Burns zeros in on WWII, but part of bigger picture gets lost

World War II is a subject so vast and calamitous, it's almost impossible to grasp for someone who didn't live through it.

Filmmaker Ken Burns admits that, calling it "so massive, catastrophic and complex, it is almost beyond the mind's and the heart's capacity to process everything that happened and, more important, what it meant on a human level."

So, when his new documentary miniseries, "The War," begins at 7 p.m. Sunday on WTTW Channel 11, Burns tries to narrow the focus by concentrating on how WWII affected four U.S. communities: Waterbury, Conn., Mobile, Ala., Sacramento, Calif., and Luverne, Minn.

From there, a viewer pretty much knows what to expect from Burns' previous PBS documentaries. Photos, newsreels, letters, news reports, interviews and other source materials are edited together by Burns and his co-director Lynn Novick to tell a story, augmented by Geoffrey C. Ward's ever-exquisite prose, read by Keith David, and backed by period music.

"The War" is a lovely, evocative, emotionally engaging and, of course, informative piece of work, as one might expect. It also figures to compete quite strongly against the new shows debuting on the major networks as it runs in seven segments for 15 hours on PBS over the next two weeks. (Sunday at 7, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday at 8, then Sunday at 7 and Monday and Tuesday at 8.) Yet I feel compelled to add that sometimes a monstrously large topic deserves to remain large -- if not monstrous as well.

Burns and his crew have done a marvelous job finding people from each of those four communities to illustrate various parts of the story. In Sunday's opening segment, "A Necessary War," the personal experiences and remembrances from people in those four towns bring to life the attack on Pearl Harbor and the first U.S. successes in the Pacific in the battles of Midway and Guadalcanal.

Burns doesn't stick strictly to the local ties. U.S. Sen. Daniel Inouye of Hawaii pops in to discuss Pearl Harbor, and the documentary circles back from there to analyze the events leading up to WWII: the Spanish Civil War, the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, the German blitzkrieg in Poland (but, mysteriously, not the appeasement allowing the German annexation of the Sudetenland).

Yet, when the documentary pauses to say, in effect, "Meanwhile, back in Russia, millions were dying in the snow in the defense of Moscow and Stalingrad," a viewer gets an idea of how provincial "The War" sometimes seems. It is a huge subject. To look at the war's effect on four U.S. communities might make sense from a PBS perspective, but it doesn't do justice to the war as it raged over the rest of the world.

It doesn't take a Chicago fan upset over the New York-Boston bias Burns showed in his "Baseball" miniseries to take offense at the similar imbalance toward the United States in "The War," but you know what? It sure helps.

That criticism aside, what's here is very good. In a calamity involving an estimated 50 million deaths or more worldwide, it helps clarify things by opening with the story of Glenn Frazier, a Southern hellion from Mobile who enlisted in the Army before Pearl Harbor as a way to escape trouble and got himself sent to the Philippines, where he would learn how to kill and then survive the Bataan death march.

That theme of learning to kill repeats again and again. Marine Sid Phillips says that after discovering the bodies of U.S. soldiers mutilated at Guadalcanal, "our battalion never took a prisoner after that." U.S. troops learned the same hard lesson in northern Africa under George Patton.

Burns also doesn't neglect the war at home. Monday's second episode, "When Things Get Tough," delves into U.S. war production and Rosie the Riveter. When the documentary slyly points out, late in Sunday's opening installment, that Irving Berlin's "White Christmas" was widely perceived as a peace song at the end of 1942, that's the sort of insight that brings the war home to viewers now.

Yet I can't help thinking it slights Britons, Russians and, yes, Germans and Japanese. Maybe the war seems too gargantuan to think of how it was playing out around the world, but it was indeed a world war.

"The Civil War," which remains Burns' masterpiece, could boast of being a comprehensive look at a U.S. calamity. "The War," by contrast, takes a world calamity and looks at it through the prism of the United States, while boasting of being just as inclusive. It's not. So go ahead, watch, get emotionally involved, but don't make the mistake of thinking this is all there is to WWII.