'The War'

Story of the World War II Through the Personal Accounts of Men and Women From Four American Towns

Acclaimed filmmaker Ken Burns, whose landmark series The War begins airing on PBS this week, was online Monday, Sept. 24, at 11 a.m. ET to discuss the project.

Related Stories: 'The War': Young Soldiers Die, They Don't Just Fade Away and Now, Six Decades Later, He Can Talk About It

Burns spent several years exploring the stories of World War II, talking with those who survived both in battle and on the homefront. With his co-producer Lynn Novick, Burns has crafted a vivid look at the Second World War and its effects on the United States and the world.

A transcript follows.

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Ken Burns: I'm honored and thrilled to have this opportunity to speak to readers of The Washington Post. We're now just getting the early ratings for the first night's show and they're through the roof and the book and the soundtrack are climbing the bestseller lists. So we're grateful for those tuning in. Thank you.

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Milwaukee, Wisc.: I was deeply moved after seeing the first episode of "The War." Could you tell us a bit about your process; specifically, how you seem to find your unique "voice" for your documentaries? Like your other films, all have that "Ken Burns" touch. How do you maintain the voices of each of the characters while still telling a story in your way?

Ken Burns: They have asked a complex question but there is a simple answer. We are emotional archaeologists uninterested in the dry dates and facts of the past but drawn to that which matters to every human heart.

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Bethesda, Md.: Loved the first episode, and although Keith David did a great, I really miss David McCullough. Did you approach Mr. McCullough about doing the narration?

Ken Burns: We have not used David because of his own schedule and wishes for 17 years. He's a phenomenal voice but I think he has over the last 10 years become our voice.

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Harrisburg, Pa.: Many people have noticed that the World War II veterans seldom spoke about what happened to them. What was it about World War II that seemed to let its veterans decide that it was best to remember in silence, and how were you able to break some of these silences?

Ken Burns: That is an excellent question. This is an unusually reticent generation. They went off and saw bad things. did bad things and lost good friend. When they got home they have no one who could really understand what they had experienced and so they locked it away in the deepest recesses of their souls. Fortunately, in the sunset of their lives a few of them have realized that their memories are our inheritance and have graciously let us bear witness to their extraordinary stories.

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Annapolis, Md.: Thanks for your work. I'm looking forward to watching.

Wondering why you chose WWII as a topic. Seems like your past ventures of Jazz, History of Baseball, and even the Civil War (before you did the documentary) were not well known. But WWII is pretty recent, and thanks to the History Channel, pretty well known.

Thanks.

Ken Burns: But most of the documentaries on the History Channel are distracted by the generals and politicians who don't do the fighting, by an interest in strategy and tactics, by an obsessive interest in weapons and armaments so that we have missed the bottom-up up emotional story these veterans are finally willing to share with us. Indeed, this is the first film ever to cover the European and the Pacific and the homefront simultaneously, the first to show really the brutality of that war and the first to give a sense of a complicated, not cliched homefront.

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Wheaton, Md.: Do you see any similarities between the rise of the Nazis and other fascists in the 1930s to the rise of the Islamic terrorist states today?

Ken Burns: I am not enough of an expert on history to be able to do anyting more than an amateur's guess that people everywhere are suppressed by the dictatorial powers of their leaders, whatever they ideology might be, which makes the American people so fortunate to live in a democracy.

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Sharpsville, Pa.: The first episode was very moving and powerful, Ken. I'm wondering how many other American towns had you considered before settling on the four that are profiled in the documentary.

Thanks.

Ken Burns: We actually thought initially that we might be able to do it with one town so we expanded to the four-town approach fairly quickly and never looked back. Each of these towns were chosen more or less randomly and I think that's been for the better. No one, except the residents of those places, come with any preconceptions and that's a good thing.

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Vancouver, British Columbia: Mr. Burns, do you feel you have captured the full history of World II, as the documentary begins two years into the War, when England had already been fighting alone for two years?

Ken Burns: As our opening statement says, we quite consciously understood that we were taking a partial story of the American experience in that war as seen by a handful of folks most of whom come from our four towns. We had no intention of being definitive or comprehensive and acknowledge that throughout the series. We hope that we were able to get at universal human stories that transcend borders and nationalities. The organizers of the Cannes Film Festival and their audiences thought that we had achieved this when we were there last May and we hope that every country will have a chance to do a portrait of their people in this war before those people pass away.

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Philadelphia, Pa.: Memories fade and people who lived through World War II should not be expected to remember details. Did you check the facts presented, or did you feel that was not necessary, knowing that viewers should understand ahead of time that not all facts should be expected to be 100 percent accurate after all these decades?

Ken Burns: We verified with official military records the essential facts that we present in the film. At some point, we have to trust as we do driving down the highway that the other won't crash into us, that the most personal details and observations are, in fact, true. After six and a half years of working on the project, we feel we've got a pretty good ear for the difference between the tall tale, the embellished story and real battle experience.

In the upcoming episodes try to watch their facial expressions and you will see that none of this is a pleasant memory or an exaggerated memory for these brave soldiers.

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Fairfax, Va.: What part did understanding the religious convictions of those involved play in your presentation of the war?

Ken Burns: It's huge. It's often said there are no atheists in a foxhole but we found it to be a much more complicated dynamic. Some peoples' faith was strengthened by their experience, others diminished but no one was far from those essential questions of life and its meaning and the presence of some Divine force.

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Washington, D.C.: Ken,

Many of us viewed with some sympathy your efforts to placate the Hispanic Caucus and Latino pressure groups but at the same time felt that selecting one ethnic group as a featured segment was an arbitrary surrender to political pressure. What was the numerical justification, if any, for the inclusion of Latinos? What percentage of the U.S. forces were they? What about blacks (which I thought was well enough covered, briefly but with all attendant ironies and ambiguities)?

Ken Burns: When we set out to do this film we made a pact with ourselves not to seek out any particular ethnic group. In the course of our five years spent in each of our four towns a diverse number of people came forward. Unfortunately, no Hispanics did. At first, we resisted making any editions to the film we finished in early 2006 but we realized that art has an obligation to transcend petty politics, even though many of those criticizing us had not seen a frame of our film and therefore couldn't understand that we were not trying to be definitive. We decided to transcend the situation, to rise above the politically correct bickering and to produce new content that would not in any way compromise our original vision but would go some distance toward honoring the concerns of this group. For me, it was a chance to tell more stories and as the extra scenes reveal we are still not interested in counting how many people from a particular group served in the war, but are after universal human experiences of battle.

As the Hispanic veterans say, they weren't Hispanics, they were American. And that's the point of the whole film.

Stay tuned in the upcoming episodes for even more stories about the African American experience and the Japanese American experience and many others that celebrate "Unum," which means "one" in Latin and not "pluribus," which means many.

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San Francisco, Calif.: I may be mistaken but from what I read, "The War" does not even mention the Holocaust, let alone cover it. How can an historian known as stickler to detail produce 15 hours of WWII coverage and still overlook the largest most evil war crime and genocide ever committed in the history of mankind ?

Ken Burns: Don't believe everything you've read. One of the most dramatic, if not the most dramatic, scene in our film is about the Holocaust.

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Norah Jones' song: Mr. Burns: Your use of the song "American Anthem" at the end of last night's episode made for a powerful conclusion. Can you discuss your thought process in using such a relatively unknown song for that moment (and apparently elsewhere in the series) and about choosing Norah Jones to sing it. By the way, I purchased the song from iTunes right after the show. Thanks.

Ken Burns: Thank you so much. My father passed away in 2001; he was a veteran of the Second World War. When I was carrying his ashes from Michigan to New Hampshire where I live I heard an operatic version of this song on the radio and broke down and cried, as much for the cargo I was carrying as for the beauty of the tune. I contacted the composer who had intended that be recorded by a popular singer, not an opera star. We worked the haunting melody into every episode of the series but I still wanted people to hear the remarkable lyrics. I think, one of the greatest anthems ever written. I asked Norah Jones to record it and she did magnificently. And I hope that the song goes out into the bloodstream of the country in the days to come.

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St. Louis, Mo.: In your interviews, did you find former soldiers who did things they were ashamed of? I interviewed a survivor of the South Pacific, who, with his wife sitting beside him on the couch, confided that he and a buddy had shot themselves in the foot to get away from the Japanese snipers. It must have been terrible for him to do this.

Ken Burns: Yes, we found many of our veterans willing to share with us part of what is the horror of all wars. Please stay tuned in subsequent episodes for just these kinds of disturbing stories alongside the powerfully heroic ones. They are both part of war and as cadets at West Point told us when we shared these scenes with them both sides must be told.

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Arlington, Va.: In tackling World War II as a subject, you had one great advantage over many of your earlier film subjects (Thomas Jefferson, Mark Twain, the Civil War, the suffragettes): the availability of considerable film and newsreel footage, rather than just still photographs. Did this material change your approach to constructing the film?

Ken Burns: It did not change our approach. We still consider the still photograph the DNA, the basic building block of how we communicate but it is true that we were able to find rare footage that helped bring this war alive in unique ways and that combined with the testimony of our eyewitnesses helps to make the viewer's experience of this story that much more real, that much more visceral.

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Catawba, N.C.: Do you have any personal connection to men or women who fought in the war? Relatives, etc?

Ken Burns: My father was an engineer in the United States Army. Fortunately he arrived in France in the spring of 1945 as the fighting was winding down. His stories, nevertheless, were a huge part of my boyhood and I still have some of his prize possessions that he "liberated" on prominent display in my home.

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Albuquerque, N.M.: What did you learn about war that you did not know before doing this documentary?

Ken Burns: Every day of the last six and a half years was for us a revelation. We learned new facts, to be sure, startling, devastating facts. But most of what rearranged my molecules was bearing witness to the extraordinary testimony of the men and women who are the real stars of hour film, the so-called ordinary people who remind us in every gesture and breath that there are, of course, no ordinary lives.

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Boston, Mass.: If you had to pick one war-related book and movie (fiction or non-fiction) for a commander-in-chief to read and watch before making a decision to go to war what would they be? My book would be, "All Quiet on the Western Front" and my movie would be, "Saving Private Ryan" (although there are several others of note).

Ken Burns: That's easy, my book would be "With the Hold Breed" by Eugene Sledge and the film would be our film. As Gen. Schwarzkopf told us after our Civil War series was aired, he was grateful for our approach that the arrows on our maps were real human beings.

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Beverly, Mass.: During the first episode, some statistics listing the number of soldiers who served during the war and the number of those that killed were shown. The magnitude of these numbers is easily lost without the context of the individual stories that you presented. Did you find you the magnitude of the sheer numbers of those soldiers lost or the individual stories of the soldiers had a bigger personal impact on you?

Ken Burns: Yes, very much so. Too often the sheer volume of the statistics is numbing. Ironically, it was Joseph Stalin who said, "When one person dies, it's a tragedy. When a million die, it's a statistic." It was our intention in this film to focus on the individual personal tragedies and to try to avoid the numbing consequence of statistics.

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Ken Burns: Unfortunately, I now have to go on to other interviews. I want to personally thank all of those who have written, especially those who have shared with me this morning their personal stories. That is what Lynne Novick, my co-producer and co-director, and I wanted: to initiate an intimate conversation about the experiences of those people, may of them the closes people we know, who went through this cataclysm and helped create the world we now take for granted an enjoy.

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