You must remember this

Sept. 25, 2007 | Sixty-two years ago, the greatest conflict in the history of humanity came to an end. Fifty to 60 million people had died. Many millions more were wounded or had lost their homes. Nations were shattered. The most appalling genocide ever had taken place. And for the first time, nuclear weapons had been used, raising the specter of human extinction.

Every way of trying to tell a story this vast carries with it blind spots, reveals its own assumptions and biases. Ken Burns' "The War" is no exception. But this magnificent 15-hour series will stand as one of the most extraordinary accounts of war ever made. Panoramic in its sweep, unflinching in its openness to all the faces of war, crafted with rare intelligence and sensitivity, "The War" is an epic achievement.

Burns' subject has always been America. From "The Civil War" to "Baseball," from "Jazz" to "The West" (for which he was executive producer), to "Thomas Jefferson" to "Mark Twain," Burns has sought out subjects that are deep in the American grain, themes and people that illuminate our history, our ideals, our triumphs, our failures. He is obsessed with the things that hold America together, that define it, that are quintessentially ours.

The danger of being America's Storyteller is that you can end up producing Norman Rockwell history -- sweet and satisfying, but sentimental. "The War" is the latest in a long line of celebratory works about World War II and the American heroes who fought it, including Tom Brokaw's "The Greatest Generation" and Steven Spielberg's "Saving Private Ryan"and "Band of Brothers." Those are praiseworthy works, ones that don't minimize the hideousness of combat or the moral ambiguity of war. But Burns' goal was more ambitious: to tell the whole story, to write a warts-and-all history of World War II. Was he the right man for the job?

In her review of the series in the New York Times, Alessandra Stanley argues that he wasn't. She criticizes the documentary for approaching the war from an American perspective -- that is, for being a documentary made by Ken Burns. "Examining a global war from the perspective of only one belligerent is rarely a good idea," Stanley argues. Pointing out that America's self-centered ignorance helped lead us into the Iraq debacle, Stanley concludes that despite its virtues, "The War's" parochialism leaves it fundamentally flawed.

Stanley is right about Iraq and right about the dangers of American parochialism. She's also right that "The War" is parochial: It's about America from beginning to end. But she's wrong to conclude that this viewpoint is pernicious. That notion -- that a documentary is automatically suspect if it limits itself to one national perspective on a global war -- is dubious. Countless successful historical works about wars are limited to a single national perspective. Stanley's criticism is driven by her frustration with the blinkered state of American culture. But for every American who becomes more jingoistic and insular because they watched "The War," there will probably be five who are inspired by it to learn more about the world outside America. In any case, history isn't a zero-sum game. There is room both for a documentary that takes a global view of WWII and for Burns' approach.

The real issue is whether Burns' vision, his take on the war, is adequate to its subject. "The War," like all of Burns' work, is essentially elegiac. An elegy, while at bottom an affirmation, is deeper and darker than a celebration. It contains the sense of tragedy, the note of fatality, the long view of time and loss. Burns is not a polemicist or a critical documentarian. He makes deeply emotional films that pluck at America's mystic chords of memory. In the case of World War II, this approach feels absolutely right.

World War II was not Vietnam or Iraq. It was a war forced on the United States, a struggle to the death against an aggressive and powerful enemy. As one of Burns' characters, former Marine torpedo bomber pilot Sam Hynes, points out, there are no good wars, but there are just and necessary ones. The idea of a necessary war has been debased by our current president, who has tried to don the mantle of Winston Churchill by claiming that his war of choice in Iraq is part of the "defining struggle of our age." But World War II really was necessary. There are controversies about the war (Burns, in a rare but nevertheless huge lapse, fails to address one of the biggest: whether we were justified in dropping atomic bombs on Japan). But few question whether it needed to be fought.

The war brought the entire country together in a way that had never happened before and probably never will again. We paid a terrible price -- not, as Burns acknowledges, as terrible as that paid by the other major combatants, but a terrible one nonetheless. After four years of bitter struggle that cost 400,000 American lives, we won. The struggle is long over. The men and women who won the war are dying. The memories are fading. If you can't make an elegiac film about this subject, you can't make one about anything.

James Joyce defined the sentimentalist as "he who would enjoy without incurring the immense debtorship for a thing done." But Burns is not a sentimentalist here: He's a lyrical historian. By looking unflinchingly at the horror of war, the devastation it wreaks on countries, people, families and individuals, he earns the right to his lyricism. Yes, Wynton Marsalis' deep-dish soundtrack, filled with folk strains and bluesy notes made in America, poignantly evokes our shared national experience. Yes, Burns tugs at our heartstrings with majestic images of American sunrises and photographs of ordinary Americans pulling together, whether on Iwo Jima or in the factories of Mobile, Ala. But there is far more footage of the darker reality of war -- the mangled bodies of the dead. Those stirring images of America the beautiful, those shots of determined Americans, are never allowed to function merely as patriotic synecdoches. "The War" is a war monument, but it's one that recalls the Vietnam Memorial, with its shattering wall depicting the names of the fallen, far more than a conventionally heroic statue.

Burns and his team, including his longtime collaborator, the fine writer Geoffrey C. Ward, and a group of extraordinary archivists, interviewers and editors, studied every aspect of America during the war. They unearthed a stunning collection of photographs, written documents, radio broadcasts and films, a magnificent treasure-trove of the past. But above all, they found the American men and women who fought the war abroad and endured it at home.

Burns hangs his narrative on four American towns: Waterbury, Conn.; Sacramento, Calif.; Mobile, Ala.; and Luvurne, Minn. These places serve as microcosms of the entire country. Burns explores the way the war changed these towns and paints quick portraits of each, but they aren't his real focus. They're of interest only because they were the hometowns of his central characters -- the young men who went off to fight and the mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, children and friends who waited for them at home.

Burns put out a call for WWII vets before arriving at his locations and chose carefully from among those who responded. Not only did they have to be from the four towns (there are a few eloquent exceptions, like writer and ex-infantryman Paul Fussell and memoirist and ex-Marine pilot Sam Hynes), but they also had to be the right kind of people -- neither inarticulate nor glib. It was important to find individuals who represented a wide spectrum of experience, who could speak about killing and watching buddies be killed, who were prisoners and volunteers and pilots and infantrymen and wives. They had to be real.

The search paid off. Burns' characters, now old, experienced the full gamut of the war's horror and heartbreak. They are stoic and funny, angry and forgiving, bitter and serene. Each has a different personality; each had different experiences. As the searing memories return, emotions often overcome them. None of them speaks "the truth" about the war, but they all speak their own truth, and their stories cut to the heart.

Next page: Every American will take something deeply personal away from "The War"