The War: Episode 7

Artwork by Auschwitz survivor Halina Olomucka

It's finally over. America has saved the world again for the 1000th time. Earl Burke got to "cop a feel" on Market Street in San Francisco on V-J Day. Katherine Phillips down in Mobile got to celebrate the atomic bomb as "the greatest thing they ever came up with." And we got to hear Norah Jones sing that dreadful "America, I gave my best to you" song one last time. I ain't buying the soundtrack.

Episode 7 didn't change the pattern established in the first six. Despite a good moment here and there, the personal connection we were supposed to make with these people according to Ken Burns' pre-screening hype was pretty much blocked by the chopped-up nature of the interview presentations. We rarely got enough continuous time with any of them to get any sense of their personalities.

And the war narrative itself was weak. There was lots of combat footage for people who are too lazy to channel-flip to the History Channel. But there was pitifully little political context for any of it. And there were points where the historical narrative was so bad as to be really misleading.

In the end, Burns wound up with the worst of both worlds: individual testimonies that the audience finds it hard to connect with as individuals (unless you count knowing that Katherine P. would pronounce "war" as "wauh" every time) and an historical narrative that was often painfully weak.

Episode 7 opens with one interviewee offering his pop psychology view that "there'll always be wars". We get a very conventional treatment of the death of Franklin Roosevelt. The only thing that struck me as notably positive about the historical narrative was that they did manage to mention the Soviet declaration of war against Japan along with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It would have been too much to expect an explanation that during the Cold War, the US account tended to make the atomic bombs the magic weapons that ended the war, while the Soviet account make the A-bombs almost insignificant in comparison to the threat posed by the Red Army.

The discussion of the Holocaust was as painfully superficial as most of the historical commentary. Here the America-centric focus of the documentary was glaring. The sequence gives an impression that is hard to believe wasn't an intentional sleight-of-hand. It's certainly true that seeing the sad state of inmates in the various detention camps in Germany and Austria had a strong effect on the Americans that liberated them, including giving many a new sense of how important the war was.

But this segment is introduced by historian Paul Fussell, one of the regular interview subject, referring to the effects the "death camps" had on people. It's understandable that people thing of concentration camps where people were killed as "death camps". But it can easily be confusing. There were six camps designated by the Germans as "extermination camps" (Vernichtungslager), all in Poland: Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor, and Treblinka. See also the article Extermination Camps from the Yad Vashem Web site. (Sometimes Majdanek is not counted as a Vernichtungslager.)

There was enormous death and suffering in other camps. And a large part of the killings in the Holocaust took place outside of camps, including mass shootings in the east by the Einsatzgruppen and Ordnungspolizei units. But those six camps were the locations used specifically for the systmatic, industrially-organized killing of Jews and others targeted for mass murder. None of the six were liberated by the American troops. Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka were part of "Operation Reinhart" in 1942-3 and had all ceased operation by the end of 1943. The Soviet Red Army liberated Majdanek in July, 1944, and Chelmno and Auschwitz in January, 1945.

This is another case where the information in The War was not wrong. But it surely left viewers not familiar already with more details the impression that Americans liberated the extermination camps, which is not the case. But it's clear that what the Americans did see, at Bergen-Belsen for instance, was dramatic and horrible (from a contemporary Czechoslovakian army newspaper, Ein tschechoslowakisches Armeeblatt berichtete im April 1945 aus dem KZ Shoa.de):

Angloamerikanische Armeen, die derzeit siegreich Deutschland durchqueren, haben auch eine ganze Reihe deutscher Konzentrationslager befreit. In diesen sahen die englischen und amerikanischen Soldaten erstmalig mit eigenen Augen, wie schrecklich Deutschen mit ihren Gefangenen umgingen. Im Lager Belsen waren 21.000 Männer, 18.000 Frauen und 500 Kinder. Es gab kein Trinkwasser, eine Ernährung war nicht möglich. Als die Amerikaner und Engländer ins Lager drangen, fanden sie dort Gefangene in einem so furchtbaren Zustand vor, dass diese sich kaum bewegen konnten. Von 40.000 Gefangenen waren 20.000 in so schlechtem gesundheitlichen Zustand, dass sie umgehend in Krankenhäuser verlegt werden mussten. Ein amerikanischer Korrespondent berichtet, dass in diesem Lager täglich viele Menschen an Hunger starben. Niemand begrub die Leichen. Amerikanische Soldaten sahen in einem Lagerbezirk aufeinandergehäufte tote Frauen, die alle völlig nackt waren. Der Haufen war 60 Meter lang und erreichte Tischhöhe. In Gruben und Gräben lagen viele weitere Leichen.

[Anglo-American armies which at the time were victoriously crossing Germany also liberated a number of German concentration camps. In these, the English and American soldiers saw for the first time with their own eyes how horrible German had treated their prisoners. In the Belsen camp there were 21,000 men, 18,000 women and 500 children. There was no drinking water, nourishment was not possible. When the Americans and English entered the camp, they found prisoners there in such a terrible condition that they could hardly move. Of 40,000 prisoners, 20,000 were in such a bad state of health that they had to be placed in hospitals immediately. An American correspondent reported that in this camp, many people died of hunger daily. No one buried the bodies. American soldiers saw in a section of the camp dead women tossed into a pile, all of them completely naked. The pile was 60 meters long and table-high. There were many more bodies in ditches and trenches.]

At least The War managed to give some sense of this event. But historical clarity was sacrificed to dramatic footage.

This series shows a big pitfall of "people's history". In trying to use the memories of "ordinary people" to tell the story of a world war, Burns winds up using their personal descriptions like experts of somce kind would be used in most documentaries. Now, I'm not one to promote the cult of Experts. A well-informed journalist or amateur historian may give as good or better an account of some events as a professional historian.

But it's one thing to hear Maurice Bell of Mobile describe seeing a kamikaze attack on his own shiop. But was the best guy to to give a background description of what the kamikazes were and what matoivated them? Bell tells us that the kamikaze pilots believed they would get a special place in Heaven for dying this way. Sound familiar?

But was religious martyrdom the sense of the kamikaze pilots of what they were doing? Leaving aside the questio of whether the concept of Heaven in the Abrahamic religions has a meaningful parallel in Buddhism or Shitoism, the religions of most Japanese at the time, here's what Robert Pape writes about the kamikazes in Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (2005) that the Japanese military adopted kamikaze attacks as a measure of desperation. They were initiated by Vice Admiral Takijiro Onishi as a way to slow down the American land invasion. And he writes:

Kamikaze pilots were also motivated by the belief that their sacrifice would bnable Japan to avoid occupation by the United States. These individuals, who were generally graduates of special training programs for pilots of universities, often kept extensive diaries, many of which have been published. Special attack pilots volunteered for their missions. Although social pressure may have contributed to why individuals willingly stepped forward, the common explanation they give for why such missions were important was that suicide attack was the only way to stave off American occupation. Shortly before his death, one pilot wrote in his diary: "We must fight to the end so that the Japanese can create a new era by the Japanese ourselves. We cannot succumb to the 'red hair and blue eyes.'" (my emphasis)

He also quotes Lt. Gen. Torashiro Kawabe, in a postwar description given to the US Strategic Bombing Survey on "the motivation of individual kamikaze pilots" that Pape says is in agreement with "contemporaneous accounts":

We believed that our spiritual convictions and moral strength could balance your material and scientific advantages. We did not consider our attack to be "suicide." The pilot did not start out on his mission with the intention of committing suicide [i.e., of immolating himself in a spirit of despair]. He looked upon himself as a human bomb which would destroy a certain part of the enemy fleet ... [and] died happy in the conviction that his death was a step towards the final victory. (my emphasis)

In other words, from Pape's brief account it appears that the perceived military necessity of the attacks was the central motivation according to which the kamikaze pilots were willing to saccrifice themselves in that way, not some promise of a special place in Heaven. But the latter is the impression with which the viewers of The War will be left.

The bottom line for me on the series: Burns' series provided some interesting moments. But on the whole, it was a real disappointment, offering largely conventional war stories and sub-par commentary on the major events of the war itself. Worst of all, the series will be very easy for most viewers to place into a familiar, comfortable, nostalgic framework, adding little to our understanding or perspective on the actual historical events.

Tags: holocaust, ken burns, paul fussell, robert pape, second world war, shoah, the war documentary