The War gets a good review - an "unambiguously good" review, we might say

My own view of Ken Burns' series on the Second World War was not especially favorable, as I explained here in reviewing the seven episodes as they aired.

But it was popular, as David Wiegand observes in his review of The War for the San Francisco Chronicle 10/14/07:

The 15-hour documentary about World War II, directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, drew a record number of viewers to PBS, and with good reason. With previously unseen archival footage blended with contemporary interviews with people whose lives were indelibly affected by World War II, the series challenges all that we think we know about the war. [What?!!!] By looking specifically at four American communities, including Sacramento, the series helps us understand how the war transformed the nation, both positively and negatively. While it is true that our definitions of duty and patriotism have evolved over time, our facile idea of World War II as being somehow morally unambiguous evaporates before the evidence to the contrary offered in "The War's" carefully detailed scenes. Most of all, "The War" isn't only about something that happened more than 60 years ago, it's about what the United States is today, and how much the world conflict shaped the nation's future. (my emphasis)

I can only ask, who in their right mind thinks any war is "morally unambiguous"?!?

This is a contribution to our knowledge of the Second World War? That the greatest slaughter (so far) in the history of the world, that killed tens of millions of human beings, was morally ambiguous? I certainly think that the United Nations/Allied cause in the Second World War was right and that it qualifies as a just war. But this boggles my mind to see that it apparently first dawned on this poor soul when he saw Ken Burns' documentary in 2007 that the war was other than "morally unambiguous". It amazes me that an adult would write such words for publication.

Just after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, President Truman's close adviser David Lilienthal said, "The fences are gone. And it was we, the civilized, who have pushed standardless conduct to its ultimate." A morally ambiguous situation, we might say.

Tags: ken burns, the war documentary

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

The War: Episode 6

Ruins in Dresden 1945 (Photo: Gerhard Gronefeld)

The historical bloopers were coming fast and furious in Episode 6. It was sort of like one of those games that people play on long drives to combat boredom (or at least did in the days before SUV DVD players): counting hawks or pickups or whatever. It was so much a matter of blatant mistakes as of a number of places where I found myself thinking, "Wha...?" Maybe "groaners" would be a better word that "bloopers".

In the opening segment, one of the interviewees from Connecticut, Joseph Vaghi, tells about talking to a German prisoner in his mid-20s who asked him where he was from. As they talked, the German knew geographical details of the area that surprised the American. As they were talking, I thought about how my father as a young man worked in Connecticut in the summers during the late 1930s tapping maple trees to collect syrup. He said that there were some Germans working there who had to go back to Germany at some point to enter the service. (All young German men were subject to the draft.) So I thought, oh, maybe this guy was working in Connecticut before the war.

Oh, no, the German told the American that he knew all that because he had been trained in a school for administrators of future American "territories". Say what?!?

Now, there is an awful lot about the Third Reich I don't know. And I would be curious if anyone has some more specific reference about such a thing. But I have read a fair amount about German policies toward administering conquered territories and also about their Fifth Column (espionage) efforts in the United States. And it just seems unlikely in the extreme that there was any program to train "administrators" for future American "territories".

This is where a little bit of analytical commentary would have been useful if they were going to use stories like that, because many viewers hearing that will assume it's a fact. I'm tempted to quote Rummy on "unknowns" here, but I would be astonished to find out that any such thing existed in any form. Hitler envisioned making America a subordinate power, at the least, in a future world run by the Axis. But he was far to fixated on conquering Russia and killing Jews in Europe to worry about designing territorial administrations for North America.

There are several possibilities for that tale, which I would list in order of descending probability as follows: the German soldier had actually been in Connecticut (the American said he spoke "accent-free" English); the German had been trained in intelligence operations for possible infiltration to the US; the American had mixed his memory of the conversation with reports about the "geopolitical" studies in Germany, featured in one of Frank Capra's wartime "Why We Fight" films; the German had studied geography in college; and, he was actually being trained as an "administrator" for conquered Connecticut.

Certainly this kind of obscure claim is something that requires further explanation than just to be tossed out there into the stream of war folklore.

Some other historical bits that bothered me in Episode 6:

The narration says that in late 1944, Americans were "growing weary" of the war. Exactly what does that mean? I posted back in July about polling data from the US during the war. In that post, I quoted Josh Marshall:

The key point is that many polls were taken during the war. And approval of the president's conduct of the war, understanding and belief in the goals of the war and other similar measurements all remained constant at very high levels or in some cases actually went up. One key data point you can see on the chart is the number of Americans will to make peace with Hitler - that is, an negotiated end to the war rather than the unconditional surrender which was a key allied war demand. The number was under 10% for most of 1942 and 1943. Then it briefly surged up to just over 20% in early 1944 (roughly the time of the invasion of Italy) before falling back down to about 15% for duration of the war in Europe. (my emphasis)

As I recall, the documentary's narration just said "1944" for when people were getting weary of the war. But the context and the comment by interviewee Katherine Phillips accompanying it definitely made it sound like late 1944. Did anyone bother to check this stuff before they broadcast it?

Ray Leopold, a Jewish medic fighting in Europe, heard a rumor that he took seriously that if the Germans captured an American and found out he was Jewish, he would be killed. That he heard such a rumor is entirely plausible. And Lord knows that the Germans, including the Wehrmacht, were willing to kill Jews. But I've never heard of any systematic practice of Germans executing American POW's because they were Jewish.

On the subject of prisoners-of-war more generally, this documentary like most war documentaries does a very superficial job on treating the subject. It's understandable, because in general it's just a much more dull subject than battles and the shooting war and the high politics. You can go in most any bookstore and find all sorts of books about the Second World War. Try looking for one dealing with POW issues in that war the next time you walk by the war section in a large bookstore.

This documentary mentioned the Malmedy massacre, in which German soldiers murdered several dozen American prisoners. This was a significant event and caused great resentment among Americans. I don't believe they mentioned that it was Waffen-SS troops that committed the massacre, but that one incident created an especially negative image of the Waffen-SS in the United States. Joe McCarthy, the notorious alcoholic demagogue from Wisconsin, made his first national stir in the Senate by expressing his passionate outrage over the fact that the US Army had prosecuted the Waffen-SS perpetrators who had massacred those American prisoners at Malmedy for war crimes. Yes, you read that right. He was outraged that the Army took action against them. McCarthy is still a hero to many Republican rightwingers. No wonder Rush Limbaugh in trashing our soldiers today with his "unpatriotic" insults, to quote the world Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid used in a Senate speech Monday. Old Joe would have related to that just fine.

But in general, both Germans and Americans did a reasonably good job of following the Geneva conventions with each others prisoners. The practice on both sides on the Eastern Front were radically different. Millions of prisoners died on the Soviet and German sides. Telford Taylor, who was a chief counsel for the US at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials wrote about that in his 1970 book Nuremberg and Vietnam: An American Tragedy as an example of why international law on treatment of captives is so necessary:

It is only necessary to consider the rules on taking prisoners in the setting of the Second World War to realize the enormous saving of life for which they have been responsible. Millions of French, British, German and Italian soldiers captured in Western Europe and Africa were treated in general compliance with The Hague and Geneva requirements, and returned home at the end of the war. German and Russian prisoners taken on the eastern front did not fare nearly so well and died in captivity by the millions, but many survived. Today there is surely much to criticize about the handling of prisoners on both sides of the Vietnam war, but at least many of them are alive, and that is because the belligerents are reluctant to flout the laws of war too openly.

Given the Cheney-Bush administration's policy of treating the Geneva Conventions as toilet paper, a little more decent background on the treatment of prisoners in the Second World War would have been very appropriate and timely. But then Burns might not have had time for the anecdotes from the guy who was a newspaper delivery boy in Sacramento all during the war.

The one story about an officer ordering the murder of German prisoners was an intense one. The interviewee claimed to have have objected to the officer that this was an illegal act and indicated that a number of soldiers wouldn't participate in the shooting. Here again, some effort at verification or some background on this practice would have been helpful. Some such shootings no doubt occurred; I'm not sure what kind of formal actions were taken against Americans involved by the services. The narration also mentioned that some officers gave a "take no prisoners" order during the Battle of the Bulge. To quote Taylor again:

Perhaps the most important of all the laws of war is the rule that an enemy soldier who surrenders is to be spared further attack and, upon being taken prisoner, is to be conducted, as soon as possible, to safety in the rear of the capturing force. It is "especially forbidden" under the 1907 Hague Convention "to kill or wound an enemy who, having laid down his arms, or having no longer means of self-defence, has surrendered at discretion." It is equally forbidden "to declare that no quarter will be given." And under the 1949 Geneva Convention on prisoners of war, they "shall be evacuated, as soon as possible after their capture, to camps situated far enough from the combat zone for them to be out of danger." (my emphasis)

I realize that for today's Republicans, such considerations are "quaint" and even downright contemptible. But they still are law in the United States and the world. In the Second World War, the highest officials of the US government still respected those laws. After the war, German and Japanese officers who violated them were tried and convicted of war crimes, some of them sentenced to death as a result. But war crimes trials and all they involved don't lend themselves easily to homey stories about how much fun it was to be a paper delivery boy back in the good old days.

I've posted more than once on issues relating to air warfare. So I won't go into much detail here. But the reporting on the air war was superficial to the point of being bad. I've paid particular attention to the story of the Dresden bombing. I went to Dresden on my honeymoon trip, so I do have some fond memories of the place. But that's not why I've focused attention on the Dresden bombing. It's because the Dresden bombing plays a particular role in the Holocaust-denial narrative. For more on that angle, see my post The bombing of Dresden 02/07/05.

The documentary makes it sound like the bombing of Dresden was Stalin's idea. It's true that Soviet pressure for greater Allied pressure on Germany was part of the calculation. There is certainly a legitimate case to be made that bombing Dresden was a case of bad judgment. But the city was a legitimate military target under the theory of "strategic bombing" being used in Europe. Again, it's not that The War says something wrong. But on a topic with continuing strong symbolic resonance, it didn't help the viewers to understand much about it. I noticed that they used the conservative figure of 35,000 deaths for the Dresden bombing. That's the high range of the realistic estimate. (Thirty-five thousand deaths is horrible by any measure; but the Holocaust-deniers obsess over that number for reasons discussed more at the link above.)

One of the bits of contemporary documentation they mention called even more for explanation. The narration cited a pamphlet issued by the 5th Air Force that said of Japan that "the entire population is a legitimate target ... For us, there are no civilians." To put it mildly, that was not national policy. Again, there is a lot to criticize about the morality and the effectiveness of the strategic bombing in both Europe and Asia in that war. But it was not official American policy to deliberately kill civilian noncombatants. That needed more explanation, definitely.

Particularly given the iconic role the Second World War plays in American national mythology, the bombing issues needed to be treated in more depth. A lot of viewers will take away from that episode a "lesson" that goes something like this: "Americans deliberately killed large numbers of civilians in the Second World War and there's no problem with that. They should have overthrown their own dang governments and surrendered if they didn't want civilians slaughtered."

A couple of other moments in Episode 6 also grated on me a bit. A minor one was a typical good-ole-boy story about Gen. George Patton stopping in the middle of a bridge crossing the Rhine river and saying that he had always wanted to piss in the Rhine, and proceed to unzip and do so in front of his soldiers. Now, I know Patton committed far more consequential indiscretions. His friend and admirer, Gen. Omar Bradley, wrote that if Patton hadn't been killed in an auto accident, he would have wound up badly damaging his own reputation by his own lapses in judgment. But I do wonder exactly what the regulations were about generals exposing their ding-dongs in public in front of their officers and men at that time.

Finally, Katherine Phillips of Mobile tells a story about she and two of her friends going to the train station one evening with sandwiches, donuts and coffee for soldiers on the train. She told it as a funny story and a fond memory. But what she described was having been terrified. A bunch of Marines jumped off the train whooping and started toward them. She and one of her friends tossed their sandwiches and donuts away, ran into the canteen at the station, locked the door, and hid under the counter in fear. That's what she described, even though she was laughing at it. The third girl was surrounded by Marines who kissed her repeatedly and left dirty hand prints all over her coat. There was a weird disconnect between what she described and the upbeat affect she displayed in telling it.

Episode 6 presented some good moments showing the grim side of war. But the defects and gaping omissions are so significant that it makes it difficult to trust the narrative. Some of the historical commentary is just sloppy.

Tags: dresden, dresden bombing, ken burns, second world war, the war documentary, world war two

The War: Episode 5

Yes, we had allies during the Second World War

The fifth installment of Ken Burns' The War strikes me as the most interesting yet. That's partially because my expectations have been considerably lowered by the first four episodes.

But still, this episode provided more engaging stories of people in extreme situations of combat in the Pacific, in the Battle of the Bulge in Europe and the Weisheimer family in their continuing imprisonment in the Philippines. It also had the advantage of relying fairly heavily on contemporary documents, not just 60-year-old memories.

Yet the accounts of the course of the war doesn't get much beyond the conventional, with lots of the same kinds of battle footage we've all seen many times before. This episode also continued to convey the impression that Americans were virtually ignorant of the world outside North America before the war began for the United States. While there's a lot of truth in that perspective, it's also misleading. I hope to expand on this a bit in a later post.

The bias of the documentary toward the stories of those who were quite young during the war continues to have an effect. For one thing, people who were not yet voting age at the time of Pearl Harbor really did first learn about the world outside North America during the war itself. Part of the contemporary material this episode uses is Sascha Weimzheimer's diary from her time in prison, written while she was a child. One Sacramento interviewee who apparently wasn't old enough to join the service during the war at all talked about how he used to play war as a kid. We needed a Ken Burns documentary to tell us that little boys play war?

The larger historical account remains a cipher. We learn that Roosevelt spent Thanksgiving of 1944 at a hospital for children with polio in Warm Springs, Georgia. What Roosevelt was doing in relations with allies or postwar planning seems to be out of the scope of this documentary. Speaking of allies, we hear in this episode that we had to deal with some annoying British general. Also we see a map that shows the Soviets apparently creeping at a slow pace across Europe, unlike the triumphant Americans who are already at the borders of Germany. It's nice to know that allies played some minor role in helping America save the world.

Tags: ken burns, second world war, the war documentary, world war two

War, The War, national purpose and death

The War series resumes tonight: six more hours to go. I still intend to watch it. So I'm hoping that the last six hours will at least be less unpleasant than watching someone scratch their fingernails on a chalkboard.

One of the things of which this series has reminded me is the different kinds of historical documentation there are. I guess that sounds banal. But it's important to remember that interviews in the 2000s of people recalling events of the early 1940s have their own validity and value even as types of historical evidence. But they are a different kind of evidence than contemporary documentation. One of the biggest reasons that most crimes short of murder have statutes of limitation is that eyewitness testimony has its problems even for recent events, but memories fade, shift and alter more significantly over time. Most statutes of limitation are seven years. Burns' interviews concern events around 60 years earlier.

Tom "Greatest Generation" Brokaw followed up his successful volume on that topic with An Album of Memories: Personal Histories From the Greatest Generation (2001). It actually does contain the text of contemporary letters and even copies of documents in some cases. One of the wartime letters he includes is from a man named Robert White to his wife. White was killed in an accident in October of 1945, the month after the war in the Pacific officially ended. In the letter dated April 5, apparently in 1945, he wrote about his thoughts about the risk of death:

I just finished reading the letter you wrote Friday. Yes I know Richard Wolff. I also know Virginia. See, that is an example of one of the things every one of us faces. We can imagine how bad she feels, but no one who has never gone through that can realize the full extent of her sorrow.

That strikes me as an honest expression of compassion, with no fluff or false comfort about it. This man died. His wife feels incredible grief. It's a bad thing. Period.

In the body of the letter he talks about his own personal struggle to keep going under the demands being put on him in the Navy. Unfortunately, Brokaw doesn't provide us his birthdate, so we can't say exactly how old he was. But his letter strikes me as a mature take on things. He was old enough to have a wife and a son.

That's one of the things that also bugs me about Ken Burns' series. The interviewees keep talking about "the boys", meaning the soldiers. I realize that's a conventional usage, sort of like "the guys". But even if you use 21 as the age for adulthood as it was recognized in those days, by no means all of the soldiers in that war were "boys". Someone could enlist as early as age 17. But the draft age back then was 20, and men in their early 30s was also drafted.

I don't have any statistic on the age breakdown in front of me. But it seems to me that stories in Burns' The War skew fairly heavily toward younger soldiers. This would be an understandable result of his focus on stories of people with strong memories of the time who were still alive in the early 2000s. And there's nothing wrong with that in itself. But it does seem to me that a little more information about that particular topic would have provided a better historical perspective for the audience.

White's letter reflects his practical perception that whatever he was contributing, he also risked leaving his family without him:

Things like this worry me at times, darling. Not that I am afraid, far from it. But God, we take chances every day, any one of which could put us on the "slab." It isn't the fact that a guy is afraid, but he gets to thinking of his responsibilities to his wife and family and it takes the guts out of him. Of course a married man may have more to fight for, but he still feels guilty about taking the daredevil chances.

And the way he understood his own personal situation in the larger context of the national cause is also intriguing to me:

You are right, darling, I cuss this whole thing at times too, we all do, but God we have to think of what kind of a future we will have if we don't give everything now and win this war. Right now I know of 15 fellows that I knew back home in school, etc., that are dead right now. Not one of them had a chance to live their rightful time. There is no doubt about it, "war is hell." We get that pounded into us every day. They don't mince words either. They never figure out our mathematical chances of living after we start fighting at the front. Even before we finish training, a number of us are going to "get it." But getting it in the Navy Air Corps is no worse than any other outfit. It is just that chance we have to take. Don't worry, though, darling, it is just that chance we'll have to take. We'll make it OK. All we need is faith, and we have that. No matter what happens, just keep up your faith. Don't ever let this thing whip you.

This letter strikes me as a real antidote the violin-heavy sentimentalism of the first four episodes of The War. He's saying, I know this war is necessary. But war is still a really f*****d up thing.

And his remarks about his 15 schoolmates that have died don't have any phony romanticism about how one of them might have gone on to be a Homer or an Einstein. He says, they were killed. And they died too soon.

Tags: greatest generation, ken burns, second world war, the war documentary, tom brokaw, world war two

The War and the high-risk narcotic of national unity

Iconic photo from the First World War of a wounded soldier deprived of the use of part of his face. His fatherland was no doubt proud of him. Maybe strangers greeted him on the street saying, "Thank you for your service".

At the Web site for The War as of 09/29/07, producers Ken Burns and Lynn Novick write of their series:

Over the course of seven episodes, we spend a great deal of time in battle - on the ground, in the air and at sea, in Europe and the Pacific - examining in countless ways and from many perspectives what one of our witnesses, Paul Fussell, described as "the real war."

"The rest of it," he told us, "is just the show-biz war. The real war involves getting down there and killing people. And being killed yourself or just barely escaping it. And it gives you attitudes about life and death that are unobtainable anywhere else."

Throughout the series, one theme has stayed constant, one idea has continually emerged as we have gotten to know the brave men and women whose stories it has been our privilege to tell: in extraordinary times, there are no ordinary lives. (my emphasis)

That quote gives a good glimpse of what makes the series itself confusing and also at why war maintains a continuing attraction for our us fallible humans.

What does this business about the "real" war versus the "show-biz" war mean? Are they saying to us that all those chats and segments about life on the "home front" are worthless fluff? Seriously, that short excerpt from Paul Fussell doesn't make much sense to me on its own. Is he saying that only military events, literally only battles, are "real" war? If he is, I find that hard to interpret any other way than as his own personal preference for military history. The armaments production isn't part of the "real" war? Domestic politics aren't part of the "real" war?

The sentiment that "in extraordinary times, there are no ordinary lives" is a good statement of the gushy core of the mythology of the Second World War in its most kitschy incarnation.

There's no doubt that war produces a feeling of excitement and solidarity, at least for some moment of time. I often quote the late historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s, comment that all wars are popular for the first 30 days.

But permanent war mobilization is also poison for democratic government. Every war of any size seems to inevitably bring government abuses of the public's freedom, even with the best-intentioned governments. (Just to be clear, a government run by Dick Cheney cannot be counted as a "well-intentioned" one.)

That feeling of national solidarity and patriotism feels good, no question about it. But war also has its price, above all in what was commonly called "the butcher's bill" in the First World War, i.e., the costs in dead and wounded. The promised miracles of air powers for nearly a century now have provided a useful basis for "boys with toys" fantasies about making war antiseptic - for Our Side that is - by killing lots of the Bad People while not killing many of Us. And I'm confident that if Cheney and Bush give the final word for attacking Iran, we'll hear about some new technological twist combined with new experience that will make this war a cakewalk, like the Iraq War was supposed to be.

But that pleasant, exciting feel of solidarity always comes with a price. As I mentioned in an earlier post, national unity isn't all it's cracked up to be. Contrary to the interviewee on The War who said that there was a feeling of unity he didn't think we would ever have again, it's very likely that the national feeling of unity after the 9/11 attacks exceeded even that following Pearl Harbor.

But what good has that feeling done us? Al Qa'ida is still out there plotting and killing. We jumped into a war in Afghanistan that possibly could have been some kind of success and in any case was unavoidable in the circumstances, but which has long since become one more useless little colonial war. We got the Iraq War, the most cynical foreign war that the country ever undertook that I can recall. (Some of the smaller wars, like the Indian Wars and various-and-sundry interventions in Latin America could be contenders.) We got torture as an official policy. We got Dick Cheney's theory of the all-powerful Unilateral Executive put into practice to a disgraceful extent. We got the final transformation of the Republican Party into an authoritarian political movement. We got the USA PATRIOT Act and unlimited NSA surveillance. And as sure as Richard Nixon was a crook, some substantial portion of that surveillance went to domestic partisan political espionage, as we'll someday find out. (The latter is speculation on my part, but speculation with a high confidence level.)

The next time we have a major terrorist attack in the United States, we should all pray for less national unity of that kind.

What Kenneth Galbraith wrote in The Culture of Contentment (1992) is still very true, and sadly will likely be true long after the Iraq War is no longer a living memory for anyone:

Almost any military venture receives strong popular approval in the short run; the citizenry rallies to the flag and to the forces engaged in combat. The strategy and technology of the new war evoke admiration and applause. This reaction is related not to economics or politics but more deeply to anthropology. As in ancient times, when the drums sound in the distant forest, there is an assured tribal response. It is the rallying beat of the drums, not the virtue of the cause, that is the vital mobilizing force.

But this does not last. It did not as regards the minor adventures in Grenada and Panama, nor as regards the war with Iraq and Saddam Hussein. The effect of more widespread wars has been almost uniformly adverse.

World War I, although it evoked the most powerful of patriotic responses at the time, has passed into history largely as a mindless and pointless slaughter. The party victoriously in power at the time, the Democrats, was rewarded in 1920 with a stern defeat at the polls. World War II, made inescapable by Japanese and German initiation or declaration of war, has survived with better reputation. However, the Korean and Vietnam wars, both greatly celebrated in their early months, ended with eventual rejection of the wars themselves and of the administrations responsible. In the longer run, it cannot be doubted, serious war deeply disturbs the political economy of contentment. (my emphasis)

And now that it's being used as the all-purpose justification for every war any US President deems desirable, we might wish that the Second World War had maintained a less favorable reputation. But not if Ken Burns and the "Greatest Generation" industry have their way!

At the risk of stepping on one of my favorite quotations about war, I would add to Galbraith's comment that American public opinion did stay remarkably strong in support of the goals of the Second World War. Maybe someone will do a real TV documentary someday that spares us the sentimental violin music and actually tries to analyze why that was so. Two thoughts on that: the cause was necessary and justified in a way that was obvious to most people; Franklin Roosevelt had a better fell for the politics of war than did his successors (predecessors, too, for that matter, with the exception of Abraham Lincoln).

Is Galbraith's view of war too cold and unromantic? Good. Any tiny thing I can do to help de-romanticize war, I'm glad to be able to do.

In his 1921 book Massenpsychologie und Ich-analyse (Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego), Sigmund Freud describes with approval several aspects of the work of the French sociologist Gustave Le Bon, particularly his book The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1895), on the psychological mechanisms at work in unified groups:

In order to make a correct judgement upon the morals of groups, one must take into consideration the fact that when individuals come together in a group all their individual inhibitions fall away and all the cruel, brutal and destructive instincts, which lie dormant in individuals as relics of a primitive epoch, are stirred up to find free gratification. But under the influence of suggestion groups are also capable of high achievements in the shape of abnegation, unselfishness, and devotion to an ideal. While with isolated individuals personal interest is almost the only motive force, with groups it is very rarely prominent. It is possible to speak of an individual having his moral standards raised by a group .... Whereas the intellectual capacity of a group is always far below that of an individual, its ethical conduct may rise as high above his as it may sink deep below it.

... In groups the most contradictory ideas can exist side by side and tolerate each other, without any conflict arising from the logical contradiction between them. But this is also the case in the unconscious mental life of individuals, of children and of neurotics, as psycho-analysis has long pointed out. ...

And, finally, groups have never thirsted after truth. They demand illusions, and cannot do without them. They constantly give what is unreal precedence over what is real; they are almost as strongly influenced by what is untrue as by what is true. They have an evident tendency not to distinguish between the two ... (my emphasis; Standard English edition translation)

That is a good statement of the dynamic by which wars can produce both great achievements of self-sacrifice and personal accomplishment, as well as the greatest and most sickening cruelties. That dynamic operates no matter how worthy the cause in some kind of objective, ethical, moral, religious, political sense. If the best causes need conscious restraint, which is where the rules and laws of warfare have come from over the centuries.

When those boundaries are thrown overboard, as the current administration has with the torture policy and the invasion of Iraq when no imminent threat had occurred, and then reinforced that freedom from constraints by producing only half-baked prosecutions of the most serious legal offenses committed by Americans, for many individuals this no doubt took the lid off "all the cruel, brutal and destructive instincts, which lie dormant in individuals as relics of a primitive epoch, [and which] are stirred up to find free gratification" in group psychology.

And, no, trolls that's not "criticizing the troops", though some certainly deserve to be criticized. It's a recognition that those troops are human beings subject to human dynamics, not the toy-soldier heroes so many Republicans like to pretend that they are.

So in that sense, what Burns and Novick write is certainly true in wartime and other cases where powerful group dynamics come into play, that "in extraordinary times, there are no ordinary lives". But unless we fully recognize the dark side of that kind extraordinariness, we make the positive side into a pretty lie.

Chris Hedges gives a vivid description of his own experience of war fever in the context of his work as a war correspondent in places like El Salvador and Bosnia in his book War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning (2002):

When we ingest the anodyne of war we feel what those we strive to destroy feel, including the Islamic fundamentalists who are painted as alien, barbaric, and uncivilized. It is the same narcotic. I partook of it for many years. And like every recovering addict there is a part of me that remains nostalgic for war's simplicity and high, even as I cope with the scars it has left behind, mourn the deaths of those I worked with, and struggle with the bestiality I would have been better off not witnessing. There is a part of me - maybe it is a part of many of us - that decided at certain moments that I would rather die like this than go back to the routine of life. The chance to exist for an intense and overpowering moment, even if it meant certain oblivion, seemed worth it in the midst of war - and very stupid once the war ended.

A Hallmark-card-style slogan like "in extraordinary times, there are no ordinary lives", standing alone, is about like saying that war gives its participants special opportunities for travel.

Tags: chris hedges, freud, john kenneth galbraith, ken burns, the war documentary

The War takes pride in America

Episode 4 of Ken Burns' The War presented us with the Anglo-British-American invasion of France in June 1944, apparently the grandest and most decisive military event in all of human history. All that had come before, our war interpreter tells us, were "mere preliminaries". Stalingrad, Kursk, Midway: small stuff, practically inconsequential. It had to be the Americans who achieved the Turning Point of All History. And in a battle, of course. Not in writing a Constitution or curing polio or some wimp sissy stuff like that. The invasion of France in 1944 was "the greatest invasion in history," we learn. Well, I guess if you don't count the massive attack that Germany and its allies threw at the Soviet Union almost exactly three years earlier. But who cares what happens in a backwater of history like Russia and eastern Europe?

A way occurred to me to describe the dissonance I have watching The War. Jackson Browne did a haunting song about the bloody civil conflicts in Africa over blood diamonds, called "Sergio Leone". It's about a filmmaker who records the brutal events. The concluding lines are:

From the Via Tusacalana to the view from Miller Drive
He shot the eyes of bad men and kept their deaths alive
With the darkness and the anguish of a Goya or Van Cleef
He rescued truth from beauty and meaning from belief

Just once in my life, I wish I could write a line as evocative as, "He rescued truth from beauty and meaning from belief."

But since I probably never will, I'll borrow Jackson Browne's lines to describe the impression Burns' documentary is making on me:

From the bombing of Pearl Harbor to the view from Utah Beach
He took long reams of war film and sandwiched it in kitsch
With the brightness and nostalgia of Norman Rockwell painting cheese
He buried truth in violins and horror in light relief

Tags: jackson browne, ken burns, second world war, the war documentary, world war two

The War: Episode 3

The Battle of Tarawa: covered in Episode 3

Watching Episode 3 of Ken Burns' The War was kind of like listening to an elderly friend or relative who's telling stories that you've heard five or ten times before. It's nice to hear the familiar tales, even the sad parts. But they don't tell you anything you didn't learn the first two or three times you heard them.

After seeing this episode, I would say that the approach of the film doesn't measure up to his declared goal of making us feel we know these families being interviewed like they are own own families. To give something like that kind of emotional intimacy to it - discounting the hyperbole of feeling like they are our own families - the film would have needed a much more narrow focus on the lives of individuals and much less combat footage. It would also need a different kind of descriptive background for the "home front" in general, e.g., how many of those romantic war marriages of which we hear about two in this episode really worked out?

The problem is that telling the story of the impact of war on an individual or a particular family is a very different undertaking than telling the story of a big, long, complicated undertaking like the Second World War. Burns tries to do both and also frame it all so that it wouldn't feel much more challenging or upsetting than a Hallmark card. Okaly, a Hallmark bereavement card, but still...

The effect is much like seeing a succesion of Norman Rockwell paintings alternating with stock battle footage with dubbed-in explosions and gun sounds.

Take Earle Burke from the second episode. He talked about how he not only came to feel his own mortality as a gunner in a bomber, but also came to realize what it did to his parents when he joined the servcie in such a high-risk branch after his older brother had just been killed in the war.

How did that experience affect his realtionship with his parents? Did he feel guilty enough about it that it affected important life decision? Did they ever express anger or resentment over it?

War bond drives, letters to and from home, joyful homecomings, the telegrams notifying families of a loss. These are all real and important parts of the history of that war. But, as Joe Stalin or somebody is reported to have said, "One death is a tragedy; ten thousand deaths is a statistic."

So far, between the schmaltzy incidental music and the ever-recurring footage of artillery going off, the film hasn't made me feel the tragedy or have any better understanding of the statistics. On Monday, I posted a paragraph from Studs Terkel's "The Good War" that made the tragedy of individual loss feel like a tragedy. It was an Iowa farmer, remembering the excitement in the community about how wartime production would produce better economic times. He ended by saying:

This neighbor told me what we needed was a damn good war, and we'd solve our agricultural problems. And I said, 'Yes, but I'd hate to pay with the price of my son.' Which we did." He weeps. "It's too much of a price to pay."

None of the stories in this documentary haved moved me like that brief story did. It's not that we can't see that the pain is real in the interview subjects in The War. It's that those segments are sandwiched in between a basic romantic, mythic treatment of the war that the losses seem like those mythical great sacrifices for the Noble Cause. That war was a noble cause. But so far, those segments come off in the documentary more like a war placard than tragedies that happened to real people.

This segment took us all the way into 1944 already. That means we've got more than half the series to go to cover the last year and a half of the war. Maybe he'll connect us a little more to the individuals on which he's trying to focus in the remaining episodes.

Tags: ken burns, second world war, the war documentary, world war two

The War goes on

I haven't seen any ratings figures from the first night. But after watching Episode 2 of Ken Burns' The War, I really wonder if its going to come close to the viewership of Burns' famous Civil War series.

After the first episode, I was grouching that a lot of it was standard History Channel fare. The History Channel does some good stuff, it's just that they became famous for running so many Second World War programs of one battle after another that it was popularly known as the "Hitler Channel" for years.

You would think Ken Burns would turn out something special. But by the last half-hour of the second episode, I was finding it downright boring. In his interviews, he's said that he hopes the viewers will become so familiar with the interview subjects that they would seem like family. Does this mean I'm going to have struggle not to nod off at Thanksgiving Dinner with these people?

I see several problems with the film so far. One is that I haven't seen anything that seems to add anything new in either facts or perspective to the story of the American experience in the Second World War. And it deals with the overall framework of the war so superficially that it does a poor job of retelling what we already know.

And the film steps on some of the parts that are the most engaging. Earle Burke from Luverne, Minnesota, has a lot of face-time in the second segment. And the film actually makes his life story come alive more than most. He tells about being a 19-year-old kid when his older brother was killed in the war. So he joins up himself, on reflection he thinks because of his brother's loss, but at the time it seemed like "fun", and he was 19 and indestructible. Flying bombing missions over Germany where the death rate among pilots and their crews was very high, he describes how he came to recognize his mortality fairly quickly, eventually ending his career on the bombing missions after two serious wounds which almost cost him his arm.

But the way the film tries to dramatize this is to show footage of American bombers being attacked by German fighters and anti-aircraft fire, complete with dubbed-in machine-gun sounds, while Burke is narrating his story about being on a bombing run over Schweinfurt, Germany,. We never see or hear the interviewer, but between the interviewer and Burke and the film editor, he was doing a darn good job of telling the story. But the fake machine-gun noise was almost drowning him out. I found myself wishing they would stop with the dubbed combat sounds and just let him tell the story.

The segment on the Japanese-American detention camps was disturbing to me, and not in a "Boy, what happened to those people was terrible" way, either. (I know there's some kind of ideological debate about whether they should be called "concentration" camps; I agree with the film's comment in Episode 1 that they were. I use "detention" only because it seems to me to be the more conventional usage, not because I object to their being called "concentration camps".)

It's preceded by the story of a white American family in a detention center in the Philippines run by the Japanese. I was thinking, why are they spending so much time on this, because there doesn't seem to be that much to the story except the bare fact that this family was there. Then it immediately switched to the story of the California camps, where we see footage of contented family strolls and baseball games to show us that "the internees acted like the Americans they were". With happy music playing in the background.

To be fair, the narration did say that those attempting to escape from the California camps were shot at and that the detainees had been deprived of their freedom. But the immediate juxtaposition of that segment with the Philippine camp segment really came off to me as intended to be a mirror-image comparison: one camp with white American internees run by Japanese, another with Japanese internees run by white Americans. The problem is, the internees in California were Americans. They weren't foreign nationals detained in wartime, as in the Philippine camp. Those two segments together left me with a bad feeling about the production.

One of the notable things about the series so far is that there is quite a bit of color footage. But I'd actually like to hear something more about the source of the film footage in general. During Burke's story, the screen was mostly taken up with scenes of bombers seemingly in the situation Burke is describing. I assume that footage is a compilation. But why don't they tell us? Especially when it's used at length to illustrate one man's story while he is narrating it simultaneously. How much trouble could it be to put up a caption that says, "Footage taken from various sources" or something?

I hardly know what to make of some of the historical commentary. Introducing Burke's story, the narrator mentions enough about the bombing policy to indicate that there was a difference in the British and American theories of "strategic" bombing. And that a lot of civilians were killed in German cities, 40,000 by their figure in Hamburg (and I believe they said in in just one night). But none of that really had much to do with Burke's particular story they were introducing. And they said just enough to brush across such huge issues related to the air war without giving the viewers any material to real understand those issues further.

And their discussion of the Second Front issue and the eastern front in Europe was so superficial they could almost have just left off mentioning that anyone but the US and Germany were in the European war.

I suppose I've got a "halo" effect working with this film. It's doing a spotty job telling the stories of the individuals and families. But it's also doing a poor job of telling the larger story of the war. We're almost getting the worst of both: a lot of schmaltz (a car dealer stopped at the base in Alaska and took home movies of "the boys" from Luverne!) mixed in with a lot of combat footage that doesn't add much of anything but noise to the story being told. Especially when we don't know if we're seeing actual footage of the events described: I guess we have to buy the $85 DVD-book-soundtrack package to find out about that.

Still, I've got more complaints. Unless I completely missed it, better-known interviewees like former Senator Daniel Inouye and historian Paul Fussell aren't identified by their more public roles. And it matters. You listen in a somewhat different way to an experienced politician or a professional historian describing things like this than to Joe Blow who's never been on TV in his life before.

The sentimental incidental music is just too much. Even if you were trying to focus on the nitty-gritty of the stories, the atmosphere with the music makes it almost impossible not to see this as a glowing heroic nostalgia tale. It also adds to the confusion. The segment discussing ramped-up war production began with about 10 minutes of boogie-woogie music for background, while the scenes on-screen were of hot, dirty, smoky factory work. Well before the end of the episode, I was thinking, "please, no more horns or violins!"

Finally, there's the problem of interviewing eyewitnesses who were teenagers or young children at the time. One woman in Mobile (who may have been a bit older than that in 1941) talked about how everybody supported Roosevelt after Pearl Harbor on. And a guy in Minnesota who was apparently a kid during the whole war talked about his very fond feelings about the sense of unity among people when he was growing up, "that sense of oneness".

National unity isn't all it's cracked up to be. And while it's true that there was widespread and enduring support for the war itself, the results of the 1944 Presidential election were that the Electoral College went 432-99 for Roosevelt, but the popular vote was 25.6 million FDR/22.0 million Dewey. Fifty-four percent of the popular vote for Roosevelt is a very solid margin. But obviously people didn't feel a complete "sense of oneness" in politics even during that war.

So maybe it's also the case that the good old days aren't what they used to be. Maybe the Minnesota guy felt a "sense of oneness" when he was a kid because the adults always talked to him about the war in simplistic terms. Here's where a focus on the individual's experience would have been enhanced by actually going into questions like that. But if you're not going to probe things like that a bit more in the final film, just leave it out. That same guy also talked about how he thought the wartime rationing was just an artificial scheme of the government to impose some sacrifices on people to make them more supportive of the war. Say what?

A lot of people are going to take away particular impressions of the Second World War from this series, I'm sure. How many days or hours will it be before a reference to it appears in a Dick Cheney or George Bush speech? Unfortunately, so far its coming off more as light entertainment than as substantial history.

Tags: ken burns, second world war, the war doucmentary, world war two

Ken Burns does "the History Channel"

War poster, 1942

I watched the first 2 1/2 hour (more-or-less) segment of Ken Burns' The War. I was not especially impressed with the first segment. It struck me as heavily sentimentalized and very uneven. The idea as the promotion expressed it was to tell the story of the Second World War through the experiences of families in four American cities: Sacramento CA; Mobile, Alabama; Waterbury, Connecticut: and, Minneapolis Luverne, Minnesota.

But in the first segment, it appeared as though Burns couldn't decide whether he wanted to do that, or instead to tell the story of the war with the interviewees as supporting characters. The section on the Battle of Guadalcanal in the second half of the second hour played like a standard History Channel offering, with the interviews just adding a couple of anecdotes to a stock account of artillery and bombs exploding with sound effects added. (The combat footage from that war typically had no sound.)

Burns decided to add segments featuring Latino soldiers after Latino groups complained that their role wasn't included. The addition at the end of this first episode definitely had a tacked-on feel to it. Although it had some of the best moments of the piece.

The first half hour sets a heavily sentimental tone, introducing us to the series with people giving idyllic accounts reminiscing about the good old innocent days of their youth. The incidental (background) music was heavy on violins, piano and horns in this section.

One of the things that immediately struck me is that because he's focusing on events as long as 66 years ago (1941), his selection of interview subject of necessity skews toward people who were quite young at the time. Glenn Frazier lied about his age to join the service at 16 in 1941. Former Senator Daniel Inouye is one of the interview subjects, and he was 17 at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack. Sixteen-year-olds obviously have a limited view of political events, which is what they were describing in the first half-hour.

So, we get the memories of people as teenagers recalling Pearl Harbor. Which was a big shocking surprise to them. It's not as if we didn't know that already. I assume Burns is trying to give us the sense of going all through the war with these people. But, honestly, the fact that people were shocked at news of the bombing of Pearl Harbor doesn't add much to our knowledge or understanding of the war.

And the need for dramatic progression with the interviewees even in the first hour interferes with the effort to provide a bare-bones historical context. In the first half hour, the film gives the impression that the Pearl Harbor attack was a total surprise to most everybody in the United States. But then the second half-hour recounts some of the things that Americans already knew about the war in progress overseas, reminding anyone who wasn't snoozing that people in the US did know something about the danger of war.

Maybe partly because the period leading up to the beginning of the war is of particular interest to me, I was dissatisfied with the background given on the war's beginning. Which was also pretty much stock History Channel type stuff. We get a film montage of a grim looking Hitler, marching Nazis, the bombing of London, the bombing of Pearl Harbor, a few seconds on Japan aggression in China. That introductory segment on Germany seemed to me to be about half composed of footage from the vile Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will), which admittedly was technically well-made. And anyone who channel-flips past the History Channel has already seen it, probably several times. Weirdly, the incidental music during the segment on Germany's aggressions in Europe was downright cheerful.

Given the emphasis on framing the personal experiences of those individuals, it seemed to me that a bit more information on just how big a political issue preparations for war had been in 1940-41 would have been necessary. It's often a cheap shot to criticize people for what they didn't say. But in this case, it leaves an erroneous impression that the entire war - not just the specific attack on Pearl Harbor - was like a sudden thunderclap on a clear day to most Americans.

And that's not the case. For instance, the USS Reuben James (the subject of a song by Woody Guthrie which borrowed much of its melody from "Wildwood Flower") was sunk by a German submarine on October 31, 1941, escorting supplies across the Atlantic. Nearly forgotten in popular accounts (like The War), it was a major event at the time. And it made people very aware of how close war could be for the United States.

I don't want to be a total Grinch about the first episode. Parts of it are quite good. Sam Hynes of Minneapolis gives a good description of the appeal of soldiering to young people. He said it was not about patriotism or who the enemy was so much as the appeal of the (perceived) romance of being a soldier.

The film did take the time to remind us that Gen. Douglas MacArthur in the Philippines, with nine hours warning after the attack on Pearl Harbor, still allowed much of his air fleet to set on the ground where a Japanese attack destroyed it.

In the Latino segment at the end, one of the soldiers gives a moving account of hearing his best friend in his unit die slowly in the course of a night while they were deployed in the woods on Bougainville.

And the film describes the internment of 110,000 Japanese-American citizens on the West Coast, including a couple of moving segments from women recalling the event as they experienced it.

But even there, the tension between following the personal drama and providing meaningful context was evident. The segment didn't mention the California white who typically bought up Japanese-Americans' land, businesses and houses for bargain-basement prices as their previous owners were shipped off to the camps: that naked greed was one of the reasons prosperous Californians pushed for the internment. Or the fact that not one single case of espionage by a Japanese-American on the West Coast was ever found. There were some cases on Hawaii, where mass detention of Japanese-Americans was not imposed. The internment was much uglier than a mistake or a tragedy that just somehow happened.

Maybe it's years of blogging that make me more aware of things like this. But a number of times I had to wonder whether the accounts were vetted for factual accuracy by the filmmakers. For instance, one Latino soldier who served with "Carlson's Raiders" in guerrilla fighting behind Japanese lines gives a matter-of-fact description of an apparently illegal execution of five Japanese prisoners-of-war. His account sounded credible. But did the filmmakers try to verify that elsewhere? Given the situation he described, that actually could have been an occasion where executing the prisoners was a military necessity and therefore a legal act. I certainly don't want to make any excuses for war crimes. But those are real factual questions that I'm curious as to whether they were vetted or just taken at face value.

The same thing occurred to me with several other segments of the interviews. Two white guys from Sacramento gave the impression that they had been opposed to the interment of the Japanese-Americans. The historical narrative did say that there was little public opposition to it at the time. But did the interviewers press their subjects on that point? Hey, I grew up in Mississippi, and to hear white folks today tell it, almost none of them actually supported segregation back in the day. Amazing that it survived so long! So I always wonder about statements like that.

I also did a double-take when the narrator said that the American oil embargo on Japan was their signal to go to war with the United States. Then immediately following, he said that the purpose of the Pearl Harbor attack was to push the US out of the Pacific area. It was just too superficial of an account to make much sense. And since this is a blog and not a magazine article, I can say that I'm not really sure, but even though the oil embargo pissed off the Japanese government, the brief way they presented it sounded an awful lot like the isolationist dogma which says That Man Roosevelt deliberately pushed Japan into war with the oil embargo and other things.

Speaking of Roosevelt, they tossed in a segment on Europe in which the viewer would hear if they were listening carefully and didn't sneeze at that moment, that the Soviet Union by mid-1942 had stopped the German army outside of Moscow - a major turning point in itself, which occurred about the same time as Pearl Harbor, overshadowing it completely in American news. And also that the Soviets had lost "millions" of civilian and military dead.

This was presented in a brief discussion of the issue of forming a Second Front in Europe with Britain and the US invading France, which didn't actually happen until 1944. It said that Churchill pushed to invade North Africa instead and that American generals opposed it. And while it was worded in a way that would let them comma-dance over it, the segment says That Man Roosevelt approved the North Africa operation just because there was an election coming up in 1942 and he wanted to show he was doing something in Europe. What the [Cheney]? Who are they using for historical consultants on this stuff? The Isolationists 'R Us Institute?

I tried to pay close attention to the incidental music, which has a huge effect but can almost escape the viewers conscious notice at times. The music was clearly aimed at creating a very sentimental aura around the whole thing. I think about the only time the sentimental music shut off was during the sections where they were showing the History Channel style segments of explosions.

And, hey, I'm a fan of 1940s music and I actually get sentimental hearing the National Anthem at the ball games and stuff. (It always reminds me of how General Andrew Jackson saved the country from British tyranny in the Battle of New Orleans.)

But in the latter part of the second hour when they played Bing Crosby singing "White Christmas", I went into eye-rolling mode. And then when it was followed by Norah Jones singing some song I'd never heard before, "American Anthem", I kinda felt like gagging. It has lyrics that would embarrass Lee Greenwood, the "Ah'm proud to be an American/Where at least I know ah'm free" guy. (At least I know I'm free? What is that about?) She was singing lines like, "American, I gave my best to you" while various battle scenes flashed across the screen.

That may be a perfectly appropriate song for, say, a veteran's funeral. But coming with the rest of the package and the endless violin music on the soundtrack, it really makes the overall effect of the first episode a nostalgic glamorizing of war. And as we've seen these past few years with Cheney and Bush, glamorizing war isn't a harmless thing.

A final note. Military censors don't mind the media carrying stories about grieving widows and about lost buddies in the field even in a war in progress. I don't mean that comment to be in any way disparaging. Those are real and inevitable parts of war. And highly meaningful to those who experience them personally.

But in a documentary film context like this one, those types of stories can easily fit into a sentimental narrative that frankly functions as entertainment to most viewers without adding much to anyone's understanding or knowledge of the war being described.

In the end, I'd have to say that this first episode gets lost in nostalgia and stock sentimentality.

Tags: ken burns, second world war, the war documentary, world war two

Remembering wars: Grigory Yakovlevich Baklanov

Soviet soldiers in the Great Patriotic War

Shoot, if the press is going to swooning in Second World War nostalgia for the next two weeks as a result of the Ken Burns series The War, I may as well indulge a bit, too.

I'm glad to see that Burns has collected a new set of oral histories. But he's by no means the first to collect such stories. Not only Tom Brokaw's famous Greatest Generation books, but a number of others have been published.

One example is Remembering War: A U.S.-Soviet Dialogue (1990) by Helen Kyssar and Vladimir Pozner, which grew out of a 1985 documentary which presented a dialogue of Soviet and American participants in the Second World War. (For those who may have forgotten, the godless Commie Russians were on the same side as the US and Britain during that war.) Building on the ground laid by the documentary, the authors pursued the project in more detail for their book.

One Soviet participant whose memories are included in the book was a well-known writer Grigory Yakovlevich Baklanov. He says:

I abhor reminiscing about the war. I have grown children, a son and a daughter, and I have almost never talked to them about the war. My growing grandson, who is in the second grade, once asked me, "Is the face of the enemy horrible?" I laughed. If the enemy's face were terrible, it would be easy to recognize him. But there are enemies with charming faces.

This is not unusual for combat veterans. Some of them like to tell their war stories, accurate and imaginative. Others would prefer not to think or talk about them any more than they have to.

He continues with the face-of-the-enemy motif in this part of his remembrance:

When I saw the first German POWs at the start of the war, I experienced true wonder, because we had been brought up with the naive notion that no fellow-worker, no proletarian, would ever fight against us. Yet their tank units, on the whole, were composed of German factory workers. At that time on the Northwest Front, I was nearly killed because of my curiosity and desire to understand, to understand who were these Germans fighting against us, because it in no way correlated with the prewar notions—including the time when I met Germans at the factory in Voronezh where I was working. Anyway, here's what happened. We were in a marsh on a reconnaissance foray, and we ambushed a bunch of Germans. There was a bright moon, so they were an easy target. So they fell down in the bushes, in the-water. And I, a young kid eighteen years old, out of stupidity decided I had to see what kind of faces they had. Who were these people? Because they couldn't be the same German workers I had known. And I just missed being killed, because one of them fired at me. ... He tried to kill me before dying. By then we were familiar with the terrible horrors; we listened to people's stories that chilled the soul; already by then the very word "German" evoked hatred. After the war, after much time, I was able to understand, first in my mind, then with my heart, that fascism was a tragedy not only for the Germans but for all of humanity. One people had suffered through this tragedy, and now they were carrying this terrible disaster to another people. I came to realize it was not a purely German phenomenon, it wasn't just a national feature. It was a tragedy that could happen to all mankind.

Baklonov mentions that he joined the Soviet Communist Party early in the war:

At the worst time, when the Germans were approaching Stalingrad, I joined the party. Communists were not taken into captivity; they were killed. But I didn't conceive of another life for myself. Nor did I really think I might die - as I said, youth is a most astonishing time of life, when we think we are immortal.

It's not surprising if his political perspective should color his memories of the event. That's part of how our memories work. And the victory of the Soviets in the Great Patriotic War - which is what it's called in Russia - was something emphasized by the Soviet regime, and by the Russian government today, as a point of national pride and as a method of legitimizing their own government. In itself, there's not wrong about that. There's certainly nothing unusual, because all countries do it.

This was also an eloquent piece of his contribution to the book:

There are people who, after the war, lived quite ordinary, commonplace lives. And for them, that time when they performed heroic feats or, as it seemed to them, made history, for them, of course, that time became their finest hour. Many others have gone on in life, achieved success, and so theirs is a more forward-looking view of things. But even I, a successful writer, must say that if there was ever something significant that I achieved, it was namely then, when I helped determine the fate of our homeland. That has remained a proud feeling in me. More than anything, it was with this knowledge that my son and even my grandson grew up. Grandpa fought in the war! Not because Grandpa killed anyone, no but because Grandpa fought in the war when it was to be decided whether or not our land and nation were going to exist. Of course, this feeling never disappears; one cannot escape it.

This sense of having been part of a larger cause together with others equally committed to it is a powerful memory for many veterans.

It's important to remember also the phenomenon that Robert Jay Lifton calls the survivor's mission". Whenever someone close to us dies, one thing that often happens is that the survivors channel some of their grief into some sort of survivor's mission which they connect with the one lost. This often becomes a way of reconnecting to life with a new perspective after tragedy. Something like this can also happen to those who lost members of their unit to whom they felt close.

Personal memories, especially ones of events decades past, are not simply factual replays of events. They are also interpretations and constructions which may have become a key part of a person's view of himself and the world.

Tags: great patriotic war, ken burns, second world war, the war documentary, world war II

New wave of Second World War nostalgia, coming soon to a television near you (Updated)

This gruesome photo appeared in Life magazine during the Second World War (05/22/1944) with a caption explaining that this was an Arizona war worker writing her Navy boyfriend a thank-you note for the "Jap" skull he sent her. (I don't have the issue date, but it's referenced in Back to the Pacific Again (and Again and Again and Again)! by Charles Urbanowicz 03/02/06 to Gavan Daws, Prisoners of the Japanese (1994).)

Nostalgia wave coming in the form of Ken Burns' newest PBS documentary series, The War. It begins on Sunday evening the 23rd, continuing each night through Wednesday the 26th. Then it picks up again on the following Sunday the 30th, with the final two episodes on that Monday and Tuesday.

The advance publicity/news is already much in evidence. I've listed some of the articles I've come across at the end of this post.

I resisted the temptation to buy the "companion volume" which has been on sale for a few weeks now, I believe. The PBS companion volumes are usually of good quality, but they may give a different view than the series itself, which is what most people will see. So I'm going to try to watch at least some of the series and react to what I see.

I'm all for people taking an interest in history. And Burns' famous Civil War series seems to have gone down well among historians not besotted with the Lost Cause mythological version of that war. His documentary on the Depression-era Louisiana governor and demagogue, Huey Long, was also decent.

But there's often a different between history in the sense of what happened and why, and history as images of national pride. And it's remarkable how people can filter even a well-done, critical-minded, challenging documentary to reinforce their own previous views, even when the documentary is actually contradicting some of those views.

The Second World War has a large place in American popular mythology as The Good War, a kind of standard against which all lesser wars are measured. for example, when Republican dead-enders talk about Victory in the Iraq War, they are appealing to a general assumption that real victory means the kind of unconditional surrender that the United Nations (that was Our Side) demanded of Germany and Japan. That meant that the enemy government agreed to step down and allow the victors to reconstruct their political systems and occupy their countries for extended periods of time.

But unconditional surrender in that war was a strategic policy related to the particular conditions of that war, not least of which was the nature of the United Nations coalition, whose three leading powers - the US, Britain and the Soviet Union - had very significant differences among them. The neocons' demigod Winston Churchill (although the neocon image probably should be written "Churchill", since its relation to the real guy is a bit imaginative) didn't like the unconditional surrender policy, and Stalin was kind of wobbly on it, too. It was Roosevelt who successfully insisted on maintaining that policy to the end. It actually was announced in 1943, not at the first of America's direct participation.

A lot of the documentary series is based on interviews with American veterans. I'm going to assume until I have reason to do otherwise that Burns made sure the stories were vetted according to decent historical standards. But the fact that the series is based around the personal experience of American veterans raises some considerations that I plan to keep in mind watching the series:

Memory is a creative process, as trial attorneys and prosecutors know well. Memories of events 50+ years ago have undergone that many years of processing. Aside from any conscious fabulations, memories interpreted and reinterpreted over five decades may be more personal than contemporary documents and photographs. But they're also far more subjective, as a rule.

Interviewers often get the stories they ask for, sometimes unconsciously. For instance, there are a famous set of interviews done by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in the 1930s with former slaves. These were elderly African-American ex-slaves who mostly experienced slavery as children; someone born in 1860 would turn 70 in 1930. These are often used in college history classes, I understand, as an example of how personal accounts have to be carefully vetted. Because when speaking to white interviewers, the subjects in the WPA interviews gave a more benign picture of their slavery experiences than the same subjects gave to black interviewers.

The format also means that the picture of the war will be America-centric. There's nothing inherently wrong with that. But it's not like most Americans have forgotten that the US played a big role in the Second World War. But how many know about what our Allies and our enemies experienced and how that affected the future course of events? How many Americans, I wonder, could say how Soviet deaths in the war compared to American deaths? (Hint: the Soviets had more than 40 times as many deaths as the US.)How many are aware that the Army's postwar survey of the effects of bombing found that in Germany, the bombing actually had the effect of increasing war-related production? (Short version: the bombing destroyed so many non-war-related businesses that a great deal of labor was freed up for war production.)

Also, a documentary or history that focuses on the war itself won't normally give much of a picture of the politics that led up to the war. That problem is particularly acute with the Civil War, where the Lost Cause version of history came to be an important political ideology which among other things insisted on a fictitious version of the origins of the war, i.e., that it had "nothing to do with slavery".

That problem is compounded by a focus on soldiers' personal experiences. The focus on the experiences of ordinary people is in large part a result of a democratic impulse growing out the historiography of the 1960s in the US and Europe. This has the great Jacksonian virtue of recognizing that history is made by the peoples of the world, not just by diplomats and politicians and war profiteers.

The drawback, though, is that it is decisions made by diplomats and politicians and war profiteers and generals that lead to specific decisions like those taken at the Munich Conference in 1938 or the Germans' decision to invade Poland in 1939. And those decisions take place in particular political contexts.

And you just are not going to get that by focusing on what John Doe remembers about his experiences fighting in the Philippines or talking about what he remembers his motivations as being back then. Remember the cynical veteran played by Humphrey Bogart in Key Largo? At one point, he remarks bitterly about what he fought for in the Second World War as being to rid the world of "ancient evils" and "ancient ills", recalling phrases Franklin Roosevelt used.

And since that war has become so iconic, it wouldn't be unusual for a vet today to say that he felt he was fighting to liberate the world from tyranny and to save the Jews from being slaughtered. When at the time, his main motivation may have been that he was drafted but anyway was pissed because "the Japs" bombed Pearl Harbor, and at the time he may not have given a s**t about the fate of European Jews.

Conversely, someone memories may be colored in a different direction by later experiences. I remember about 10 years ago being very disturbed by a speech given by a former pilot who participated in the bombing of Japan. He expounded at some length about how they knew that their goal was to kill Japanese civilians, and it was evident to me that he had an ideological axe to grind. Specifically, he wanted to wrap the aura of "The Good War" around his own opinion that deliberately killing civilian noncombatants is a desirable goal in war. To what extent the Allied bombing was intended to target civilians is a matter of legitimate dispute; certainly huge numbers of civilians were killed. But officially, neither the American nor the British goal was to kill civilian noncombatants (though the British position of targeting civilian "morale" came closer to that line).

But this character said specifically his commanders instructed him that their purpose was to kill civilians. I've always been sorry that I didn't challenge him on that point in the questioning period. Because I doubt very seriously that such was the case. And if they did tell him that, it's my understanding that he would have been legally obligated to disobey such an order. In any case, he was bragging about what under international law at the time would have been a war crime. It made me want to puke.

A much milder incidence of that was in today's San Francisco Chronicle, Reviews: KQED films add to what we learn from Ken Burns' 'The War' David Wiegand 09/21/07. Reviewing a documentary called Soldados about Latino soldiers during the Second World War, Wiegand includes the following reference to an interview with a soldier:

More than a half million Latinos served their country during the war. Most of the interview subjects worked as farm laborers in the Santa Clara Valley and Central Coast of California. One of the veterans interviewed in the film recalls that his parents didn't want to sign the enlistment papers for him when the war broke out, but the young man held his ground, determined to join the Army, because, he says, "we were soldados!"

Now, just on the face of it, it doesn't really make sense for him to say he was determined to join the Army because he was a soldado, because he wasn't a soldado yet. This is a relatively minor point, because it would be easy to read his comment as a mixture of the pride he felt as a soldier back into his desire to become a soldier and assume he meant that he was determined to become a soldado. But as a straightforward description of his own feelings before he joined the Army, it just looks factually incorrect on the face of it.

I'm curious to see what the series actually contains.

Here are some of the recent articles I've come across related to the Ken Burns series:

World War II created industrial, cultural revolution in Bay Area by Carl Nolte 09/16/07.

The Chronicle's Web site has an interesting collection of stuff about the Second World War, focused on the Ken Burns series: The War Then and Now, including podcasts of interviews with Burns.

'War' Stories: Ken Burns documentary brings all fronts into focus by Chuck Barney Oakland Tribune 09/19/2007

PBS goes to 'War' by Chuck Barney Oakland Tribune 09/19/2007

Below are some of my posts on Second World War-related issues:

The Munich Agreement 10/02/03

Jeffrey Record on appeasement 10/16/06

A dark side of the "greatest generation" 03/29/07

Historical analogies and the people who analogize them 05/01/07

Review of Making War, Thinking History by Jeffrey Record 11/18/06

Waldheim's posthumous plea for "Versöhnung" (reconciliation) 06/15/07

Kurt Waldheim, the "all-powerful lobby" and contemporary anti-Semitism 06/17/07

Yes, Virginia, there were polls back then 07/22/07

Occupying Japan and occupying Iraq 07/28/07

"Good" war, real and mythical 08/16/07

Unconditional surrender in the Second World War 08/17/07


[Update: The Life photo is also referenced in the July/Aug 2005 Extra! article Where Have All the Bodies Gone? by Pat Arnow.]

Tags: ken burns, second world war, the war documentary