On PBS, of course.
I was sort of expecting a Burns version of World at War, but it sounds like this will be more personal, highlighting four communities and how their people got through it.
I love everything Burns has done. Well, I love American Stories, The Civil War, and the one he did on Lewis and Clark. I haven’t seen the ones he did on Jazz and Baseball. Busy guy, isn’t he?
Who’s gonna watch?
Thanks for the reminder, Auntie.
Baseball was awesome. The companion book (which I still have) was just as good.
Thanks for the update.
I’m really excited for this. One of the towns featured is a small town in southwest Minnesota not far from where I live.
It is already a Season Pass on my Tivo. I can’t wait.
Ditto. Any Burns fan must watch Baseball if it comes on. My wife really enjoyed it and she doesn’t like any kind of sports.
Another reason why PBS is the best channel on TV
Well, I am now. I had no idea he had a new project. Thanks for the heads up.
Same here, I wasn’t aware Burns had a new show in the works. And I was just wondering the other day what he might be doing. Weird.
I plan to see it. Last night, KETC (our local PBS station) ran an hour-long program listing the names of people from this area who had perished in the war. The voice-over was people talking about their experiences in that time…some were friends and relatives of the dead, others were vets or civilians.
In last night’s program, one Navy vet related that he had driven a landing craft on D-Day. He was told to get those guys onto the beach and get out immediately; not to worry about what was happening, as there was nothing he could do. He had his job, they had theirs. At one point in his story he said something like “even now, I can’t tell anyone the things I saw that day. Simply unbelievable…”
It brings back memories of my dad, and the fathers and mothers of my friends and what they told us as we grew up. Lighter, funnier stuff when we were little…then more serious matters…and as we got close to eligibility for the draft, the things that one would see and do in combat.
I hope people in other countries do something similar (if they haven’t already).
What time is it on? I have a wonderful confluence of events happening tonight, this documentary being one of them.
7-9:30 pm CST for my station. Does that mean it starts at 6 p.m. Eastern and 9 p.m. in the West? I have no idea how PBS runs things.
7 is a good time to start something that’s running for 2.5 hours.
Baseball was very good up until around the 1960s. The last couple of decades weren’t really as well done as the earlier years.
And some people never could get around to talking about combat. Until just a few years ago I never knew one of my uncles was as Omaha Beach about twenty four hours after the invasion began. He was in a tank group and he* never once talked about it.* My ex-husband’s grandfather was in WWI, and he loved to tell stories about things that happened when they weren’t fighting. But he couldn’t bring himself to speak of combat, except once, to say he saw his best friend shot beside him. He got this funny look on his face and changed the subject.
I’m looking forward to this show.
Hey, now. Them’s fighting words here in C-SPAN country.
(Though PBS does kick all sorts of ass - it’s just that C-SPAN kicks more.)
One of the towns he picked is Waterbury, CT, which is the nearest city to me, and the newspaper has been running daily stories on it for about a month. I’m glad it’s finally hear.
Ken Burns is some kind of miracle-worker. He captures his audience completely and does it almost entirely through the art of editing. He’s a genius. We’ll be watching this tonight!
Two stories I heard about the Battle of the Bulge, both while I worked at a public library:
Mr. Rock’s unit met up with another who had made a fire. There were several German dead nearby, and the Americans were sitting on them. It was so bitterly cold that they couldn’t sit on the ground, they would freeze. Mr. Rock still chuckled when he remembered that he was greeted with, “Pull up a Kraut and sit down.”
Mr. Smith was captured at the Bulge. The German leading the prisoners knew they were going to meet up with an American unit, and was letting prisoners escape. When they were liberated, the Americans gave two of the prisoners Tommy guns and let them take a particularly vicious guard out of sight and murder him.
I heard third hand of a friend’s father lying perfectly still, his eye hanging out of the socket, while Japanese bayoneted the wounded.
My Father recounted how he and his associates shot and killed a parachuting Japanese who minutes before had been dropping bombs on them and shooting at them with machine guns.
My step Father talked once when he was drinking of twin brothers in his machine gun unit. One was killed and they had to leave the body unburied in order to get somewhere quickly.
I don’t want to hear any more of those stories.