The War: Episode 5

Yes, we had allies in the Second World War

The fifth installment of Ken Burns' The War strikes me as the most interesting yet. That's partially because my expectations have been considerably lowered by the first four episodes.

But still, this episode provided more engaging stories of people in extreme situations of combat in the Pacific, in the Battle of the Bulge in Europe and the Weisheimer family in their continuing imprisonment in the Philippines. It also had the advantage of relying fairly heavily on contemporary documents, not just 60-year-old memories.

Yet the accounts of the course of the war doesn't get much beyond the conventional, with lots of the same kinds of battle footage we've all seen many times before. This episode also continued to convey the impression that Americans were virtually ignorant of the world outside North America before the war began for the United States. While there's a lot of truth in that perspective, it's also misleading. I hope to expand on this a bit in a later post.

The bias of the documentary toward the stories of those who were quite young during the war continues to have an effect. For one thing, people who were not yet voting age at the time of Pearl Harbor really did first learn about the world outside North America during the war itself. Part of the contemporary material this episode uses is Sascha Weimzheimer's diary from her time in prison, written while she was a child. One Sacramento interviewee who apparently wasn't old enough to join the service during the war at all talked about how he used to play war as a kid. We needed a Ken Burns documentary to tell us that little boys play war?

The larger historical account remains a cipher. We learn that Roosevelt spent Thanksgiving of 1944 at a hospital for children with polio in Warm Springs, Georgia. What Roosevelt was doing in relations with allies or postwar planning seems to be out of the scope of this documentary. Speaking of allies, we hear in this episode that we had to deal with some annoying British general. Also we see a map that shows the Soviets apparently creeping at a slow pace across Europe, unlike the triumphant Americans who are already at the borders of Germany. It's nice to know that allies played some minor role in helping America save the world.

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

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