'The War': Young Soldiers Die, They Don't Just Fade Away

Here, too, are enduring brush strokes: women climbing on their knees up the steps of Our Lady of Mount Carmel Catholic Church in Waterbury, grateful to God for the Japanese surrender; or the Jewish GI who kept his dog tags with the little "H" stamped on them -- for "Hebrew" -- inside his glove so he could quickly toss them away if captured by the Germans; or the Marine on Peleliu using his bayonet to extract gold teeth from a Japanese soldier not yet dead. A woman from Mobile, recalling the sight of caskets lining a train platform in St. Louis, asks, "How could you not cry?" How not, indeed.

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If "The War" is occasionally turgid, so is "Beowulf." Such is the risk of epic. The original 15 hours recently grew a bit when Burns added several segments to appease Latino groups who felt slighted. He could keep adding indefinitely, for even seven nights can hardly do justice to everyone who played a part. Very little footage, for instance, is devoted to women in uniform, who were valorous and legion -- 100,000 in the Women's Army Corps alone.

The British historian Martin Gilbert concluded his own epic history of the war by observing that "the greatest unfinished business of the Second World War is human pain." To hear of the recurring nightmares and to see the streaming tears six decades after the guns fell silent is to sense how even octogenarian survivors still feel themselves "pulled back into the whirlpool," as Aanenson put it. Another pilot says simply, "We are all casualties."

If no good war exists in Burns's cosmology, there was "A Necessary War," as he entitles Episode 1. He also dedicates the film to "all those who fought and won that necessary war." Yet a strong case can be made against necessity. Had the future Allied powers intervened to thwart Hitler earlier in his maniacal trajectory, perhaps the calamity could have been avoided. Even Churchill, while recuperating from pneumonia in Marrakesh in January 1944, lamented, "This war will be known in history as the Unnecessary War."

Not in "The War." Perhaps it's too tempting to contrast the meritorious struggle of the 1940s with the dubious conflict today. Watching "The War" in a time of war inevitably suggests resonances, as well as dissonances. Until victory was in sight, for example, U.S. government policy forbid the publication of images showing dead American soldiers, an approach reminiscent of the current refusal to allow even returning flag-draped caskets to be photographed at Dover Air Force Base.

But for the most part, the world of "The War" seems distant from the world of our wars. In describing the bucolic Norman countryside, reporter Ernie Pyle wrote, "Someday I would love to cover war in a country that is as ugly as war itself." Latter-day correspondents could offer a few suggestions. Burns's characters often employ the first person plural: "We" is the most common pronoun, bespeaking unity of effort, shared sacrifice and collective experience. This hardly feels contemporary.

On June 6, 1944, in announcing the invasion at Normandy, President Franklin D. Roosevelt took to the radio airwaves and offered a public prayer to "Almighty God," voicing a plea that "by Thy grace and by the righteousness of our cause, our sons will triumph." This too seems drawn from another life.

A Marine mortar man named Eugene Sledge, who kept an unauthorized diary by tucking tiny pages into his New Testament, wrote, "Something in me died at Peleliu." Sledge's experience in the South Pacific convinced him that "war is brutish, inglorious, and a terrible waste." However obvious, such reports from the front bear repeating, again and again.

The War (15 hours in seven parts) debuts tonight at 8 on Channels 22 and 26.