BY: JERRY P

Ken Burns' new documentary series provides an unflinching look at the human toll of World War II, illustrated with rare and never before seen archival and personal footage.

The first night ”The War” was on PBS I watched for two hours until I switched to “Damages” on FX, a serial that I have gotten hooked on. “The War” was grim stuff on opening night, less so on Monday night. Bodies were everywhere: Americans at Pearl Harbor, Japanese half buried in the sand of a Pacific island, German corpses in the snow at Stalingrad, and of course, Jewish remains in a concentration camp, just a tangle of limbs and skeletal torso. The carnage seemed endless, and it was, as untold millions died, combatants and civilians, not to mention livestock. But the most amazing thing about the program, and its most compelling aspect, was the pictures. There were only a few I recognized, a few clips from Leni Riefenstahl’s epic film, “The Triumph of the Will.” Otherwise they were all new to me. Burns must have had access to some archival morgue somewhere, most likely a government storehouse. He also incorporated some personal footage that the families of vets contributed. So, despite the depressing material, it was all so mesmerizing it was hard not to keep watching the parade of pictures.

The four men that Burns selected to be representative of all vets, as narrators of personal experience of WW II, were all from small towns around the country; they all did a superb job of telling their stories. All four were articulate and did not soften their reflections and memories of combat; they all talked about how they learned to kill, something they all had initial trouble with, but learned to embrace once they saw what the enemy did to Americans, including mutilations of the dead. One even said flat out they did not take prisoners sometimes. On Monday night they talked about killing dispassionately, regarding it as “craft” not a possible immoral activity. That reminded me of a vet I used to talk who was a customer at Bookmans on Ina, where I used to work. He had been a sniper and he told me he had to concentrate on the “job at hand,” not the moral implications of killing another human being. “If you thought about that stuff, you would not be able to do your job.” He said if you thought about “that stuff you would mess up your job, and many people were depending on you, and besides, you’d drive yourself crazy to think about those things.”

Burns makes it clear that U.S. troops got their ass kicked the first two years of the war. The fact they had to adjust to killing and to so much death around them was a process they had to go through before they became better fighters than the professional Axis soldiers. Another thing he made clear was the magnificent mobilization of American industry, switching from a peacetime to wartime productivity. The reorganization took some time but once our Industrial capacity was in gear, the assembly line had never worked more efficiently. One can say without exaggerating that Americans have never operated better as a nation, as a team, then they did during WW II, at home and overseas.

For JERRY PFAFFL, writing about movies is an act of love and exaltation. Once a week while growing up he and his brother were taken to the neigborhood theater by thier parents to see second-run movies. He remembers sitting in the dark and being utterly mesmerized by noir thrillers, technicolor musicals, Westerns, and Biblical epics. When he was a college student he discovered the wonder of foreign movies and how more daring subject matter was possible. When he was teaching at UNLV he founded CINEMA X, a film society devoted to the showing of contemporary experimental films. When he was working at Bookmans on Ina he was in charge of the Video and DVD department and his nametag read "The Movie Guy." In sum, movies have always been his passion.