War, The War, national purpose and death

The War series resumes tonight: six more hours to go. I still intend to watch it. So I'm hoping that the last six hours will at least be less unpleasant than watching someone scratch their fingernails on a chalkboard.

One of the things of which this series has reminded me is the different kinds of historical documentation there are. I guess that sounds banal. But it's important to remember that interviews in the 2000s of people recalling events of the early 1940s have their own validity and value even as types of historical evidence. But they are a different kind of evidence than contemporary documentation. One of the biggest reasons that most crimes short of murder have statutes of limitation is that eyewitness testimony has its problems even for recent events, but memories fade, shift and alter more significantly over time. Most statutes of limitation are seven years. Burns' interviews concern events around 60 years earlier.

Tom "Greatest Generation" Brokaw followed up his successful volume on that topic with An Album of Memories: Personal Histories From the Greatest Generation (2001). It actually does contain the text of contemporary letters and even copies of documents in some cases. One of the wartime letters he includes is from a man named Robert White to his wife. White was killed in an accident in October of 1945, the month after the war in the Pacific officially ended. In the letter dated April 5, apparently in 1945, he wrote about his thoughts about the risk of death:

I just finished reading the letter you wrote Friday. Yes I know Richard Wolff. I also know Virginia. See, that is an example of one of the things every one of us faces. We can imagine how bad she feels, but no one who has never gone through that can realize the full extent of her sorrow.

That strikes me as an honest expression of compassion, with no fluff or false comfort about it. This man died. His wife feels incredible grief. It's a bad thing. Period.


In the body of the letter he talks about his own personal struggle to keep going under the demands being put on him in the Navy. Unfortunately, Brokaw doesn't provide us his birthdate, so we can't say exactly how old he was. But his letter strikes me as a mature take on things. He was old enough to have a wife and a son.

That's one of the things that also bugs me about Ken Burns' series. The interviewees keep talking about "the boys", meaning the soldiers. I realize that's a conventional usage, sort of like "the guys". But even if you use 21 as the age for adulthood as it was recognized in those days, by no means all of the soldiers in that war were "boys". Someone could enlist as early as age 17. But the draft age back then was 20, and men in their early 30s was also drafted.

I don't have any statistic on the age breakdown in front of me. But it seems to me that stories in Burns' The War skew fairly heavily toward younger soldiers. This would be an understandable result of his focus on stories of people with strong memories of the time who were still alive in the early 2000s. And there's nothing wrong with that in itself. But it does seem to me that a little more information about that particular topic would have provided a better historical perspective for the audience.

White's letter reflects his practical perception that whatever he was contributing, he also risked leaving his family without him:

Things like this worry me at times, darling. Not that I am afraid, far from it. But God, we take chances every day, any one of which could put us on the "slab." It isn't the fact that a guy is afraid, but he gets to thinking of his responsibilities to his wife and family and it takes the guts out of him. Of course a married man may have more to fight for, but he still feels guilty about taking the daredevil chances.

And the way he understood his own personal situation in the larger context of the national cause is also intriguing to me:

You are right, darling, I cuss this whole thing at times too, we all do, but God we have to think of what kind of a future we will have if we don't give everything now and win this war. Right now I know of 15 fellows that I knew back home in school, etc., that are dead right now. Not one of them had a chance to live their rightful time. There is no doubt about it, "war is hell." We get that pounded into us every day. They don't mince words either. They never figure out our mathematical chances of living after we start fighting at the front. Even before we finish training, a number of us are going to "get it." But getting it in the Navy Air Corps is no worse than any other outfit. It is just that chance we have to take. Don't worry, though, darling, it is just that chance we'll have to take. We'll make it OK. All we need is faith, and we have that. No matter what happens, just keep up your faith. Don't ever let this thing whip you.

This letter strikes me as a real antidote the violin-heavy sentimentalism of the first four episodes of The War. He's saying, I know this war is necessary. But war is still a really f*****d up thing.

And his remarks about his 15 schoolmates that have died don't have any phony romanticism about how one of them might have gone on to be a Homer or an Einstein. He says, they were killed. And they died too soon.

Tags: greatest generation, ken burns, second world war, the war documentary, tom brokaw, world war two

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