"The War"

Like many others, I suspect, this week Ann and I watched the PBS series on World War II. Well, truth be told, we watched part of it. I hope it doesn't sound unpatriotic, but it got to be a bit much, and by Wednesday we began drifting away. Sticking to it for the whole series was just more of a commitment than we were ready to make, so we'd leave it on and watch sporadically through the evening as we turned our attention to other tasks.

Don't get me wrong. "The War" was a moving and apparently reasonable recounting not only of what actually happened, but also of what its impact had been back here on the home front. It was a war fought not just by the military but by everyone who bought War Bonds and counted ration stamps, who blanketed windows during blackout drills, and who learned the sound of air raid sirens. (Interesting to compare this to the current war.) Like all the other works which Ken Burns and crew have done, the program was powerful. We particularly appreciated the absence of historians and other experts, and found the personal recollections of ordinary folks to be especially moving, more so because they caused us to do some recollecting of our own.

My own memories of WWII are pretty hazy. (I was eight years old at the time of Pearl Harbor.) Most of them are not my remembrances of actual events, but of my parents' reaction to what was going on: cutting short our Stone Harbor vacation when Poland was invaded, moving to New York City when dad became involved with the Manhattan Project and the development of the atomic bomb, a rare moment of tears on my mother's face when the news broke of FDR's death, the wild celebration around the Columbia University campus when the Navy V-12 students heard of the war's end.

More mundane recollections, but far more personal, included remembering the boring tasks of flattening tin cans and peeling tinfoil from gum and cigarette wrappers for recycling into we knew not what, knitting squares which were supposed to be used for some unknown war-time purpose, the Victory Garden dad had us work in but which never produced much more than a few scrawny radishes, and memorizing the silhouettes of the German airplanes, with pre-adolescent laughter about the Fokkers.

I remember the Blue Star flags in the windows, sometimes turning into Gold Stars, and never thought that the family would two generations later have one for our own grandson who's now in Baghdad. I remember going to the movies and cheering for our guys during the March of Time newsreel, our only graphic of the war. Most of all do I remember mom's tearful reaction to the news of Hiroshima's bombing, when she suddenly realized what her husband, my dad, had been doing in New York.

Although I served my time in the Marine Corps, I'm not, in the usual course of things, much of a fan of wars. I'd lived here nearly 30 years before going onto the battleship North Carolina, coaxed there by excited grandchildren, and I know that the canonization of the "Greatest Generation" is a new definition of hyperbole. Nor have I ever understood the basic differences between kamikaze airplanes and suicide bombers and high altitude bombing. War is, I know, something that falls under the category of a necessary evil, or the lesser of two unattractive alternatives, but it ain't pretty.

So for me, perhaps the greatest gift of "The War" is that it didn't sentimentalize or sermonize, it just told the story. And a powerful story it was, and is. I'm glad it was told.