gathered. By using only four representative towns, Burns misses much of the diversity and complexity of life on the home front. By focusing on small towns, he can adhere to the Norman Rockwell image of that earlier America that many people cherish.

Yet it was the cities that showed the harsher stresses of war and belied the conventional myth of absolute unity and small-town values ascendant. Burns barely mentions the vicious race riots in Detroit and Harlem, and ignores the “Zoot Suit” riots in Los Angeles that involved American servicemen and Mexicans. Labor conflict never appears, even though the labor wars of the Depression era continued to some extent during and after World War II. Although unions were strengthened and the government enacted important progressive labor policies, workers engaged in fairly frequent strikes (often white workers protesting the hiring and promotion of black workers) and owners continued to exploit workers just as they always had, even as they enjoined the workers to be patriotic and not ask for higher wages. Compared to what came in the 1960s, Americans certainly worked together far more and debated basic issues far less, but the nation experienced serious conflicts internally as well as with Germany and Japan. In this area, The War engages in mythmaking, not illumination.

Vast movement, not the stability of small-town life that Burns celebrates, marked the war years above all. Tens of millions of Americans moved to a new place during those years, thrown into military barracks, new work situations, and large, faceless cities. America was probably never so much a true melting pot for ethnic, regional, and racial diversity than during the war years. It was exhilarating, but also frightening, and it is no accident that one of the enduring genres of film from the ‘40s and early ‘50s is film noir. Noir’s claustrophobia, fear of strangers and sudden, violent death, its “tales of the city” that seldom had a happy ending, expressed the dark undercurrent of fear that thrived beneath the dominant themes of togetherness and triumphant nationalism.

Interestingly, in light of Clint Eastwood’s film Flags of Our Fathers, which explores the gap between selling a bowdlerized victory story to a war-weary public and the grim human cost of combat, Burns gives little attention to the importance of propaganda and public relations. The role of Hollywood in explaining and selling the war, not just war bonds but a particular image of America, is never explored--a rather strange and glaring omission, since one of our most important postwar presidents, Ronald Reagan, was a famous actor active in World War II propaganda efforts and used the war experience to help sell his message to a new generation of voters. Stranger still that Burns would ignore this important aspect of the war when his leading historian, Paul Fussell, made it a central feature of his bitter recollection of the war years, Wartime.

Fussell’s presence is ironic in a documentary that, for all its hard-edged scenes of military carnage, is essentially hagiography for veterans. A 21 year-old second lieutenant when he was severely wounded in France in 1945, Fussell went on to become a professor of literature specializing in 18^th century British poetry. He wrote his masterwork, The Great War and Modern Memory, in 1975. Focusing on both the “Troglodyte World” of trench warfare and the ways that the Great War poets helped Britain digest and memorialize that spirit-shattering war and the radical social changes it ushered in, Fussell had finally found a means to help confront the lifelong rage and depression his own war experience engendered. He wrote Thank God for the Atom Bomb and Other Essays (1988), which expressed the gratitude of soldiers who had gone through months and years of terrible combat, and faced the prospect of a virtual suicide mission in attacking the Japanese homeland, given an abrupt reprieve by the atomic bomb. Burns’ extensive use in The War of the recollections of Eugene B. Sledge, a Marine from Mobile who survived the Pacific war, comes straight from Fussell, who has often praised Sledge’s unsparing memoir With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa.

Fussell’s Wartime (1989), part analysis and part memoir, takes a radically different viewpoint than Burns. Wartime is almost relentlessly negative (as limited, in its way, as “The Greatest Generation” tripe), focusing on the soldiers’ boredom, deprivation, cynicism, and heavy use of alcohol. He exposes the facts of bombers that often don’t hit their targets, frequent death by friendly fire, hiding the prevalence of death and dismemberment from civilians in propaganda films, and other official lies. Fussell’s evocation of the subversive GIs, with their contempt for incompetent leaders and the sunny, sanitized messages about the war that saturated the media back home, is rarely to be found in The War, though Fussell appears several times on camera. Unfortunately, this man with unique and powerful insights, who could have been to this documentary what Shelby Foote was to The Civil War, is reduced to just another veteran. He has long been an outspoken critic of the romanticization of war and especially the rosy glow attending the American experience of World War II, yet in The War he participates in a project that, in the end, buries its gruesome content in a mist of nostalgia.

We are given a glimpse of the profound and lingering pain of the war when Sledge is quoted: “Something in me died at Peleliu. Possibly I lost faith that politicians in high places who do not have to endure war’s savagery will ever stop blundering and sending others to endure it.” But Burns has essentially left us with an evocation of The Good War. The fools and swine who populate Joseph Heller’s great novel of the war, Catch-22, are nowhere to be found in The War. It is a feel-good elegy to the men and women who survived, but leaves out huge and complicated aspects of the experience. As Walt Whitman said of the American Civil War, “the real war will never get in the books.” For all its emotional power and often-fascinating detail, Burns only partially gets at the real World War II.

Bobby Davis is a damned smart guy and a FOV. Thanks Bobby.