Ken Burns does "the History Channel"

War poster, 1942

I watched the first 2 1/2 hour (more-or-less) segment of Ken Burns' The War. I was not especially impressed with the first segment. It struck me as heavily sentimentalized and very uneven. The idea as the promotion expressed it was to tell the story of the Second World War through the experiences of families in four American cities: Sacramento CA; Mobile, Alabama; Waterbury, Connecticut: and, Minneapolis Luverne, Minnesota.

But in the first segment, it appeared as though Burns couldn't decide whether he wanted to do that, or instead to tell the story of the war with the interviewees as supporting characters. The section on the Battle of Guadalcanal in the second half of the second hour played like a standard History Channel offering, with the interviews just adding a couple of anecdotes to a stock account of artillery and bombs exploding with sound effects added. (The combat footage from that war typically had no sound.)

Burns decided to add segments featuring Latino soldiers after Latino groups complained that their role wasn't included. The addition at the end of this first episode definitely had a tacked-on feel to it. Although it had some of the best moments of the piece.

The first half hour sets a heavily sentimental tone, introducing us to the series with people giving idyllic accounts reminiscing about the good old innocent days of their youth. The incidental (background) music was heavy on violins, piano and horns in this section.


One of the things that immediately struck me is that because he's focusing on events as long as 66 years ago (1941), his selection of interview subject of necessity skews toward people who were quite young at the time. Glenn Frazier lied about his age to join the service at 16 in 1941. Former Senator Daniel Inouye is one of the interview subjects, and he was 17 at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack. Sixteen-year-olds obviously have a limited view of political events, which is what they were describing in the first half-hour.

So, we get the memories of people as teenagers recalling Pearl Harbor. Which was a big shocking surprise to them. It's not as if we didn't know that already. I assume Burns is trying to give us the sense of going all through the war with these people. But, honestly, the fact that people were shocked at news of the bombing of Pearl Harbor doesn't add much to our knowledge or understanding of the war.

And the need for dramatic progression with the interviewees even in the first hour interferes with the effort to provide a bare-bones historical context. In the first half hour, the film gives the impression that the Pearl Harbor attack was a total surprise to most everybody in the United States. But then the second half-hour recounts some of the things that Americans already knew about the war in progress overseas, reminding anyone who wasn't snoozing that people in the US did know something about the danger of war.

Maybe partly because the period leading up to the beginning of the war is of particular interest to me, I was dissatisfied with the background given on the war's beginning. Which was also pretty much stock History Channel type stuff. We get a film montage of a grim looking Hitler, marching Nazis, the bombing of London, the bombing of Pearl Harbor, a few seconds on Japan aggression in China. That introductory segment on Germany seemed to me to be about half composed of footage from the vile Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will), which admittedly was technically well-made. And anyone who channel-flips past the History Channel has already seen it, probably several times. Weirdly, the incidental music during the segment on Germany's aggressions in Europe was downright cheerful.

Given the emphasis on framing the personal experiences of those individuals, it seemed to me that a bit more information on just how big a political issue preparations for war had been in 1940-41 would have been necessary. It's often a cheap shot to criticize people for what they didn't say. But in this case, it leaves an erroneous impression that the entire war - not just the specific attack on Pearl Harbor - was like a sudden thunderclap on a clear day to most Americans.

And that's not the case. For instance, the USS Reuben James (the subject of a song by Woody Guthrie which borrowed much of its melody from "Wildwood Flower") was sunk by a German submarine on October 31, 1941, escorting supplies across the Atlantic. Nearly forgotten in popular accounts (like The War), it was a major event at the time. And it made people very aware of how close war could be for the United States.

I don't want to be a total Grinch about the first episode. Parts of it are quite good. Sam Hynes of Minneapolis gives a good description of the appeal of soldiering to young people. He said it was not about patriotism or who the enemy was so much as the appeal of the (perceived) romance of being a soldier.

The film did take the time to remind us that Gen. Douglas MacArthur in the Philippines, with nine hours warning after the attack on Pearl Harbor, still allowed much of his air fleet to set on the ground where a Japanese attack destroyed it.

In the Latino segment at the end, one of the soldiers gives a moving account of hearing his best friend in his unit die slowly in the course of a night while they were deployed in the woods on Bougainville.

And the film describes the internment of 110,000 Japanese-American citizens on the West Coast, including a couple of moving segments from women recalling the event as they experienced it.

But even there, the tension between following the personal drama and providing meaningful context was evident. The segment didn't mention the California white who typically bought up Japanese-Americans' land, businesses and houses for bargain-basement prices as their previous owners were shipped off to the camps: that naked greed was one of the reasons prosperous Californians pushed for the internment. Or the fact that not one single case of espionage by a Japanese-American on the West Coast was ever found. There were some cases on Hawaii, where mass detention of Japanese-Americans was not imposed. The internment was much uglier than a mistake or a tragedy that just somehow happened.

Maybe it's years of blogging that make me more aware of things like this. But a number of times I had to wonder whether the accounts were vetted for factual accuracy by the filmmakers. For instance, one Latino soldier who served with "Carlson's Raiders" in guerrilla fighting behind Japanese lines gives a matter-of-fact description of an apparently illegal execution of five Japanese prisoners-of-war. His account sounded credible. But did the filmmakers try to verify that elsewhere? Given the situation he described, that actually could have been an occasion where executing the prisoners was a military necessity and therefore a legal act. I certainly don't want to make any excuses for war crimes. But those are real factual questions that I'm curious as to whether they were vetted or just taken at face value.

The same thing occurred to me with several other segments of the interviews. Two white guys from Sacramento gave the impression that they had been opposed to the interment of the Japanese-Americans. The historical narrative did say that there was little public opposition to it at the time. But did the interviewers press their subjects on that point? Hey, I grew up in Mississippi, and to hear white folks today tell it, almost none of them actually supported segregation back in the day. Amazing that it survived so long! So I always wonder about statements like that.

I also did a double-take when the narrator said that the American oil embargo on Japan was their signal to go to war with the United States. Then immediately following, he said that the purpose of the Pearl Harbor attack was to push the US out of the Pacific area. It was just too superficial of an account to make much sense. And since this is a blog and not a magazine article, I can say that I'm not really sure, but even though the oil embargo pissed off the Japanese government, the brief way they presented it sounded an awful lot like the isolationist dogma which says That Man Roosevelt deliberately pushed Japan into war with the oil embargo and other things.

Speaking of Roosevelt, they tossed in a segment on Europe in which the viewer would hear if they were listening carefully and didn't sneeze at that moment, that the Soviet Union by mid-1942 had stopped the German army outside of Moscow - a major turning point in itself, which occurred about the same time as Pearl Harbor, overshadowing it completely in American news. And also that the Soviets had lost "millions" of civilian and military dead.

This was presented in a brief discussion of the issue of forming a Second Front in Europe with Britain and the US invading France, which didn't actually happen until 1944. It said that Churchill pushed to invade North Africa instead and that American generals opposed it. And while it was worded in a way that would let them comma-dance over it, the segment says That Man Roosevelt approved the North Africa operation just because there was an election coming up in 1942 and he wanted to show he was doing something in Europe. What the [Cheney]? Who are they using for historical consultants on this stuff? The Isolationists 'R Us Institute?

I tried to pay close attention to the incidental music, which has a huge effect but can almost escape the viewers conscious notice at times. The music was clearly aimed at creating a very sentimental aura around the whole thing. I think about the only time the sentimental music shut off was during the sections where they were showing the History Channel style segments of explosions.

And, hey, I'm a fan of 1940s music and I actually get sentimental hearing the National Anthem at the ball games and stuff. (It always reminds me of how General Andrew Jackson saved the country from British tyranny in the Battle of New Orleans.)

But in the latter part of the second hour when they played Bing Crosby singing "White Christmas", I went into eye-rolling mode. And then when it was followed by Norah Jones singing some song I'd never heard before, "American Anthem", I kinda felt like gagging. It has lyrics that would embarrass Lee Greenwood, the "Ah'm proud to be an American/Where at least I know ah'm free" guy. (At least I know I'm free? What is that about?) She was singing lines like, "American, I gave my best to you" while various battle scenes flashed across the screen.

That may be a perfectly appropriate song for, say, a veteran's funeral. But coming with the rest of the package and the endless violin music on the soundtrack, it really makes the overall effect of the first episode a nostalgic glamorizing of war. And as we've seen these past few years with Cheney and Bush, glamorizing war isn't a harmless thing.

A final note. Military censors don't mind the media carrying stories about grieving widows and about lost buddies in the field even in a war in progress. I don't mean that comment to be in any way disparaging. Those are real and inevitable parts of war. And highly meaningful to those who experience them personally.

But in a documentary film context like this one, those types of stories can easily fit into a sentimental narrative that frankly functions as entertainment to most viewers without adding much to anyone's understanding or knowledge of the war being described.

In the end, I'd have to say that this first episode gets lost in nostalgia and stock sentimentality.

Tags: ken burns, second world war, the war documentary, world war two

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