Ken Burns and "The War"
I've watched all of the episodes so far of "The War," Ken Burns' epic documentary on the American involvement in World War II.
And so far, I'd give Burns and his crew an 'A' for effort and a 'B' for content. I commend him for showing the brutal reality of the war and driving home the point that American soldiers, while overall disciplined and effective, were not always angels. Our side executed prisoners for convenience sake just as the Germans and Japanese did. It was not a "Good War," as Burns points out, but a necessary one.
Last night's episode on the Battle of the Bulge and the rescue of the American civilian internees in the Santo Tomas camp outside Manila was particularly good. In one of many examples of his overall fairness, Burns juxtaposes the little-known Japanese imprisonment of American civilians in the Philippines under increasingly brutal conditions with the American internment of Japanese civilians in the mainland U.S. That's progress; most documentaries on the war show only what we did to Japanese-Americans.
Yet Burns holds back on Santo Tomas. I know a lot about this because I researched it several years ago for a yet-unwritten book on the history of GPU, the company responsible for the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in Harrisburg. GPU, then known as Associated Gas & Electric, owned Manila Electric Co. All the white collar workers at Meralco were Americans, many from Reading, Pa. William Snyder, who later supervised the early stages of construction of TMI-1 for Metropolitan Edison Co., was among the prisoners, although he was later moved to the Los Banos camp. I interviewed several of the GPU Santo Tomas survivors for the book and examined documents of the post-war war crimes trial of the Japanese officers who ran the camp.
Burns gets the increasing starvation right, but he never mentions that it was deliberate Japanese policy in the last months of the war. Many camp inmates believed that the Japanese Army was preparing to murder them outright. The very dramatic rescue of the Santo Tomas inmates didn't come across well in the documentary, but to be fair it was probably a matter of not having time to show everything. Burns does sort of link Gen. MacArthur's grandstanding visit to the camp to the decision of the Japanese to target the camp with their artillery, which killed several American civilians. Most of the former prisoners I talked to had little good to say about MacArthur personally.
My other complaint about the series is the repetitive footage of cannons and machine guns firing. The footage appears to be linked to specific battles on specific days, but the claim of direct link is never made and I wonder if a lot of generic war footage was used. Those army cameramen on both the American and German sides seem to have been everywhere.
And a final note: did anyone else notice how the volume of "The War" is noticeably higher than whatever show you were watching before it? I have to get up and turn it down when each episode starts. I guess Burns knew who his primary audience would be--older Americans who are increasingly hard of hearing. If it wasn't public TV and sponsored entirely by General Motors, I suspect Miracle Ear would have been right in there.