i find "the war" to be a good - with a caveat to follow - documentary but not up to ken burns standards. "the civil war" far surpasses it.

however, i MUST comment on the musical soundtrack.

if wynton marsalis is responsible for this, he surely needed to be reigned in, or at the least, the film editor needed to turn it down to a level below the narration and on-camera interviews. at times, the "music" and the narration were in direct competition and the "music" was unfortunately winning.

in the first episode during the pacific theatre segments the sound track sounded as if someone was playing a cat's tail with a violin bow and the cat was none too happy about it. i don't mean to sound flip, but it was so horribly annoying and grating that i had to turn the sound down and put on the subtitles - it went on and on and on and on and on and on. i was literally begging for it to stop - for god's sake, stop it!

it in NO way duplicated any japanese or asia instrument i've ever heard.

tonight - more of the same, including a portion with the same screeching instrument.

also, in episode one, at certain points the music appeared counter to what was being seen on the screen - jocular, upbeat, hoedown violin, relentless like the faux japanese instrument, when no instrumentation was needed at all.

good grief. if episode three is like this, i'm giving up.

sorry, ken - please redo your sound track for DVD. i don't recall being this annoyed or upset with a documentary soundtrack - ever - and certainly, never with a ken burns documentary soundtrack.

...shows. The editing, timing, choice of pictures, the inserted fake battle sounds -- all these make for a production of less quality than "The Civil War." Less emotionally moving, more tired, more predictable, more frustrating when important events and foreign perspectives are left out.

Also, having the stories told "in their own words" by plainspoken septuagenarians is, sorry to say this, a liability. Shelby Foote these folks are not.

The vets are dying, a thousand of them a day, but the legacy of the war is inscribed in our national DNA.

My father, recently deceased, was a WW2 vet. (Killed in part by lung failure after getting hooked on cigs given out for free to troops to cheer them up and create a generation of addicts)

From beyond the grave I can hear him calling bullshit. The legacy of WW2 is inscribed only in the vets themselves (who are quickly dying off) and their immediate children. We've already forgotten about Vietnam for Christ's sake. (Or Iran-Contra, arming Saddam, etc) WW2 these days has exactly two uses - as a poor analogy to prop up the war du jour and as way to make the "my generation was better than your generation" argument.

I don't doubt that it has meaning to Gary given his particular circumstances but our national memory is exceedingly short. For the vast majority of people WW2 means nothing.

FreeProton, perhaps you missed where I wrote, Too bad you had to learn propaganda in your schools. It takes away from the very real sacrifice the Red Army made.

And Burns in fact does touch on an episode of a Marine pulling the gold teeth out of a dead Japanese soldier. (It's in a later episode.)

But remember, German units went out of their way to surrender to American or British units to avoid surrendering to Soviet units. Notice also the waves of refugees who fled West in front of the Soviet armies contrasted to the, um, no waves of people fleeing East in front of the liberating Americans and British, in fact, greeting them with flowers, etc.

There's a "U.S.-only" bias because--surprise!--the series is being shown only in the U.S. Trust me, Americans are not as dumb and naive as you think. They know full well that other nations were involved in WWII.

In fact, this makes no pretense to be a be-all documentary, since it focuses only on a few towns and their people.

Get over yourselves already. There's nothing more irritating than people who go out of their way to be offended. I shouldn't be surprised, though, since this is a liberal web site full of oh-so senstive people.

Excellent stuff, Gary.

"Stalin was not marching on Japan. Roosevelt and Churchill had been begging Stalin to open a second front on Japan for months, but Stalin kept begging off, citing how badly his army had been bled in defeating Germany." -- Vlad the Impaler

Well, the Soviets *did* lose something 97% of males between the ages of 20 and 30 in the war, so I guess Stalin's "begging off" made sense. On the other hand, he had three armies (each approaching the size of Hitler's Vermacht in 1941) stationed on the Eastern Front, and let's not forget that the Russians fought and won a significant battle against the Japanese before the U.S. ever joined the war. But these are details of history, we can debate the accuracy of our statements ad nauseum, since we're basing it on diverging reading lists. Fine and good.

Rape nonwithstanding (and you're right, we never talked about it, and you probably will not see any accounts of American looting in Burns' film... or well, you might), it was wrong for Soviet propaganda to claim "The Great Patriotic War" as their own, just as it is wrong for Burns' to (implicitly) claim "The War" as belonging primarily to the United States. It's called a "World War" for a good reason, you know.

You can call into question my details (I am by no means a professor of 20th century history), and you can bring up veiled insults to my country of origin, but my main point stands, I think.

...the pacing and editing in Episode 1 were appallingly erratic. What's with the fades every 5 minutes? And the multiple false endings. The heart-tugging symphonic score. Good god.

Amateur hour--or two and half hours.

Burns presents nothing new. And if this indeed ends up in classrooms (as the frequent fades suggest), pity the generation that grows up believing that the war didn't start until the US joined it.