--- title: The Violence of History description: Ken Burns' new megaseries The War helps us better see WW II--and today's war as well canonical: https://time.com/archive/6682206/the-violence-of-history/ author: James Poniewozik article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2007-09-20T04:00:00.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-02-27T10:08:41.943Z article:section: Entertainment og:title: The Violence of History og:description: Ken Burns' new megaseries The War helps us better see WW II--and today's war as well og:url: https://time.com/archive/6682206/the-violence-of-history/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt9a9e989ddcdfa70e/698a4619d07533faaee6efdb/360_awar1001.jpg?branch=production&width=360&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 360 og:image:height: 203 og:image:alt: 360_awar1001.jpg og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: The Violence of History twitter:description: Ken Burns' new megaseries The War helps us better see WW II--and today's war as well twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt9a9e989ddcdfa70e/698a4619d07533faaee6efdb/360_awar1001.jpg?branch=production&width=360&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  * [Entertainment](/section/entertainment/) # The Violence of History > Sponsored content. 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Terms and conditions apply. * Savings buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Savings Account. * No ATM fees from Ally Bank at Allpoint and Moneypass ATMs plus we reimburse for fees charged by other ATM owners nationwide up to $10 per statement cycle. * Early direct deposit offers eligible direct deposits up to two days sooner. * Spending buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Spending Account. by [James Poniewozik](https://time.com/author/james-poniewozik/) Sep 20, 2007 4:00 AM UTC  Ken Burns new megaseries The War helps us better see WWII and today's war as well. Ken Burns new megaseries The War helps us better see WWII and today's war as well. National Archives by [James Poniewozik](https://time.com/author/james-poniewozik/) Sep 20, 2007 4:00 AM UTC It’s a gray, stormy Tuesday in Manhattan–Sept. 11, to be precise–a day that can’t help calling to mind a sunny Tuesday six years ago, a day that makes New Yorkers think about war and history, a good day, therefore, to be talking to Ken Burns. Burns is quick to say that The War, his elegiac, exhaustive 15-hour documentary on World War II (PBS, debuts Sept. 23), is about that war, not today’s. But he and co-director/producer Lynn Novick are not naive. “We’re not unmindful that it will engage people with questions about the current situation,” Burns says. “That’s the reason you do history. You’re not going to change what happened on June 6, 1944\. But you’re going to ask questions that are going to help us on Sept. 11, 2007.” The film, which shows interviews with more than 40 surviving soldiers and civilians, mostly from four U.S. cities and towns, was conceived before Sept. 11, 2001\. Most of the interviews were conducted after the attacks–which, Burns says, reawakened vets’ post-Pearl Harbor memories–but before the invasion of Iraq. It’s all the more eerie then when Pacific veteran Sam Hynes recalls Japanese atrocities but says he didn’t know what Americans might do in similar circumstances, unavoidably conjuring Abu Ghraib. Or when the narrative discusses underequipped soldiers and politicians concerned about upcoming elections–“universal realities of war,” Burns stresses, but ones that ring specific today. Burns’ 1990 The Civil War first aired in wartime too, just after Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait. Today the most powerful statement of The War is its simple, brutal willingness to show what war looks like. Without wallowing in gore, Burns and Novick combed through archive and newsreel footage to depict the war as GIs saw it: battlefield corpses, bomb-blasted civilians and waves lapping against bodies on beaches. Compare this with the Iraq conflict, during which the U.S. government has suppressed images of coffins, let alone casualties, often with the cooperation of the media. The contrast is starker when The War presents a newsreel from the battle of Tarawa–issued on President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s orders–that shows ghastly images of Marine dead. “This,” the newsreel narrator intones, “is the price we had to pay for a war we didn’t want.” Today the government is loath to lay out a price, or ask one. “People yearn for the memory of shared sacrifice that the Second World War represents,” Burns says. “Now we’re all free agents. We don’t give up nothin’. We were asked after 9/11 to go shopping. It was sort of ‘Don’t worry your pretty little heads about it.'” The War’s biggest controversy so far, however, had nothing to do with Iraq or 9/11\. It was the protest that Burns had not interviewed a single Hispanic soldier. Burns and Novick resisted changes at first (ironically, The War, like many Burns films, is fixated on race, namely the treatment of African Americans and Japanese Americans) but eventually added two Latinos and one Native American. Finally, though, The War’s power doesn’t come from adding anything to WW II’s vast historical record. It’s what the series adds to the emotional record. We’ve seen the battle plans already on the History Channel, but through their interviews, Burns and Novick re-create the enormity of millions of young people literally preparing to die. “What we asked all the time was, What happened? and then, How did you feel?” says Novick. The answers make a much chronicled war fresh, real and heartbreaking–an elderly woman weeping like a child about being shipped to an internment camp or Senator Daniel Inouye recalling rifle-butting a German prisoner who was reaching, it turned out, not for a gun but for some family photos. “That’s war,” Inouye says grimly. The War is harrowing and, at 15 hours, an endurance contest. But it makes vivid a tale worth retelling. Burns, who briefly swore off war movies after The Civil War, says he’s just decided to make a film about Vietnam, although not until its vets are several years older. For now, The War makes the anguish and loss as real as if they were happening today. 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