The War (the documentary film by Ken Burns)

Cafe Society
21

I think some may be missing the point - the show isn’t about WWII as a series of battles, manuevers, etc. - it is about the people who fought it. Additional background on the runup to the war wouldn’t really add that much, IMHO. I enjoyed it and it made me wish I had spoken to my grandfather about his experiences - even though I don’t believe he would have said much. He gave the impression it was something he’d just as soon put behind him so everyone respected that.

My wife got out her father’s letters written during the war and the first one she has is one dated Dec. 8, 1941. It starts off, “Well folks, I don’t really know exactly what to say…it seems we’ve got ourselves a war.” He had enlisted a few months earlier and served in New Guinea and the South Pacific.

It also made me remember one of my more colorful uncles, who had enlisted in the Navy in 1940 and served on the Ranger and the Yorktown. Until the day he died he never forgave the Japanese and hated them.

22

I watched up to the war atrocities on the Bataan Death March. I tend to get pissed when I see that stuff and can’t sit still. I wish now that I had watched it all since apparently, Mcarthur was really lambasted by the vets and that is a richly deserved epithet for that bastard.

23

I actually dozed off between the Pearl Harbor attack and the surrender of the U.S. troops in the Philippines. Seems a bit more slowly-paced and jumping-around timewise than the usual Ken Burns documentary. I also would have preferred another title; what’d be wrong with “The Second World War”? Nitpicks aside, Burns’s use of archival footage and photos is masterful, as always, and the descriptions of the Bataan Death March and the removal of Japanese-Americans on the West Coast were quite moving.

What’s the string music heard over the intro section? Beautiful.

I don’t mind Keith David’s narration, although I’d prefer David McCullough.

24

Same here. It’s no “The Civil War”.
The jumping around in the timeline really annoyed me.

25

It was pretty bad here in CA, too. Are you on Comcast, or some other provider? I was wondering who was to blame for the out-of-sync audio.

Yeah, although I’m not sure I would have noticed had I not read about the controversy beforehand.

But I’m liking it so far. I didn’t have much trouble following the timeline shifts or the location changes.

26

Audio sync problems on Dish as well.

I’m liking the series so far. although The Wife needed me to explain why I laughed at the reported Marine Recruiter’s comment about the Navy – “They don’t want you anyway. Your parents are married.”

27

I thought the documentary struck a nice balance between historical context and participants’ interviews. The only structural problem I see developing is in KB’s decision to depict the war, not through the eyes of the ordinary participants (the bottom-up approach), but in his conceit to depict the war through its impact on four small and mid-sized towns: Sacramento, CA; Luverne, MN; Mobile, AL; and, er, Waterbury, CT.

You can see from Ep. 1 how the selection of these particular towns can accomodate some minority issues, socio-economic aspects, and different regional contributions to the war effort: the internment of Japanese Americans (and resulting harm to agricultural output, which may be acknowleged in a later episode); Jim Crow segregation and racism in the South especially and the tension between integration and segregation in the armed forces, and Mobile’s and shipbuilding industry; the Jewish Americans, Italian Americans and manufacturing industries in the nation’s northeast; and I suppose a sleepy provincial Norman Rockwell-sort of middle America – and, ultimately, how the war mixes millions of these people together, relocates them to far-flung and exotic locales around the world, and inadvertently leads to an increased postwar geographic and socio-economic mobility, cosmopolitanism, and eventually to the end of official, state-sanctioned segregation.

The lengthy interviews with the Hispanic vets seem out of place because they didn’t hail from any of these towns, IIRC. Perhaps KB wishes he’d selected a fifth town with a large Mexican-American minority, from the desert southwest, perhaps.

One little data point and minority tie-in that I didn’t catch: for all the newspaper headlines marking the growing dimensions of the war long in progress before Pearl, I didn’t see any of the Italian overrunning of Albania in April, 1939, and I’m not sure if there was any mention of their ultimately repulsed invasion of Greece in late 1940. Not all of the aggression in Europe was perpetrated by the Nazis or the Soviets. The obvious tie-in with the documentary would be the Italian Americans of Waterbury… what did they think of the fascism in their ancestral homeland? Of Il Duce’s leadership? Of his unsteady alliance with Hitler? Of the possibility of fighting in Italy? Were Italian-American boys encouraged by their families to enlist to fight the Japanese more enthusiastically than to fight in the European theater? There’s a sizeable Greek-American minority in the northeast (and perhaps in Waterbury); was there a distinctly Greek-American willingness to enlist after Italy and Germany declared war on us? I can only hope the documentary will get around to some of these questions.

28

You mean American Patrol, right? Glenn Miller tune?

29

I thought it was pretty tight – at least everything depicted happened in 1942.

I had heard of Guadalcanal, but had never really understood its strategic significance. I learned something last night.

It’s pretty clear KB has no use for MacArthur – it’ll be interesting to see how that plays out.

30

Great post.

To address this one part a little bit. Italy had only been a unified country since 1861. Many Italians that had immigrated between then and “The War” still thought of themselves by their region of Italy. The Sicilians were a separate clique from the Southern Italians of the Bari or Taranto. Naples and Salerno was another group. Romans yet another. Florence and Genoa each a different group of Italians. etc. So in many of these families, they did not think of Italy as their homeland but as Bari as there homeland. Sicilians were notoriously hostile to Rome for centuries. It varied a lot by household and how they married. My Grandfather (Mother’s side) and his brothers and several Great Uncles from my Dad’s side all hated Mussolini and served in the war in various capacities in the Army, Navy or Merchant Marines. Most of them expressed a deep hatred for Il Duce and all he represented.

I am sure there were Italian-Americans that did not dislike him, but I believe most did dislike him.

Jim

31

I’m really appreciating this documentary. It’s an attempt to get at the experience of Americans in all aspects of the war, with just enough context thrown in. People of my generation are quite familiar with WWII, because our parents’ generation were the people who fought it. But it was always damn near impossible to get anyone to talk about it. So Burns is filling up a huge hole, and doing it masterfully, IMO. I wish it had been done sooner. Sure, there are books, but this is the kind of thing that TV is the perfect medium for.

32

Exactly. This isn’t the Authoritative Documentary on World War Two, and was never meant to be. Burns is simply preserving the stories of those who will not be here for much longer. Would that I had preserved more of my family’s war stories. This effort enriches us all.

33

We’re enjoying it so far, although I agree that the music becomes annoying from time to time; but then most of Marsalis’ compositions annoy me. We’re also having audio sync problems on our digital channel.

34

Please explain the married joke to me-I still don’t get it! Does it mean the Navy is made up of bastards? hardy harr har…
I also think the Latino portion is PC run amok (where are the women and nurses who served so well?), but it was interesting in its own right. It was very obviously tacked on, though-we all thought it was over and I even went to turn off the TV…but, wait! There’s more! :slight_smile:
I am looking forward to tonight’s episode.

I like the American anthem (Norah Jones sang it)–I’d like to hear it again. (It was just at the end, I mean the bit before the Latino bit).

My dad was 11 and my mom was 9 when the war started. I 've heard their stories about rationing and tin foil drives (Dad as an Eagle scout). This gives me the next generation up’s POV, so to speak. My grandparents were too old to serve, my parents too young.

One thing I never knew was that facts about battles etc were held back from the news. Makes me wonder about today, frankly, and all wars, of course.

35

What’s more, the vast majority of Italian immigrants to the U.S. were from Sicily or southern Italy and had been relatively poor peasants or workers in the old world, and the bulk of Mussolini’s support was based the northern half of the country and skewed wealthier, generally speaking.

My recollection of the KB documentary is a tad fuzzy because it was followed, in the New York area, by two hour-long documentaries in a similar vein on New Yorkers and the war. IIRC, in one of these programs there was a Jewish veteran who confessed that his primary motivation in enlisting wasn’t patriotism, but to break free of his family (at least for a while)!

I suppose what I’m most fascinated with early on as a viewer of the explicitly populist KB documentary, is the tangled motivations and concerns of the soldiers and their families, especially broken down by categories of ethnicity and degree of assimilation.

For ex., many young Japanese-American men volunteered to fight and did so for various reasons: to prove their patriotism and gung-ho Americanism (and shame the government and American society for interning them and their families); to defend their country (and the USA was the only country most young Japanese Americans knew); to get out of the godforsaken camps; to prove their manhood to themselves and others; to make decent pay; to have an adventure and see the world; etc. etc. And for its part, the government came around to accepting these volunteers, but organized them in ethnically segregated units and didn’t feel it was a good idea to send them to the Pacific theater (with the well-known exceptions of some translators and such). And I’ll bet that many of these volunteers and their families probably felt some relief, even secretly, that they would be fighting in Europe and not risk confronting their own [distant] relatives.

I wonder how much these tensions reverberated with respect to other ethnic groups. I know that plenty of Americans with Italian and German surnames were sent to Europe, but I’m curious as to whether the government made any attempt to funnel more of them to the Pacific theater. (Pure speculation on my part; I’ve never come across a reference to any such prioritizing.) I wonder if the documentary will yet address the issue of German Americans, one of the oldest ethnic groups in the USA, but still with some healthy (and largely non-nationalistic) self-identification as such, especially in states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. German-American cultural expression took a big hit with the anti-German feelings that flared up during WWI, but I’m sure there were many communities where there were still a variety of German-American voluntary associations and clubs, Oktoberfest celebrations, and perhaps even the odd German-language newspaper or circular. I wouldn’t be surprised if Luverne, Minnesota turns out to have a sizeable German-American population that, for all their unambiguously American patriotism, will be particularly dismayed by revelations of Nazi German barbarism.

I guess we’ll find out soon enough, with part 2 of 7 airing tonight, and part 3, tomorrow…

36

IMS, Minnesota was settled by mostly Norwegian, Swedish–Scandinavians. No doubt there are some of German descent there, but the more central midwest states had the larger German populations.

KB did touch on the fact that German aliens(?) and Italians were also rounded up, but only the Japanese were interred in camps. Xenophobia run rampant, (and I’m not excusing it) but feelings were strong and thinking not clear. It is a shameful chapter of our history–and one that some people of my generation did NOT learn about in school (I have a friend who found out about these camps through reading the book, Snow Falling on Cedars a few years back. We are in our 40s).

I never knew about the U-boats attacking our ships at port on the east coast. And I never understood about Guadalcanal until now. (of course, given the scope of the war and that it comes so relatively recently, my US history class in HS was somewhat rushed. We barely made it to Vietnam and didn’t get to Watergate etc. This was 1979).

37

The distinction made by KB was that Italian and German *aliens *were interred, but Japanese-American *citizens *were interred.

Me neither! I think my impression was that there was a single incident…or maybe I’m thinking of the West Coast, and a Japanese sub.

I have generally benevolent feelings toward all humankind…but after last night’s stories about Bataan, I can’t fault your uncle.

38

I didn’t understand the importance of Guadalcanal and the Solomons either. I figured hey, there’s a big ocean between Japan and the West Coast – why so much devoted to those little islands so far away?

There’s still a skeptical/suspicious part of me that wonders why the US put so much men and materials in the Pacific when Russia needed our help so badly, and wonders whether if Russia had been a democracy, would we have tried to help them sooner?

I need to watch World at War again.

39

I think the US was in more immediate danger from Japan than from Germany. Germany had the UK and the USSR to fight, whereas we were really the only big power going after Japan (Australia probably had fewer than 15M people back then). I’d credit the action more to self-interest and self-preservation than anything else.

40

Not to mention that the entire Pacific basin was threatened by Japan. Remember that they were not above trying to get a foothold on the North American mainland. Japan was probably a much more direct threat to America than Germany was.