Ken Burns' War
by Spencer Warren

“Victory at Sea,” from the early 1950’s, with its famous Richard Rodgers musical score, and Britain’s “The World at War,” from the 1970’s, probably are the best known multi-part television documentaries about the cataclysm of the Second World War. They may now be joined in the first decade of our new century by Ken Burns’s seven-part “The War.”

Despite one serious drawback, this PBS series, more than fifteen hours in length, will do much good by introducing a new generation to this terrible but also noble chapter in our history. Burns tells the story mainly through the eyes of specific “average” Americans from four mid-sized or smaller communities: Waterbury, Connecticut; Mobile, Alabama; Luverne, Minnesota; and Sacramento, California. He employs the technique of still photos, narration and music he used with such success in his Civil War and other documentaries, only here he also has live action films, newsreels and interviews with actual participants.

Burns skillfully interweaves the personal experiences of his subjects with the whirlpool of great events in which they became embroiled. They include Glenn Frazier of Mobile, who volunteered before Pearl Harbor when he thought (mistakenly) he had been jilted by his girl, and who then endured more than three years in hell as a prisoner and slave laborer of the Japanese, starting with the infamous Bataan Death March; Quentin Annenson of Luverne, who fought as a fighter pilot in Europe; and Babe Ciarlo of Waterbury, an infantryman fighting in Italy. Among others, Burns focuses on Sascha Weinzheimer, age eight in 1941, who with her family was interned by the enemy in the Philippines for almost three years until liberated, and Willie Rushton, a black man from Mobile who joined up and encountered racism in the segregated military. Katharine Phillips, whose brother, Sidney, joined the Marines, recounts the immense changes wrought in Mobile by the war. The sister and brother of Babe Ciarlo recount what life was like for them and their widowed mother, avidly reading the cheerful letters from Babe which did not breathe a word about his new world of death.

Happily, and perhaps surprisingly (but for the glaring exception explained below), Burns and PBS generally stay clear of the contemporary practice of filtering the war through the radical left-wing perspective that prevails in much of the “mainstream” media – for example, Clint Eastwood’s ill-willed, ignorant but much acclaimed Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima. (See my reviews at http://acuf.org/issues/issue73/061211med.asp and http://acuf.org/issues/issue78/070216med.asp .) Another example can be found in some of the gratuitous comments on World War II and Cold War movies by the left-wing, and equally ignorant, host of the Turner Classic Movies classic movie channel, Robert Osborne.

Thus, Burns devotes a great deal of time to the suffering of Glenn Frazier (who was beaten so frequently it “became routine”) and the interned Weinzheimer family. (Civilian internees who did not bow low enough for their captors were beaten.) When Burns recounts, through the words of the late Eugene Sledge, author of the acclaimed memoir, With the Old Breed, an atrocity by a Marine against a badly wounded, helpless Japanese soldier during the desperate fighting on the Pacific island of Peleliu, he leaves it at that. The viewer can see this was a relatively isolated incident, in contrast to the systematic, barbaric cruelty of the Japanese. Burns also includes the incident on Saipan, where our forces landed in June 1944, in which the resident Japanese civilians and their families were ordered by their own military to commit suicide – those who did not jump from the cliff, women and children – were shot by their own men. U.S. troops risked their own lives trying to rescue some of the enemy’s women and children. Yet, Eastwood in Letters from Iwo Jima draws precise moral equivalence between us and our savage enemy; Osborne also promotes moral equivalence in his inane comments. (How will the many left-wing schoolteachers deal with the series, or will they ignore it in class?)

Likewise, Burns’s narrative treatment of the events leading up to the dropping of the two atomic bombs avoids the controversies stirred up by left-wing historians. He permits the viewer to judge the events in the context of their time – as people saw them then. Following very vivid and disturbing live action films in color of the fighting on Iwo Jima and Okinawa in 1945 – the preludes to our planned invasion of the Japanese home islands – Burns goes directly into our firebombing of enemy cities by the giant new B-29 Super Fortresses, and then into preparations for the atomic bomb. (He should have noted that the firebombing began only after precision bombing of military targets had proved impracticable.) Any patriotic viewer will draw the obvious conclusion that the atomic bombs were employed to save our boys’ lives. In one indelible, haunting image, we see one of our boys on Iwo Jima (most were 19-22 years of age) lying dead, propped up against the side of a big shell hole in the volcanic sand, his helmet still sitting on his lifeless head. Truly, a picture is worth a thousand words. In this connection, Burns notes the estimates of up to 500,000 U.S. dead from the invasion of Japan. Implicitly, dismissing the left-wing historians who argue “only” 35,000 would have died, Geoffrey Ward’s narration states: “All everyone knew was that the cost was likely to be astronomic.”

The biggest shortcoming of the documentary is Burns’s obsession with and factually dubious treatment of the internment of more than 110,000 Japanese-Americans and Japanese resident aliens. (Large numbers of German- and Italian-Americans also were interned, but they were a small percentage of their brethren in the country.) He returns to this subject again and again and again, even, a la Eastwood, juxtaposing photos of the internment camp in the Philippines (where Burns had noted our prisoners were beaten) with the camps in the U.S. He devotes so much time to the heroics of the Japanese-American fighting unit, the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, that one might think it was the only such unit in the Army. They are deservedly renowned for their gallantry and suffered heavy casualties, but the disproportionate attention for this one unit suggests they are being used by Burns and the ultra-liberal PBS for purposes of leftist “diversity.” (He also employs a Navajo Indian for the same purpose.)

Worse, in his segment on the death and funeral of President Roosevelt in April 1945, as we see the casket being escorted up Pennsylvania Avenue, Burns’s narration questions the President’s moral character for having signing the internment order of February 1942. How frustrating it must be for Michelle Malkin, whose scholarly work in her book, In Defense of Internment (2004), examines the now declassified secret intelligence which justified Roosevelt’s order in the alarming context of the period after Pearl Harbor, to see her exhaustive research completely ignored so the left can continue to propagate its myth of America as a nation of victims. Burns’s “research” consists of pictures of internees playing baseball in the camps and one young internee complaining he had “pledged allegiance in school every day.” The intelligence examined by Malkin also was ignored by the commission which in the 1980’s recommended we apologize and pay reparations to those interned, which President Reagan mistakenly endorsed. (Canada took similar internment actions, beginning a month earlier than the U.S., in January 1942.) Too bad that today we face other potential fifth columnists in our country, who potentially could kill tens or hundreds of thousands of Americans, but we do not have a president with the resolve to protect our people from domestic dangers as we did in 1942. (Today’s president, six years after 9/11, in deference to the left’s distortion of the principle of “tolerance,” still refuses to permit the profiling of airline passengers that could have prevented the deaths of more than 3000 Americans that day.)

Burns also manages to touch on some of the broad strategic issues, such as the Germany-first strategy and the peripheral strategy of first deploying U.S. and British forces in Africa in November 1942 and in Italy in 1943, which allowed the Allies to weaken and spread out the Germans for a year and a half before the decisive D-Day landings in France on June 6, 1944. It also gave our air forces time to destroy the Luftwaffe, which was almost totally absent from the skies above the Normandy landing beaches on June 6 th and, indeed, for the rest of the war. Burns notes that President Roosevelt sided with Churchill and the British military on these issues, which in 1942 and 1943 at times bitterly divided the U.S. and British military and naval chiefs. General Marshall and the rest of the Joint Chiefs opposed the peripheral Mediterranean strategy and desired a decisive blow with maximum force in France in 1943; also, Stalin was pressuring for a second front in France as soon as possible to relieve pressure on the eastern front. Almost all historians now agree this would have been disastrous and Roosevelt showed great strategic acumen in siding with the British, who had much more experience than our chiefs and who did not have the blood and treasure to spill that our bigger country had. These were two of many wise strategic decisions made by Roosevelt who, conservatives should recognize, may have greater claims as commander-in-chief than as steward of the economy during the Depression. Interested readers may wish to consult the detailed list of Roosevelt’s wise strategic decisions at pages 52 to 84 in American Strategy in World War II (1963), by the chief historian of the Army, Kent Roberts Greenfield. Burns also mentions Roosevelt’s staunch support for the hugely expensive, highly risky Manhattan Project, which produced the atomic bombs. I would rank Roosevelt with Lincoln as one of the two best commanders-in-chief; Lyndon Johnson and G.W. Bush rank at the bottom.

Another strategic issue that Burns mentions, which has special interest for conservatives, is the failure to end the European war by Christmas 1944, as many expected after our rapid break-out from Normandy in July 1944 and General Patton’s race across France to the German frontier. Had the U.S. and Britain succeeded in pushing into Germany in autumn 1944, we could have shortened the war and would have occupied most if not all of the country, as the Red Army was still fighting in the east along the Vistula River in Poland. This would have greatly strengthened the bargaining position of Roosevelt and Churchill at Yalta in February 1945 – many critics forget that when the Big Three met in the Crimea, the Red Army already occupied all of Eastern Europe.

The reason we did not win the European war in 1944 was logistical – our rapid advance stretched our supply lines from the English Channel very thin and, due to decisions by Eisenhower (the Supreme Allied Commander) and General Montgomery, we failed to clear the vital port of Antwerp in Belgium, allowing the Germans to remain fixed along the River Scheldt leading from the port out to the North Sea. Eisenhower, who as the head of a coalition felt compelled to be a political as well as military general, also denied the pleas of Patton that he be given priority for gasoline and other supplies so he could make the big final push. Eventually, in September 1944, Eisenhower agreed to Montgomery’s plan – Operation Market-Garden -- for a mammoth airborne operation to outflank the Germans in The Netherlands and strike across the northern Rhine into Germany’s industrial Ruhr. Intelligence was ignored and Market-Garden was a fiasco. The tenacious Germans re-grouped along their fortified “West Wall” and staged one final offensive, the Battle of the Bulge in December-January, which inflicted nearly 100,000 U.S. casualties. Eisenhower bears some responsibility for this as well. Germany did not surrender until May 1945. True, this analysis has elements of hindsight, but the consequences, for the next forty-five years of Cold War, of not ending the war in 1944 are known to all.

To his credit, Burns devotes one program to fiascos like Market-Garden, the Huertgen Forest, the Vosges Mountains (where the Japanese-American 442 nd suffered many needless casualties due to the incompetent General Dahlquist) and Peleliu; it was all a very grim business, beyond our imaginations today, and a lot of boys suffered and died due to blunders at the top. Yet this does not diminish the meaning of what they gave for us – as the eyewitness accounts of our liberation of some of the Nazi death camps makes all too clear.

Also to his credit, Burns allows viewers to see the central and chief place of religion in wartime America – and by implication the radical secularization of recent decades. The landings in France were known in the USA the morning of June 6, 1944. All that day, churches and synagogues were packed. Burns plays part of President Roosevelt’s radio address to the nation that evening of June 6th. This presidential prayer, which no one would have thought to criticize at the time, may be inconceivable today. The President announced the landings were a success to that point. Then he began, slowly and firmly in a solemn, weighty tone: “Almighty God; Our sons, pride of our Nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion, our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity. . . . Their road will be long and hard . . . [W]e know that by Thy grace, and by the righteousness of our cause, our sons will triumph. . . . Some will never return. Embrace these Father, and receive them, Thy heroic servants, into Thy kingdom.” (Here allow me to criticize Burns’s frequent over-use of music underscoring, which distracts the viewer.)

Another mark for Burns is how he recounts the awesome unleashing of our free economy – Ford’s Willow Run plant in Michigan, operating 24/7 over 67 acres, was producing huge four-engine B-24 Liberator bombers off the assembly line, one every 63 minutes. This explains why it has been written that it was Detroit which destroyed Hitler and Japan. Burns also notes the economic, social and (at least in wartime) racial changes in Mobile following the mammoth expansion of Gulf Shipbulding. Every American was mobilized for total war – from children leading scrap drives (even fat, which was used for explosives), to war bond campaigns, to rationing, and more. (The Victory speed limit during the war was 35 mph and only 135 cars were manufactured.) In light of our defeat in the “limited” war in Vietnam and our domestic divisions (along with strategic blunders) that have been impeding the Iraq War – for which no domestic sacrifice has ever been requested by the president – should it not be asked whether, in the future, we should fight another limited war without widespread domestic mobilization? World War II is the last real war (i.e. against serious opponents) we won; unlike today, the President made very clear from the outset that the road to victory would be long and hard. Nor was conduct of the war embroiled in an election cycle timetable.

Of course, Burns cannot cover everything, but he is remiss in completely ignoring the central role of Ultra – British and then American intelligence over time breaking many of the German and Japanese military codes, and the Japanese diplomatic code as well. This is the biggest revelation in historical research since the 1970’s. Although the series focuses on the U.S., Ultra played a crucial role in the Battle of Britain in 1940 and shortened the war by years, saving countless lives. It was crucial to Montgomery’s victory over Rommel at El Alamein in October 1942 (not mentioned in the series), to our victory over the U-boats in the Battle of the Atlantic in 1943, to MacArthur’s rapid conquest of New Guinea in 1944, and to the planning for D-Day. Also omitted are the daring Doolittle bombing raid on Japan in April 1942 (http://acuf.org/issues/issue84/070522cul.asp) and the Allies’ fire-bombing of Dresden in February 1945.

The series builds to a moving climax as Burns’s personal subjects struggle to survive the inferno. Reality gives the lie to Babe Ciarlo’s upbeat letters when he is killed on May 21, 1944, eight days before his 21 st birthday, two rosaries in his pockets. His sister and brother recount how they were returning home late one evening and found all the lights lit in their house. Later, Mrs. Ciarlo would ceaselessly pour over newspaper photos, sure it was a mistake and she would find her boy alive. Glenn Frazier, now a slave laborer in Japan, knows the Americans are coming from hearing our B-29’s bombing attacks, and he observes our carrier-borne aircraft striking enemy shore installations. The guards tell him he and all the prisoners will be murdered if the Americans invade. The Weinzheimer family in the Philippines also learn their rescue is coming when in September 1944 they hear massive waves of U.S. aircraft overhead, powered not by Mitsubishi engines but “strong, powerful American engines.” Quentin Annenson, flying high above the Falaise battlefield in France, can smell “the stench of burnt flesh” below. To this day he does not forget the extraordinary intensity of life in combat.

Finally, a united nation ecstatically celebrates V-J Day, August 15, 1945. Every church and synagogue held services. Church and school bells rang out. Crews on aircraft flying back to the USA could eye a huge sign emblazoned on one hillside: “Welcome Home. Well Done.” Was this the happiest and proudest day of our history? Are we the same country today?

Spencer Warren is ConservativeBattleline’s movie critic.