The War: Episode 3

The Battle of Tarawa: covered in Episode 3

Watching Episode 3 of Ken Burns' The War was kind of like listening to an elderly friend or relative who's telling stories that you've heard five or ten times before. It's nice to hear the familiar tales, even the sad parts. But they don't tell you anything you didn't learn the first two or three times you heard them.

After seeing this episode, I would say that the approach of the film doesn't measure up to his declared goal of making us feel we know these families being interviewed like they are own own families. To give something like that kind of emotional intimacy to it - discounting the hyperbole of feeling like they are our own families - the film would have needed a much more narrow focus on the lives of individuals and much less combat footage. It would also need a different kind of descriptive background for the "home front" in general, e.g., how many of those romantic war marriages of which we hear about two in this episode really worked out?

The problem is that telling the story of the impact of war on an individual or a particular family is a very different undertaking than telling the story of a big, long, complicated undertaking like the Second World War. Burns tries to do both and also frame it all so that it wouldn't feel much more challenging or upsetting than a Hallmark card. Okaly, a Hallmark bereavement card, but still...

The effect is much like seeing a succesion of Norman Rockwell paintings alternating with stock battle footage with dubbed-in explosions and gun sounds.


Take Earle Burke from the second episode. He talked about how he not only came to feel his own mortality as a gunner in a bomber, but also came to realize what it did to his parents when he joined the servcie in such a high-risk branch after his older brother had just been killed in the war.

How did that experience affect his realtionship with his parents? Did he feel guilty enough about it that it affected important life decision? Did they ever express anger or resentment over it?

War bond drives, letters to and from home, joyful homecomings, the telegrams notifying families of a loss. These are all real and important parts of the history of that war. But, as Joe Stalin or somebody is reported to have said, "One death is a tragedy; ten thousand deaths is a statistic."

So far, between the schmaltzy incidental music and the ever-recurring footage of artillery going off, the film hasn't made me feel the tragedy or have any better understanding of the statistics. On Monday, I posted a paragraph from Studs Terkel's "The Good War" that made the tragedy of individual loss feel like a tragedy. It was an Iowa farmer, remembering the excitement in the community about how wartime production would produce better economic times. He ended by saying:

This neighbor told me what we needed was a damn good war, and we'd solve our agricultural problems. And I said, 'Yes, but I'd hate to pay with the price of my son.' Which we did." He weeps. "It's too much of a price to pay."

None of the stories in this documentary haved moved me like that brief story did. It's not that we can't see that the pain is real in the interview subjects in The War. It's that those segments are sandwiched in between a basic romantic, mythic treatment of the war that the losses seem like those mythical great sacrifices for the Noble Cause. That war was a noble cause. But so far, those segments come off in the documentary more like a war placard than tragedies that happened to real people.

This segment took us all the way into 1944 already. That means we've got more than half the series to go to cover the last year and a half of the war. Maybe he'll connect us a little more to the individuals on which he's trying to focus in the remaining episodes.

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

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