By Curt Schleier

It seems of late that we as a nation have been force fed the Second World War.  There was, for example, Tom Brokaw’s book and TV special, THE GREATEST GENERATION. There were the films SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS and LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA.  And leave us not forget the HBO series BAND OF BROTHERS, based on the Stephen Ambrose book.

I think we have to ask ourselves two questions.  Why this interest in a 60-year-old war?  And do we need another documentary about it?

The answer to the first is complicated.  Part of the reason for the explosion in WW II related media, I think, is that we’ve gone through a series of 60th anniversaries lately and that has no doubt sparked interest in the subject.  But also the veterans of that conflict, our fathers and grandfathers are dying off.  So there has been a rush to collect their memories and tell their stories.  Finally (and this is purely conjecture on my part) there is a yearning in this country for a time when America was America, when we sacrificed together as a nation and fought for ideals, not oil.  Nostalgia?  Sure.  But I think it’s something more, too.

But is it really necessary to do another documentary – and this one for the record is 15 hours broadcast over seven evenings on PBS?  The answer is yes – for at least two reasons.  First of all (and this, too, is conjecture on my part), I believe that there is a large number of younger people out there who’ve never known an America that largely was a great and just power.  Oh sure we had and have our problems.  We’re far from perfect.  But there was a time when every nation in the world aspired to be us.  And that’s not the case any more.

Also, this is a film by Ken Burns, who, frankly, can do no wrong.  What he’s chosen to do is go into four American communities – Mobile, Ala., Sacramento, Calif., Waterbury, Conn., and Luverne, Minn. – to see how the war impacted them.  He interviews veterans, their families and others about the impact the conflict had on them ands their cities.


It was terrible time.  Between 50 and 60 million people died.  There were 405,000 American military deaths – proportionately fewer than other combatants, but still a terrible toll.  Some of the basic facts Burns offers were either new to me – or I’d forgotten what I’d learned in school.   I was unaware, for example, that the War Department kept secret how staggering our losses were at Pearl Harbor.  Or how poor a military leader Gen. Douglas MacArther was.  While all that was interesting, it’s the comments of the individual veterans, who seem bright and articulate, that impressed me.

One talks about coming from a Christian family for whom killing was anathema.  But when a buddy had a Japanese bomb dropped on him all that changed.  “From that point on, I had no problem with killing. In fact, I went out and hunted them.  In fact, if I didn’t kill one in a day, I didn’t do my job.

Another interview subject recalled: “The story in out family was that the recruiter would cross the street anytime he saw my mother, because she would give him a piece of her mind for taking her boy.”


Another soldier who was in the Philippines and captured by the Japanese survived the fabled Bataan Death March.  He had two sets of dog tags and threw one in a mass grave.  “If I survived, no problem,” he told Burns.  “But if I die, my family will have some kind of ending; they will think I’m in this grave.”

This is powerful stuff.  And there’s more to come.