War is Hell

I've been watching Ken Burns' The War on PBS the last two nights, and it's riveting and disturbing at the same time. The film is the story of the Second World War told from personal accounts. Like his other films, it's extremely U.S.-centric.

The first episode starts with the attack on Pearl Harbor, and works in chronological order through 1942 from the Bataam Death March to the Battles of Midway and Guadalcanal to the Japanese internment camps on the West Coast. Not exactly light entertainment, and this was only the first hour of 15-hours of coverage.

When you watch all those WWII documentaries on the History Channel about this battle and that battle that focus on the top-down strategies and tactics, it's easy to forget that those battles weren't fought by little plastic Risk armies, but real soldiers on both sides. And many of those soldiers died.



My main issue with Burns' last couple of high-profile PBS series (Baseball and Jazz) was that both series lost steam over the last few episodes. The coverage of the 19th Century and the Negro Leagues in Baseball was fascinating, but the last "inning" that covered the years 1960-1993 was a mess. And the final episode of Jazz (covering the same period) was even more of a mess. As a historian, I think Ken Burns works at his best when he keeps away from the post-war era, so this series might work better than the others.