It's war
Weaving tales from home front and battle front
In the end, it’s about killing. That’s what war is, and that’s what Ken Burns gives us in ghastly detail in his latest effort, ‘‘The War.’’
This massive 14 1/2-hour documentary about World War II, which begins its seven parts on WGBH Sunday night, has to be the last word on the subject from the American perspective. (We hope so, at any rate.) There are inevitable nits to pick — length and dense scheduling for starters — but the production is, indisputably, a major achievement for Burns and his codirector and coproducer, Lynn Novick, who devoted six years to the effort.
This triumph comes against a reflexive fatigue that Burns has generated among many over the years — a sense that his signature style has run its course, that his imagery and emotional approach to storytelling are stale. Not this time.
Also, the mere thought of a giant paean to the Greatest Generation — which Burns claims it’s not but inevitably is — will drive some people screaming from the room. Others will opt for the Sox in late September over the Ardennes in winter. No matter. ‘‘The War’’ is the event on PBS this year, and will be repeated ad nauseam and marketed on DVD, so it will be there when you’re ready.
Burns’s structural conceit is the connective tissue he weaves between the war abroad and life in four American towns: Waterbury, Conn.; Mobile, Ala.; Luverne, Minn.; and Sacramento. The editing, led by Paul Barnes, is superb, both in splicing battlefront with home front among the four communities and within the war itself.
It works. This framework allows us to find intimacy in the mayhem, to absorb the impact of the war at home as it unfolds abroad.
Burns uses a combination of real people when possible and voices of actors when not to tell their stories. Katharine Phillips of Mobile, for example, is a wonderful, quirky chronicler of life there as the war begins to bite. Tom Hanks (who else?) keeps us abreast of quotidian life in Luverne as the steady voice of Al McIntosh, the late editor of Luverne’s Rock County Star Herald. Hanks is marvelous until he’s tiresome.
We see snapshots of Katharine’s brother Sid as a young Marine. We hear his raw memories of the nightmares of Guadalcanal and Tarawa and watch footage of the fighting. Ray Leopold of Waterbury was trained as a sniper but ended up a medic. Corado ‘‘Babe’’ Ciarlo of Waterbury wrote heartbreaking letters home — sanitized of the horrors he faced to spare his family anguish — only to die near Anzio.
What’s jaw-dropping (there’s no other word for it) is combat footage we’ve never seen before that Burns and his team uncovered during five years of digging in the National Archives and other repositories around the world.
D-Day, the Battle of the Bulge, and particularly the gruesome island fights in the Pacific — watch them again for the first time. They provide the truth of combat, captured bluntly by the professor Paul Fussell, who was a young infantry officer in Europe: ‘‘You can’t be careful. You can only be lucky.’’
Burns traces the war with linear clarity, year by year, across the globe — a wise choice because chronological shifts back and forth would have been confusing in a story this complex. He begins in the 30s, with the rise of the fascists, and ends after Hiroshima, when American boys returned as men, irrevocably changed, to the eerie tranquility of home.
Burns, it should be noted, had a very public spat with Latino groups that demanded a Latino presence in the program to reflect their contributions in the war. To placate them, he eventually added 28 minutes, largely about two Latino veterans. If the demand is troubling to artistic freedom, and it is, the insertion certainly does no harm.
‘‘The War’’ provides new context to events on the ground. We learn, for example, that the American troops who were overwhelmed by Germans in the Battle of the Bulge had been sent to the Ardennes to recuperate after being savaged in the battle for Hürtgen Forest, a vicious battle most of us have never heard of that left 33,000 American casualties.
In the Pacific, we are reminded it was the Marines who did the dirty work, again and again, in the brutal island-hopping effort. And we grasp how useless seemingly all of the huge Allied naval bombardments were that preceded invasions, from Omaha Beach to Iwo Jima.
WATCH A PREVIEW
A short clip of "The War" is available at boston.com/ae/tv
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All is not unremittingly grim. On the light side, Burns unearthed a modest photograph of General George Patton urinating into the Rhine, as Patton had vowed to do.
If the footage is riveting, so too is the sound of war. Burns has gone to great lengths to inject the whisper of bullets through jungle leaves, the reports of grenades exploding just off-camera, to enhance the immediacy of battle over the silent footage.
Music is critical too. It is a rich mix — from a lone piano playing Elgar’s Nimrod piece of his Enigma Variations, to Copland, Dvorak, Faure and Wynton Marsalis, among others. The theme song is a haunting version of Gene Sheer’s ‘‘American Anthem,’’ which could have been pure treacle, sung by Norah Jones, with the indelible lyric, ‘‘America, I gave my best for you.’’
What Burns does is tell multimedia stories. One about a daylight Allied bombing run against an important German ball-bearing factory is particularly gripping. Earl Burke of Sacramento was a gunner on a Flying Fortress that day, and as he recounts the event, we watch incredible dogfight footage and hear the frantic radio traffic among Allied pilots. He was seriously wounded while 60 bombers and 600 men were lost. The factory remained essentially unscathed.
Which leads to another theme of ‘‘The War’’ along with its horror: waste. We see it in the fighting on the Pacific island of Peleliu, deemed tactically unimportant, that left more than 8,700 American casualties.
We follow the appalling internment of 110,000 Japanese Americans during the war and the formation of the highly decorated 442d/100 Regimental Combat Team, composed mostly of Japanese-American men, many coming from internment camps to volunteer. And we learn how race riots were triggered by an influx of blacks taking jobs in the war effort. Mobile, then part of the Jim Crow South, was ugly.
The Holocaust looms large, as it must. Footage of the skeletal and the dead at the camps, which one might expect to be generic at this point, continues to horrify. What we miss is the huge war on the Eastern Front between Soviets and Germans. Granted, Americans weren’t involved there, but we needed a deeper look to grasp the full dimension of the war.
It takes Burns almost 15 hours — far longer than necessary — to cement his case that the horror of war is the essence of war. We already knew this, of course, but ‘‘The War’’ is a brutal reminder of that truth in a conflict Americans still refer to as ‘‘The Good War.’’
Speaking for many in the series, Sam Hynes, a former Marine pilot in the Pacific, dismisses that concept. World War II was a necessary one, nothing more. There is, he says, no such thing as a good war.
Nor has there been anything on television that has come close to the sweep and penetration of ‘‘The War’’ to close the book from an American perspective on that global conflagration.
Sam Allis can be reached at allis@globe.com. 