New wave of Second World War nostalgia, coming soon to a television near you (Updated)

This gruesome photo appeared in Life magazine during the Second World War (05/22/1944) with a caption explaining that this was an Arizona war worker writing her Navy boyfriend a thank-you note for the "Jap" skull he sent her. (I don't have the issue date, but it's referenced in Back to the Pacific Again (and Again and Again and Again)! by Charles Urbanowicz 03/02/06 to Gavan Daws, Prisoners of the Japanese (1994).)

Nostalgia wave coming in the form of Ken Burns' newest PBS documentary series, The War. It begins on Sunday evening the 23rd, continuing each night through Wednesday the 26th. Then it picks up again on the following Sunday the 30th, with the final two episodes on that Monday and Tuesday.

The advance publicity/news is already much in evidence. I've listed some of the articles I've come across at the end of this post.

I resisted the temptation to buy the "companion volume" which has been on sale for a few weeks now, I believe. The PBS companion volumes are usually of good quality, but they may give a different view than the series itself, which is what most people will see. So I'm going to try to watch at least some of the series and react to what I see.

I'm all for people taking an interest in history. And Burns' famous Civil War series seems to have gone down well among historians not besotted with the Lost Cause mythological version of that war. His documentary on the Depression-era Louisiana governor and demagogue, Huey Long, was also decent.

But there's often a different between history in the sense of what happened and why, and history as images of national pride. And it's remarkable how people can filter even a well-done, critical-minded, challenging documentary to reinforce their own previous views, even when the documentary is actually contradicting some of those views.


The Second World War has a large place in American popular mythology as The Good War, a kind of standard against which all lesser wars are measured. for example, when Republican dead-enders talk about Victory in the Iraq War, they are appealing to a general assumption that real victory means the kind of unconditional surrender that the United Nations (that was Our Side) demanded of Germany and Japan. That meant that the enemy government agreed to step down and allow the victors to reconstruct their political systems and occupy their countries for extended periods of time.

But unconditional surrender in that war was a strategic policy related to the particular conditions of that war, not least of which was the nature of the United Nations coalition, whose three leading powers - the US, Britain and the Soviet Union - had very significant differences among them. The neocons' demigod Winston Churchill (although the neocon image probably should be written "Churchill", since its relation to the real guy is a bit imaginative) didn't like the unconditional surrender policy, and Stalin was kind of wobbly on it, too. It was Roosevelt who successfully insisted on maintaining that policy to the end. It actually was announced in 1943, not at the first of America's direct participation.

A lot of the documentary series is based on interviews with American veterans. I'm going to assume until I have reason to do otherwise that Burns made sure the stories were vetted according to decent historical standards. But the fact that the series is based around the personal experience of American veterans raises some considerations that I plan to keep in mind watching the series:

Memory is a creative process, as trial attorneys and prosecutors know well. Memories of events 50+ years ago have undergone that many years of processing. Aside from any conscious fabulations, memories interpreted and reinterpreted over five decades may be more personal than contemporary documents and photographs. But they're also far more subjective, as a rule.

Interviewers often get the stories they ask for, sometimes unconsciously. For instance, there are a famous set of interviews done by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in the 1930s with former slaves. These were elderly African-American ex-slaves who mostly experienced slavery as children; someone born in 1860 would turn 70 in 1930. These are often used in college history classes, I understand, as an example of how personal accounts have to be carefully vetted. Because when speaking to white interviewers, the subjects in the WPA interviews gave a more benign picture of their slavery experiences than the same subjects gave to black interviewers.

The format also means that the picture of the war will be America-centric. There's nothing inherently wrong with that. But it's not like most Americans have forgotten that the US played a big role in the Second World War. But how many know about what our Allies and our enemies experienced and how that affected the future course of events? How many Americans, I wonder, could say how Soviet deaths in the war compared to American deaths? (Hint: the Soviets had more than 40 times as many deaths as the US.)How many are aware that the Army's postwar survey of the effects of bombing found that in Germany, the bombing actually had the effect of increasing war-related production? (Short version: the bombing destroyed so many non-war-related businesses that a great deal of labor was freed up for war production.)

Also, a documentary or history that focuses on the war itself won't normally give much of a picture of the politics that led up to the war. That problem is particularly acute with the Civil War, where the Lost Cause version of history came to be an important political ideology which among other things insisted on a fictitious version of the origins of the war, i.e., that it had "nothing to do with slavery".

That problem is compounded by a focus on soldiers' personal experiences. The focus on the experiences of ordinary people is in large part a result of a democratic impulse growing out the historiography of the 1960s in the US and Europe. This has the great Jacksonian virtue of recognizing that history is made by the peoples of the world, not just by diplomats and politicians and war profiteers.

The drawback, though, is that it is decisions made by diplomats and politicians and war profiteers and generals that lead to specific decisions like those taken at the Munich Conference in 1938 or the Germans' decision to invade Poland in 1939. And those decisions take place in particular political contexts.

And you just are not going to get that by focusing on what John Doe remembers about his experiences fighting in the Philippines or talking about what he remembers his motivations as being back then. Remember the cynical veteran played by Humphrey Bogart in Key Largo? At one point, he remarks bitterly about what he fought for in the Second World War as being to rid the world of "ancient evils" and "ancient ills", recalling phrases Franklin Roosevelt used.

And since that war has become so iconic, it wouldn't be unusual for a vet today to say that he felt he was fighting to liberate the world from tyranny and to save the Jews from being slaughtered. When at the time, his main motivation may have been that he was drafted but anyway was pissed because "the Japs" bombed Pearl Harbor, and at the time he may not have given a s**t about the fate of European Jews.

Conversely, someone memories may be colored in a different direction by later experiences. I remember about 10 years ago being very disturbed by a speech given by a former pilot who participated in the bombing of Japan. He expounded at some length about how they knew that their goal was to kill Japanese civilians, and it was evident to me that he had an ideological axe to grind. Specifically, he wanted to wrap the aura of "The Good War" around his own opinion that deliberately killing civilian noncombatants is a desirable goal in war. To what extent the Allied bombing was intended to target civilians is a matter of legitimate dispute; certainly huge numbers of civilians were killed. But officially, neither the American nor the British goal was to kill civilian noncombatants (though the British position of targeting civilian "morale" came closer to that line).

But this character said specifically his commanders instructed him that their purpose was to kill civilians. I've always been sorry that I didn't challenge him on that point in the questioning period. Because I doubt very seriously that such was the case. And if they did tell him that, it's my understanding that he would have been legally obligated to disobey such an order. In any case, he was bragging about what under international law at the time would have been a war crime. It made me want to puke.

A much milder incidence of that was in today's San Francisco Chronicle, Reviews: KQED films add to what we learn from Ken Burns' 'The War' David Wiegand 09/21/07. Reviewing a documentary called Soldados about Latino soldiers during the Second World War, Wiegand includes the following reference to an interview with a soldier:

More than a half million Latinos served their country during the war. Most of the interview subjects worked as farm laborers in the Santa Clara Valley and Central Coast of California. One of the veterans interviewed in the film recalls that his parents didn't want to sign the enlistment papers for him when the war broke out, but the young man held his ground, determined to join the Army, because, he says, "we were soldados!"

Now, just on the face of it, it doesn't really make sense for him to say he was determined to join the Army because he was a soldado, because he wasn't a soldado yet. This is a relatively minor point, because it would be easy to read his comment as a mixture of the pride he felt as a soldier back into his desire to become a soldier and assume he meant that he was determined to become a soldado. But as a straightforward description of his own feelings before he joined the Army, it just looks factually incorrect on the face of it.

I'm curious to see what the series actually contains.

Here are some of the recent articles I've come across related to the Ken Burns series:

World War II created industrial, cultural revolution in Bay Area by Carl Nolte 09/16/07.

The Chronicle's Web site has an interesting collection of stuff about the Second World War, focused on the Ken Burns series: The War Then and Now, including podcasts of interviews with Burns.

'War' Stories: Ken Burns documentary brings all fronts into focus by Chuck Barney Oakland Tribune 09/19/2007

PBS goes to 'War' by Chuck Barney Oakland Tribune 09/19/2007

Below are some of my posts on Second World War-related issues:

The Munich Agreement 10/02/03

Jeffrey Record on appeasement 10/16/06

A dark side of the "greatest generation" 03/29/07

Historical analogies and the people who analogize them 05/01/07

Review of Making War, Thinking History by Jeffrey Record 11/18/06

Waldheim's posthumous plea for "Versöhnung" (reconciliation) 06/15/07

Kurt Waldheim, the "all-powerful lobby" and contemporary anti-Semitism 06/17/07

Yes, Virginia, there were polls back then 07/22/07

Occupying Japan and occupying Iraq 07/28/07

"Good" war, real and mythical 08/16/07

Unconditional surrender in the Second World War 08/17/07

[Update: The Life photo is also referenced in the July/Aug 2005 Extra! article Where Have All the Bodies Gone? by Pat Arnow.]

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

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