Don't miss The War tonight on PBS

Tonight at 8 p.m. on PBS, The War, a World War II documentary by Ken Burns, premieres, and I can't wait to see it. It's a 14-hour-long documentary, and by all early accounts, it's really going to be eye-opening.

One big reasons I'm looking forward to it is because of what it's NOT - a Hollywood production of World War II, with all of the dramatic special effects and sappy love stories (See Disney's POS Pearl Harbor for a shining example). Burns is literally reporting on the war through the eyes of the people who lived it - the most accurate kind of film making on war, in this author's humble opinion.

U.S. News & World Report and Newsweek have pretty good pieces on the upcoming series, so take a look if you get a chance. (U.S. News also has some video clips, too.)

In an interview with U.S. News, Burns offers up some great reasons for undertaking The War. Here are some excerpts:

On why his film is different from other WW II films:

The War is a kind of bottom-up, experimental look at the Second World War told not from the familiar perspectives of celebrity generals or politicians or an overweening interest in strategy or tactics or the distraction of weaponry and guns, but from so-called ordinary people. There are no experts in the film. If you weren't in the war or waiting anxiously for someone to come back, you're not in our film. The intimate view allows us to unwrap the Second World War from the bloodless gallant myth that has attended it since it ended.

On history being a myth:

How could [World War II] possibly be "the good war" when it was the worst war in history - killing nearly 60 million people? By the end of the film, we learn the great secret: that in shared sacrifice, we made ourselves richer. The whole war is smothered in myth that we sometimes forget the cost.

[...]

These were teenagers that were asked to become professional killers. They saw bad things, they did bad things, and that's the kind of war that we want people to understand. And when the [veterans] came back, no one was distinguishing if you were on the front lines or in the 10th shoreline division. So the people who saw the worst of it tended to shut up.

On revisiting WW II:

We're losing 1,000 WW II veterans a day in this country, our kids think we fought with the Germans against the Russians, it's horrible, and I couldn't abide. I'm in the memory business, and each time a person dies, it's a whole library of memories that leave.

On what his film says about memory:

War is the great lie of civilization; it is a collective forgetting. When people bear witness to it, they help resurrect it. Memory becomes the agent of our transformation, and we have an obligation to it. Like the still photograph, for me, remains the primary building block of visual communication, individual memory becomes the building block of our collective cohesiveness.

**

If The War is half as good as Burns' reasoning behind undertaking the project in the first place, it's going to be a very fine documentary indeed, and best of all, a very important contribution to history.

I've been an avid student of World War II for a long time, but when it comes to the war and the sacrifices of the generation who lived it and fought in it, I don't even know what I don't know. But, I'm always eager to learn more, and hopefully The War will be educational and informative to us all.