So who will? The story of D-Day, as momentous as any battle in all of human history, still lacks its Homer, Goya or Stephen Crane. That the breach is being filled by television programs, magazines and newspapers seems, at first, another cheapening of our battered culture. Journalism is a buck private in the army of art and literature. But the extensive coverage of D-Day has been more than good. It has been important. The United States is an especially ahistorical nation, always looking forward rather than back. Schools and parents tend to flunk history, leaving the next generation not just ignorant of the past but willing to take the present for granted. It has been left to the media - usually the all-purpose bogeyman - to step forward and educate millions of people about events that directly shaped our lives.
Anniversaries look like weak excuses for news coverage. It always seems to be the 20th anniversary of this or the 65th anniversary of that, as if the history being made today was somehow inferior. Well, it is - at least when it comes to a story like D-Day. Bosnia and Haiti are deeply troublesome, but they aren’t World War II. And anniversaries (as well as obituaries for people like Richard Nixon and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis) turn out to be perfect opportunities to remind us of what we’ve forgotten, or never knew.
The entertainment quotient in news tends to be held in check during these commemorations. But the natural journalistic impulse to recount what is most compelling remains, and pulls even more people into the history lesson. Without intending to, the media have become our most imposing historians. This would be troubling if the coverage weren’t so informative and moving, if it didn’t serve as study guides for classroom work and whet the appetite for books. To those who complain of overkill, the reply can only be; grainy footage of D-Day sure beats whatever other piffle might be on TV instead. And it’s certainly more newsworthy. World War II simultaneously saved democracy and changed the way we live. What could be more relevant to the second half of the 20th century than that?
Of course reporters and commentators cannot help much in answering the deeper questions. What ever happened to bravery? To heroism? To laying down one’s life for freedom? Do such qualities even exist in peacetime? It isn’t easy to contemplate all this while channel-surfing from the NBA playoffs. This week, President Clinton has wisely chosen as one of his themes the problem of how to communicate history’s great lessons from one generation to the next. Speeches by national, community and religious leaders are one way. The media and schools can amplify the message. Yet when the veterans and their contemporaries are gone, the burden of conveying the enormity of World War II will rest, as it always has, within each family, to ensure that the fundamental things apply, as time goes by.
title: “War And Remembrance” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-25” author: “Mary Miller”
In our mind’s eye, World War II was a spectacular affirmation of American ideas and industry. We produced vast quantities of arms (296,000 planes, 102,000 tanks, 88,000 ships), organized a global alliance and triumphed over evil. The war ended the Depression, restored our self-confidence and spawned a postwar problem-solving mind-set. As in the Big One, we would “wage war” against national enemies (communists, poverty and drugs, to name a few). All this is true, but it is not the whole truth.
World War II was a preventable tragedy, and in this sense, its occurrence represented an immense political failure. Hitler could have been stopped many times before he unleashed history’s greatest slaughter. (No one knows how many people died; a common estimate is nearly 55 million.) American isolationism abetted the timidity of England and France, while also leaving the United States woefully underarmed once war came. Our wartime conduct was marred by glaring moral failures, from the internment of Japanese-Americans to our virtually ignoring the Holocaust.
In short, the gap between the modem memory of the war–selective and self-serving–and the war’s reality is huge. I claim no originality for this insight. It has been made before and is now made again in a compelling and richly detailed account of the American war experience by historian William O’Neill of Rutgers University.* But we need to remind ourselves constantly of the gap, lest we be misled by sanitized history. The war’s successes and sacrifices will rightly impress us. Yet, it may be the mistakes and missteps that are now more relevant.
To some extent, of course, the war was not a success or failure but simply a national trauma that permanently changed us. The shared experiences of scrap drives, rationing (everything from gasoline to meat), anxiety and personal loss inspired a generational solidarity–the “we” generation, as historian Stephen Ambrose has put it–that still endures. The need to finance the war led to the adoption of income-tax withholding. In 1941. only 7 million Americans filed tax returns; by 1944, 42 million did. The war boom stimulated mass migration to California and Northern cities.
But the war also revealed enduring features of the American system. One is that our democracy is crisis driven. We make tough decisions only after the alternatives are exhausted. If Japan hadn’t attacked Pearl Harbor, O’Neill thinks it conceivable that the United States would have stayed out of the war. In early 1941, 83 percent of Americans backed neutrality, despite strong sympathies for Britain. Six weeks before Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt gave a strident anti-German speech that barely altered the wait-and-see attitude of Congress and the public.
Staying out would have been a calamity. It would have virtually guaranteed Hitler’s victory, allowed him to develop nuclear weapons and left the United States without major allies. As it was, isolationism caused a costly delay in rearming. in mid-1941, some American soldiers trained with wooden guns. The delay also had lasting consequences, including the division of Europe after the war, as O’Neill points out. Had the allies invaded France in 1943, American, British and French troops (and not Soviets) would have liberated much of Eastern Europe. But in 1943 America was not ready to invade.
Sadly, the prewar isolationism echoes in the present. “Americans had no tolerance for arguments based on geopolitical realities,” writes O’Neill. Foreign policy permitted only two kinds of rhetoric, the first of the “isolationists, the other of Woodrow Wilson”–what we now call “human rights.” The cold war abolished this debate. Our moralism was engaged, because communism embodied evil; and the war had discredited isolationism. But with the cold war’s end, we may be reverting to prewar form. We still have trouble identifying geopolitical realities or underlying national interests.
World War II surely affirmed U.S. economic power. By 1944, average family incomes were perhaps 25 percent higher than in 1941. Even here, though, it is easy to draw the wrong conclusion. To some, the success of the war-time collaboration of business and government calls for more of the same now. In fact, the cooperation was not all that smooth. Mobilization was marked by bureaucratic confusion that, by one study, cut munitions output 10 to 20 percent. Public support for complex economic controls (production allocations, wage and price rules) broke down once victory seemed inevitable.
What we need to remember is that we made plenty of mistakes. The trouble is that memories of wars, for good or ill, are inevitably clouded by victory or defeat. For years, little was said of the patriotism of American soldiers in Vietnam, because the war was deemed wrong. Likewise, our triumph in World War II has obscured many errors. Compared with other countries’ losses, ours were low: 405,000 dead of the 16 million who served. But some frontline casualty rates were horrific and stemmed from blunders, as O’Neill points out. Interservice rivalry between the navy and General MacArthur caused the navy to invade, at a huge cost in lives, many Pacific islands with little military value.
It was not a good war, only a necessary one. The overriding lessons are to recognize the permanence of evil and to prevent major wars through strength. It is true that, once aroused, Americans fought doggedly at home and abroad. There was, as one woman wrote her soldier-husband on VJ Day, “a determination to keep our way of life.” But we were simply making the best of a bad situation.
title: “War And Remembrance” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-19” author: “Stanley Williams”
Triumphant armies have long carried away the loser’s art. The Louvre has Veronese’s ““Wedding at Cana’’ because Napoleon stole it from Venice. He also tried to remove the Horses of St. Mark, but the Duke of Wellington made him give them back to the Venetians . . . who’d taken them from the Byzantines. But the Nazis were particularly wanton, as Lynn Nicholas documents in her award-winning book, ““The Rape of Europa.’’ ““You have to be a little bit sympathetic to the Russian point of view because the Germans destroyed so much,’’ she says. Feelings about repatriating art run especially high with the Russians, who kept much of what they held secret up until the early ’90s. Then a small window of reconciliation opened, only to close again when the country was gripped by nationalist fervor.
When a German TV crew arrived at the Pushkin opening last week, the museum’s director, Irina Antonova, 72, waved them off, saying they should pay for the right to film it; otherwise they’d be ““stealing.’’ ““Soviet troops saved these art works while the Fascists wrecked ours,’’ she said. ““We deserve some form of compensation.’’ The show’s inclusion of eight paintings theNazis had appropriated from the private collections of Hungarian Jews is especially offensive to some. ““I think it’s a scandal to hang a painting from a German collection next to a painting from a private Jewish collection, especially one acquired by Eichmann just as he sent hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz,’’ says Willi Korte, a German historian whose specialty is tracking works removed from postwar Germany. Konstantin Akinsha, a Russian scholar instrumental in uncovering the existence of German art in Russia, is even more scathing: ““I don’t see the difference between the nationalist orgy at the Pushkin and what’s happening in Chechnya. Russia is drifting in a rightward direction.''
In 1945, the so-called Trophy Commissions were set up in the Soviet Union – personally overseen by Stalin – to collect reparations, mostly industrial and military material. But the Red Army discovered another windfall: art collections deposited for safekeeping in special bunkers beneath Berlin’s museums and other buildings. Five days before Germany’s surrender, the Soviets began sending trainloads of treasures east. In addition to the art the Pushkin and Hermitage are making public, the loot is believed to have included (among 2.5 million items) almost the entire contents of Berlin’s East Asian Museum, 3,500 paintings from the Potsdam palaces of the Prussian kings, Titians and Bruegels from the Dresden museums, and Leipzig University’s Gutenberg Bible. Antonova herself helped unload some of the special trains arriving in Moscow in 1945.
The case can be made that Germany deserved to lose everything. Besides pillaging the Jews he annihilated all over Europe, Hitler also set out to extinguish Slavic culture. His troops plundered and burned more than 400 museums on their way to Moscow. Russia says it is missing 200,000 art works, including tons of amber carried away from the Catherine Palace outside Leningrad. And what the Soviets saved cost them dearly: every work in the Hermitage survived the siege of Leningrad, but 500,000 people (half the city’s population) died in the battle.
Americans cannot sit back smugly and watch the spectacle of art-grabbing between Russia and Germany, for our own occupation record is not spotless. According to one account, in July 1945, the U.S. military payroll in Berlin was about $1 million. The amount of postal money orders purchased by entrepreneurial GIs: $4 million. One enterprising lieutenant smuggled gold-and-jewel-encrusted reliquaries from the cathedral in Quedlinburg back home to Texas. In 1991 Germany quietly paid off his heirs with $2.75 million and got some ofthe works back – but not before the Dallas Museum of Art exhibited the treasures, Pushkin style.
Taking art as spoils of war has been against international law since the 1907 Hague Convention. During the 1940s and ’50s, the U.S.S.R. did send many art works back to East Germany, but returned nothing to the West. In 1990, however, Mikhail Gorbachev signed a treaty stipulating that all misappropriated art would be mutually returned. A 1992 accord set up a Russo-German restitution commission. Today, Germany says it returned everything that could be found. But the Russian political climate has changed. Economic turmoil, social decay and a disintegrating empire have turned the government severely to the right. No more wimpy givebacks. The return of 6,000 volumes (including a 1541Bible) to Germany’s Gotha library was blocked at the last minute by customs officials. A former army officer’s private attempt to return old-master drawings taken from the Bremen Kunsthalle collection was likewise derailed last year. The Russian Parliament has suspended the return of all art and is now considering a law that would nationalize Russia’s spoils of war.
The hard-line position may be a minority viewpoint within Russia. Pragmatists are willing to admit that prewar owners are legal owners. On a recent trip to New York, Hermitage director Mikhail Piotrovski indicated he favored returning to Germany the bulk of the booty, but leaving some art behind for the Hermitage and other museums. (One expert has called it the ““let’s make a deal’’ approach.) The Pushkin plans to show more spoils: in September, an exhibit of a Dutch drawings collection, said to be worth $100 million, by such artists as Rembrandt, Durer and Cezanne, and in January, a show of ancient gold excavated by Heinrich Schliemann at Troy in the 19th century. But the thrill of revelation won’t make the issue of repatriation go away.
title: “War And Remembrance” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-13” author: “Annmarie Schilling”
That’s where Burns aims to put you, too. In the middle of Peleliu, Tarawa, Iwo Jima, D-Day, the Hürtgen Forest, the Battle of the Bulge, Auschwitz, Hiroshima—and in Waterbury, Conn., Mobile, Ala., Luverne, Minn., and Sacramento, Calif., where the loved ones of ordinary soldiers and airmen waited and worried. If you saw Burns’s 1990 film “The Civil War,” you know what you’re in for—except that here he supplements his trademark panning shots of grainy photographs with combat footage, much of it, surprisingly, in all-too-living color. And instead of such historians as Shelby Foote, “The War” has present-day recollections from those who were there, with faces that would catch the eye of any filmmaker. Mobile’s Sid Phillips, still lean and handsome, recollects atrocities in the Pacific. His townsman John Gray, whose bearing and features evoke the bluesman Howlin’ Wolf, tells about dancing with Samoan girls who’d reach back to see if blacks really had tails. And Luverne’s Quentin Aanenson, who looks gentle and haunted, talks about how his right hand still won’t function when he wakes up from nightmares of having used it to gun down Germans massed in a truck.
Burns’s single most important source of photos and footage was the National Archives, which stores the military’s official combat photography. “The thing that pisses me off more than anything else,” he says, “is that they don’t charge us anything, while the people who charge the most are the Germans and the Japanese. What’s wrong with this picture?” The newly discovered color footage—old newsreels had showed some of it in black-and-white—has a fearsome immediacy: “This is as close to the meat grinder as we can get.” Still, Burns downplays his gumshoe work: " ‘Rare and never-before-seen footage’ is the trope that I’ve beaten to death, as has everyone else. It’s how you use it. It’s not just illustrating, it’s trying to put you in the moment.”
Inevitably, though, this documentary also puts you in a moment Burns never foresaw: today, in Iraq, and on a far different home front. No scrap drives, Victory Bonds, rationing or air-raid wardens yelling at you to pull down your shades. Where “home front,” in fact, is a quaint expression—except to the families, far fewer than in World War II, with a reason to take it personally. And “war effort” means yellow-ribbon decals in the mall parking lot. In the current war, Burns says, “we’re not permitted to shoot the caskets coming back. In this film, we show huge nets from a trawler, each one filled with 15 or 20 flag-draped coffins. Today you can’t show the bad stuff. You can’t even find the bad stuff, without behaving like a pornographer on the Internet. We don’t even know the cost anymore.” When Burns began work on “The War” in 2001, he couldn’t have known Iraq would become the film’s secret subject, even though the place is never mentioned.
In John Cheever’s 1954 story “The Country Husband,” published only nine years after the end of the war, to bring up the topic at a suburban cocktail party was “unseemly and impolite.” “The people in the Farquarsons’ living room seemed united in their tacit claim that there had been no past, no war—that there was no danger or trouble in the world.” After Vietnam, and especially since the 40th anniversary of D-Day in 1984—a “long orgy of sentiment and self-congratulation,” Washington Post essayist Jonathan Yardley called it at the time—our view of World War II began blurring into nostalgia. It’s also generated high ratings on TV and coined money at bookstores and box offices. From “The World at War” (the 1974 documentary narrated by Laurence Olivier) to Tom Brokaw’s 1998 book “The Greatest Generation,” the usual stance could be summed up in the title of Studs Terkel’s 1984 oral history, “The Good War.” The fascination, Yardley argued, wasn’t really with the war itself, but with “the goodness of ourselves and our cause.”
Burns’s film, however, belongs to a newer way of looking at the war: the deadpan realism exemplified by Tom Hanks’s 1998 movie “Saving Private Ryan,” which presents straight-on the brutality and absurdity from the soldier’s viewpoint. (Hanks does some of the voice-over in Burns’s documentary.) For contemporary scholars, the top-down view of history is, you might say, history, and this revisionism suits Burns’s populist sensibility: “The War” belongs to the tradition of Ernie Pyle’s reporting and Bill Mauldin’s cartoons, not of Eisenhower’s “Crusade in Europe.” We’ve seen this sensibility in “The Civil War,” and in “Baseball” (1994), whose most memorable figure isn’t Babe Ruth, but the Negro Leagues veteran Buck O’Neill. But, like all his films, “The War” also carries on Burns’s most primal, personal mission: what he calls “waking the dead.” As he’s often said, the early death of his mother determined both his life and his life’s work—“though I don’t want to dime-store-psychology it too much.” It’s significant that the other piece of news prompting Burns to do this film was that 1,000 World War II veterans were dying every day. “One thousand,” he says. “And every time someone dies, all those associations and all those memories, whatever was repressed, whatever secrets—gone. This is our last chance.”
“The War” is in no sense a polemic—or even an “antiwar” film, except in the sense that any film showing what battle is like for those who have to fight it is inherently antiwar. “We’re not in a dialectic, as Michael Moore is, in which the whole purpose is to infuriate,” he says. “Which is all right, but it’s limiting.” Burns simply shows, spin-free, both the heroics and the atrocities, the brilliant generalship and the bad decisions: like Peleliu, or the bloody 1944 Operation Market Garden —“just a foolish, blundering, idiotic thing that Eisenhower approved on Montgomery’s recommendation”—which cost 542 lives in eight days, for no purpose. A month of World War II could produce the casualties of four years in Iraq.
As Burns demonstrates, both sides could be both incompetent and savage: American troops in the Pacific find comrades with their heads cut off and their genitals tucked into their mouths; they respond by taking no more Japanese prisoners. This isn’t to say that he ever suggests a basic moral equivalence: it’s always clear who the good guys are, no matter how badly they act. But after seeing this film, who could talk about the Good War with a straight face? Well, probably the same people who’ve been using the expression while knowing that some 60 million people died, including some 400,000 American troops. “It was time, I think, to just unwrap the bloodless, gallant myth of the second world war,” Burns says, “and say this was the worst war ever. The worst.” It was only—as the title of the first episode calls it—the necessary war.
So far, this underlying thesis hasn’t jerked patriotic knees: in fact, Burns says, veterans are thanking him, “at every single screening,” for showing war as they experienced it. Of course the film hasn’t aired yet. For now, though, the biggest beefs come from Hispanic groups and some Native Americans who complain that their people go unrepresented, and some affiliates—which didn’t seem to mind the obscenely gruesome Holocaust pictures or the scene where a machine gun blows off a soldier’s head—had a problem with the four uses of cusswords, one of which is alluded to in the anagrammatic title of episode five, “FUBAR.” (For you youngsters, this was a GI anagram standing for “F–––ed Up Beyond All Recognition.” Perhaps it was a snafu to include that.) Did you need further evidence that today’s decadent home front can’t see past the end of its own nose? There you go.
Burns carefully selected the veterans, families and communities through whose eyes we see the war for their geographic and ethnic distribution, and also for their just-folksy likableness. (Some aren’t just folks anymore: literary scholar, essayist and historian Paul Fussell, who memorably breaks down on camera, is identified simply as an infantryman; during the war, Burns argues, he was just Paul Fussell.) Still, Burns doesn’t idealize the home front of the 1940s. “The War” presents in detail such national disgraces as the ongoing subjugation of black Americans that led to race riots in Birmingham, Ala., and other places in the middle of the Good War, and the huge Japanese-American internment camps—which Burns says about 90 percent of his audiences had never heard about. (Speaking of national disgraces.) It deliberately cuts from footage of the ruins and radiation victims of Hiroshima to an inappropriately raucous VE-Day celebration in Times Square, with Glenn Miller on the soundtrack. “Yup,” Burns says, “we stick it in your face.” He was concerned enough about this point to write, in a follow-up e-mail, “I share your sense of the obscenity of celebration after atomic obliteration. That’s why we did it that way, and that’s the way it was here in these United States, despite the skin-crawling nature of it.” Still, the solidarity we experienced in World War II has come again only once: immediately after 9/11. And we know how long that lasted.
One afternoon in late June, Burns is holding a small press conference in Concord, N.H., not far down the road from his home and headquarters in rural Walpole, before an evening screening of a one-hour clip reel from “The War.” He’s been doing these gigs all year. A film isn’t great, he maintains, if nobody sees it—nor will the big-money sponsors pony up. (PBS is spending nearly $10 million to promote the series.) Only a dozen people have showed up at the oak conference room in the Capitol Center for the Arts, but by 4:30, at least 100 people are standing in line outside for the free tickets. Two buses arrive from the New Hampshire Veterans Home, and white-haired men with wheelchairs and walkers, some equipped with oxygen tanks, join the line going down the walkway and out into the street. Few people here are under 50, except for some apparent grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
Burns deals with the usual questions about profanity and the protests by Hispanics as if he were taking infield practice. He compares the cussword quotient to that of the far more foulmouthed “Private Ryan,” and notes that in 1940 Hispanics made up just 1.4 percent of the U.S. population—though he doesn’t note that an estimated half a million fought in the war. He’s done mini-bowdlerizations for some local outlets, and with documentarian Hector Galán filmed supplemental material on Hispanic soldiers; some 28 minutes will appear on the official DVD and in reruns, and on the premiere broadcast before the credits of two episodes. He’s also shoehorned in material about Native American troops.
His next stop is a reception downstairs, in a low-ceilinged, carpeted room where tables have been laid with crudités, dip, small pastries, cheese, fruit, bottled beer and wine in plastic cups. God knows how many times he’s seen spreads like this. He doesn’t actually get to eat: he’s too busy meeting and greeting, and he’s also on a no-carb, no-sugar diet he says has given him energy and taken away 20 pounds.
The auditorium is full; on being asked how many veterans are here, perhaps a third of the audience rises. Floor mikes are already set up for the Q&A afterward. Burns gives his speech—the ignorant high-school kids, the thousand vets a day, the no top-down heroes, the not-good-but-necessary war. Backstage, he eats a bit of cheese while the clip reel shows—seven clips, one from each episode—comes back out, gets his standing O, and audience members line up at the mikes. A man in shorts and a ponytail suggests that Burns make a film about “peaceful resolutions to conflict.” (Burns agrees we seem drawn to violence, but thinks it’s “more effective to keep reminding people of the cost.”) A veteran of the 1943 Tarawa campaign, one of the film’s grimmest stretches, approaches, holding a paper bag. He praises his old commander, and says the commander’s sister wrote a book—actually, he’s got it right with him. A middle-aged man says his father and uncles were in the war; one uncle was shot down and saved his crew, another survived the Bataan Death March. “Sorry,” he says, “getting a little emotional here.”
A couple of weeks later, I sit down with Burns in his office, under a large photo of Jackie Robinson, in the farmhouse where Burns has lived since moving here in 1979, before his first film, “Brooklyn Bridge,” made him famous enough to raise the money for another, and then 20-odd more. " ‘The War’,” he says, is “the first film where I’ve ever said unequivocally, ‘This is the best film I’ve ever made’.” (We sat in this same room after he’d completed the 2001 “Jazz,” and he said the same thing.) Like all his films, “The War” derives its power from the inspired sequencing of hundreds of small moments. Not just the harrowing combat footage or the corpses that seem to cry out to you, but the veterans, now grown old, recalling what they’d tried so hard to suppress. Ray Leopold, a Jewish veteran from Waterbury—who recently became one of the thousand-a-day—begins to tell about liberating a Nazi “mental hospital” in which medical experiments had been performed, then stops and says, “I really can’t tell you what I saw.” And then, as Burns puts it, “he stares at the camera for a thousand years.”
Burns loves to talk about his craft—hell, he loves to talk. He can explain to you why he needed to use Benny Goodman’s recording of “Solitude” behind one scene, rather than the Ellington or Billie Holiday versions, both of which he prefers. For the Holocaust section, he tracked down the widow of the composer Olivier Messaien, who began his stark, rapt, terrifying “Quartet for the End of Time” in a German prison camp in 1940, and got rarely granted permission to use excerpts to accompany Holocaust footage. “That clarinet just pierces your heart over the skulls,” Burns says. “If you notice, three times in that scene the music comes to a climax and it ends, and then it starts up again. And the last one is really too much, you don’t want it to start up again—we did it totally consciously.” On principle, he avoided too-familiar images: in “The War,” you won’t see the flag being raised at Iwo Jima.
While “The War” maintains a studious neutrality, Burns himself—like a lot of people you may know—can’t keep the lid on his private outrage over what’s currently happening to the country that he’s made all his films to celebrate. He veers into The Subject while talking about the new film he’s completing, about America’s national parks. “Roosevelt thought up the Civilian Conservation Corps, and within three months—good, you’re sitting down—within three months, it was employing 300,000 young men, sending back money and helping millions of people. And we couldn’t get a f–––ing trailer to New Orleans in three months. That’s what it’s like right now.”
“Well,” I say, “if you want to go there—”
But he’s already there. “We’ve outsourced our intelligence. Our ability to do things. It’s terrifying.”
“And our service industry—”
“It’s oxymoronic.”
“You heard about that paper that’s outsourced its local news reporting?”
“It’s terrifying. I don’t recognize this country.”
“Lately I’ve been wondering if—do you think you’ll be able to stick it out and die here?”
“I hope I can die here. But there’s a possibility … I made the films in some ways as a kind of—not bulwark, but just some sort of ‘Hey, can’t we all get along?’ kind of thing. ‘Don’t you remember why we agreed to cohere?’ "
Burns took pains to make “The War” judiciously enough so it won’t be put to jingoistic use. “I hope it makes people ask questions about war, and make sure that our governments fight only necessary wars. They’ll have to make their own decisions about which those are.” But hearing the theme song, “America,” an obscure old number sung on the soundtrack by Norah Jones—“America, America, I gave my best to you”—doesn’t inspire much confidence. It’s all too easy to imagine it emanating from a beribboned SUV, or an underarmored Humvee. Will one listener in a hundred pick up on the misty wistfulness in Jones’s voice, suggesting that self-sacrifice in a necessary war has become a thing of the distant past—except arguably in the case of Afghanistan—like a nickel Coke or a deal sealed with a handshake? But Burns is an optimist. He truly believes that a mass audience—if you call PBS viewers a mass audience—will understand a story and its implications, provided you tell it clearly.
Burns may be overestimating the capacities of a populace so unacquainted with its own history, so accustomed to being spun—in plain English, lied to—and so conditioned by the disposability of all “content,” from popular music to movies to celebrities to events in the news, that facts go in one ear and out the other. Whether the United States fought against the Germans or with them is an exam question, and who likes exams? The Iraq War is only the latest manifestation of a sense that the world is a matrix of shifting shapes and provisional truths: Saddam morphs into Osama morphs into Hillary, and rationales for war bob in and out of being like the cryptic answers in a Magic 8-Ball. American casualty figures—two today in “Baghdad” or “Anbar province,” seven yesterday, three the day before—have about the same degree of reality as the numbers on a credit-card slip or in the federal budget (where the cost of the war is off the books), except to comrades and family members. Would they seem real if we were allowed to see the pictures of the coffins? Or would we think they were Photoshopped by MoveOn.org?
If there’s any reason to be nostalgic about World War II, it’s that in those days such talk would have been insane. FDR might have played fast and loose with some inconvenient truths, but no administration official would have boasted, as one senior adviser anonymously did in 2002, that “we create our own reality.” How quixotic of Burns to make a film to show what the worst war in history actually was, back when we agreed that things actually were. And we knew what bound us together: if not goodness, at least necessity. If Burns gets lucky, his contribution to our understanding of American history will haunt viewers for days. Did I call him a practical man? The sand keeps giving way, and he keeps on marching.
