SAM HYNES: I'm not sure I can speak about
why human beings, in general, go to war.
I think that's a pretty large category.
I can only speak about why
18-year-olds from Minneapolis go to war.
They go to war because it's impossible not to.
Because a current is established in the society
so swift, flowing toward war,
that every young man who steps into it is carried downstream.
I think we were really reluctant to get into this subject.
We'd made a film on the Civil War, it was successful.
Didn't wanna be typecast,
didn't wanna be playing to the success of that.
But people would just call us up all the time and say,
"You gotta tell my father's story. He's just now beginning to talk."
Or, "My father passed away and he never told us what he did
"and we found these letters between him and my mom."
Or somebody will come and say, "I landed at Omaha Beach.
"How come you haven't done something?"
And that began to erode our conviction not to go to war again.
And, of course, that's a part of it too -
not experiencing that really just visceral sense.
We don't know any other way than to ask the question, "What was it like?"
And if you ask, "What was it like?"
You invite so much sadness and loss and terror, in some cases.
The real war involves getting down there and killing people
and being killed yourself, or just barely escaping it.
And it gives you attitudes about life and death
that are unobtainable anywhere else.
(EXPLOSION)
We wanted to do something experiential,
that would help our audience understand what it was like
to live through the war and to fight in the war.
And we realised that if we didn't do it now,
we wouldn't have the chance to do it later
because so many veterans were passing from the scene.
And then I heard that 1,000 veterans of the Second World War
were dying a day in America.
And that our kids -
many of them the grandchildren of those brave soldiers -
think we fought with the Germans
against the Russians in the Second World War.
And I just thought, "Oh, my God."
How could the greatest cataclysm in history -
as we call it in the film - how could that get lost?
And if we lose that, what do we lose?
And we felt almost honour bound to go in and try to figure out
a new way to tell the Second World War,
this time from the bottom up...
...not distracted by the generals and presidents
and celebrities of the war.
Not distracted by armaments and strategies
but by focusing on what so-called ordinary people experienced
and to tell the story from their point of view.
And to honour, bear witness, to what they went through.
We tried really hard to find a way to connect what was happening at home
to what was happening to the soldiers overseas.
There's this gulf between the life people had at home
and what the soldiers were experiencing on the front lines.
It's sort of an unbridgeable chasm,
except that there's the thread that connects,
which is the human beings and their families,
or their loved ones, back home.
And if you can really care about someone who's overseas
because his sister is worrying about "Where is he?" and "Is he OK?"
You can sort of understand how this was a family story.
And, by extension, the whole country was involved in it in that way.
OLGA CIARLO: She'd wait every single morning on the porch
for the mailman to come to bring her a letter.
And finally she would get a letter, she'd be so happy.
She'd run upstairs and she'd let us read the letter,
'cause my mother couldn't read English.
MAN: "Mom, How are you getting along?
"Fine, I hope, and keeping happy always.
"I know I haven't written to you for a long time
"and I hope you understand the army has been keeping me pretty busy.
"I'm doing good and always happy because I know you're OK.
"Love, Babe."
KEN BURNS: This is the greatest thing that's happened in the world.
I mean, the biggest thing.
And how do you limit it? Where do you begin? What do you have to tell?
How do you get access to it in a new way?
And we focused, after some time,
on the idea that we would do the war from the perspective
of four geographically distributed American towns.
It was a little bit of a trial-and-error process
to come up with what those towns would be.
And we started with the idea
of picking some place in the north-east,
partly out of convenience to us because we live in the north-east.
And really with the idea that you could pick any town
and find great stories because the war did touch everybody.
We chose Waterbury, Connecticut - Brass City -
that had contributed so much to the war effort.
Had made lipstick holders and cocktail shakers and alarm clocks
before the war.
Continued to make those alarm clocks,
but then it was said there wasn't a British or American soldier
that wasn't wearing or shooting or riding on something
that had been made in Waterbury, Connecticut.
It wasn't so easy to find veterans
who could talk about their war experiences.
We met hundreds of veterans
and really only a small percentage of them were able,
for a variety of reasons, to share what they'd been through.
And so we thought maybe instead of just picking a town randomly
and seeing what we could find there,
we'd find some interesting veterans and see where they were from
and see if their town might work,
and sort of come at it backwards.
We chose Mobile, Alabama.
We'd read a phenomenal memoir
of a guy named Eugene Sledge,
who passed away just as we were beginning the film.
But when we went to Mobile to seek out his family
and tell them how much we liked it
and thought Mobile might be a possibility,
they introduced us to his best friend and his sister
and then their community, and we went out farther afield.
And Mobile became this wonderful place.
More of the folks that we interview are from Mobile
than any other place.
Factory workers from poor towns, African Americans,
old Mobile aristocracy.
In fact, one of our great choruses, Katharine Phillips -
the sister of Sid Phillips,
the best friend of Eugene Sledge, our memoirist -
is in almost every episode of the film
and really helps guide you along
from what it means to be at the home front.
KATHARINE PHILLIPS: We had started losing boys in the neighbourhood.
The boy up here on the corner was a navy pilot and he was killed.
The boy down the street was an air force pilot
and he was missing in action.
They started disappearing all around us.
And my mother spent her time going to visit the other mothers,
consoling them.
And it was a very, very fearful time, it really was.
We couldn't make a film about the Second World War
and not include the Japanese American experience,
and particularly the experience of internment.
Therefore we had to pick something on the west coast,
because only Japanese Americans on the west coast were interned.
We wanted to talk about Japanese Americans,
not only their internment but the much less-known story
of the magnificent 442nd Regiment that was as brave as any regiment
in the history of the United States Army.
And their amazing adventures in a country...
...fighting for a country, whose parents were locked up back home
and under guard and machine guns in the United States.
And then we needed a small town. That was the toughest of them all.
We wanted to pick something in the Midwest
because that was one area of the country we hadn't touched at all.
And again we thought we could just pick any random small town,
but it might be hard to find really memorable war stories from that town.
And we found a fighter pilot who lives outside of Washington, DC.
And his story was so amazing and he was so amazing.
Such a strong character.
His story so unbelievable that Hollywood couldn't make it up.
We asked him where he was from. He said, "Luverne, Minnesota."
And we tracked it down. It's in the lower left-hand corner of Minnesota.
Not far from Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
Luverne turned out to be unimaginably rich,
with the discovery of Al Mclntosh, the editor of the Rock County paper,
who covered the daily experience
of how the war touched really every family in that town, in his column.
It was the godsend of this production,
getting in touch with Quentin Aanenson, our fighter.
And then, by extension, Luverne and its newspaper editor,
who died in the '70s, Al Mclntosh.
Which we've had to have Tom Hanks - Tom Hanks -
read and bring to life as no-one else on earth could do.
August 1941.
Miss Aagot Rylund, who was in town visiting her brother,
knows what it is to see vast sections of a city ripped to ruin
by German bombs.
And she remembers the nights that London burned,
how she could read a letter by the unbelievable glare
of the far-off flames.
KEN BURNS: It was from those four places -
and if you look at a map, they really anchor, they hold down the country -
we began to realise that we could comprehend the whole.
We could get a sense of what the Second World War was like.
Paradoxically, from the bottom up,
and following these stories and getting invested in these people,
you could learn a lot more about the whole arc of the war as well.
That was the great surprising gift of how we approached it.
We are going on our third early morning dawn shoot
and it's about 4:40 in the morning.
And we're not exactly sure where we're gonna shoot today.
We're gonna quickly run up to the Catholic cemetery
and see if that's a nice view.
And then if not, we'll probably go to another farm.
Morning. Good morning, Allen.
Do you see your coffee in there? I smell it.
We have to get up really early
because we'd like to be able to see the beautiful sky.
And once the sun comes up, the sky no longer has so much colour in it,
so if you get up before the sun comes up, the sky is gorgeous.
And then we can try to find something
to basically silhouette it against that gorgeous sky.
So, we have a chance of really doing two different kinds of shoots.
If we get up before the sun comes up,
we can do a silhouette of something against the gorgeous sky.
And then when the sun crests and we have first light
we can get that golden light hitting different things we want to show.
So we have to get up early.
Take a look at this.
Yeah, look at the kick on that window,
and then close to the window.
Oh, gorgeous. That's fantastic.
LYNN NOVICK: We had a lot of fun getting to know these four towns
and the people in them,
and trying to find ways to tell the stories
of what the war had meant in these places.
And we went about it in a variety of ways.
We focused first on finding out
what was the archival resources that were available to us -
photographs, home movies, newspapers, letters, etc.
And we went to historical societies and public libraries
primarily for that.
And we put articles in the newspapers asking for people to contact us
if they had stories to share or materials to share.
And we were just deluged, basically, with materials.
Why don't you tell us what you've brought for us today?
Phone calls, emails, all kinds of things.
A lot of the process was actually just going through
and weeding through all this material.
Everything that was sent to us was read...
Oh, that's a great picture.
...and was responded to, and it was a huge job.
But we found treasures we never would have found any other way.
KEN BURNS: We live in a digital world now.
We used to be able, in every film, to tell you
we shot 1,050 rolls of film,
and that represented this many hours.
We don't have that anymore.
Sometimes the photographs don't get photographed - they get digitised.
And then they're into our system, and the movements are made on them.
And I kind of regret, being a kind of hands-on person,
the loss of a lot of that.
But I think it's fair to say that we have
hundreds of hours of interviews,
hundreds and hundreds of hours of still photographs,
and thousands of hours of footage that we went through to distil.
You visit hundreds and hundreds of archives.
And it's not just the places where you think,
'cause you're not always just getting the stuff of the war.
You wanna get the stuff when it's not war.
What it was like back home.
So, I see this film as
a kind of great merger of a vast public archive,
which was from hundreds of places around the world,
from Tokyo to Moscow to Berlin to London - everywhere.
And hundreds of archives in the United States,
including the National Archives and the Library of Congress.
Particularly the National Archives,
which has so many of the treasures of what we've done.
And merge that with the personal archives.
We've got the home movies of the guy in Sacramento
who's describing going to the movies,
and then coming and playing war with wood guns in the driveway.
We've got him in colour.
It's real. You know it's happened.
We've got their high school graduation picture.
You've got the exterior of your house.
There's almost no - I'm proud to say - re-creation.
In one point in the Battle of Guadalcanal
we just took our camera and went through a jungle.
At another point, when the news of D-day is reaching the United States,
we turned on the lights in the middle of the night
at Al Mclntosh's house.
SARAH BOTSTEIN: OK, James, go.
OK, yeah, that's nice. Hold on.
Perfect, perfect. Just sit tight.
KEN BURNS: That's really his house.
We turn on the lights at that house
and you hear his comment
about waking up in the middle of that night.
(PHONE RINGS)
MAN ON RADIO: Ladies and gentlemen,
all night long, bulletins have been pouring in from Berlin
claiming that D-day is here,
claiming that the invasion of Western Europe has begun.
MAN: "When we stumbled sleepily down the hall
"to answer the ringing telephone,
"we made a mental note that it was shortly before 3am."
That's about it. And the rest of it is guaranteed authentic footage.
(KLAXON WAILS)
QUENTIN AANENSON: Early in the morning
we were awakened from our bunks
and we were told to get in our flight gear
and meet in the briefing room.
And we knew it was something serious.
We could tell by just the atmosphere.
And as we took our seats,
and they pulled the curtain back, they said,
"Gentlemen, this is it.
"The invasion of France has begun."
We decided not to use historians
or so-called experts in the film.
We really wanted it to be the bottom-up story of regular people
who anyone of us could know and could be friends with,
or could have in our neighbourhood or backyard.
We want someone to tell you,
"I was there and this is what happened to me."
But that means that we had a lot to ask of those witnesses.
To give us not just their own experience,
but a little bit broader meaning of why we should care about it
and what it means for all of us.
And, so, finding the people to talk who could do that was a challenge.
No-one had ever really asked me about my experiences.
In my generation, it's just something we all talk about.
We exchange stories about the war.
MAN ON RADIO: We have been on the telephone with our station KGMB,
which is in Honolulu,
and they report to us that the anti-aircraft fire
can be heard in a steady drone
as the attacking planes come in.
KATHARINE PHILLIPS: We comforted each other.
And the girls all cried and wept
because they had boyfriends or relatives
that were already in the armed forces.
And we realised immediately that this would be war.
SASCHA WEINZHEIMER: The day Pearl Harbor got bombed
was the seventh.
Back in the Philippines, over the International Date Line,
it was the eighth.
Same day, and we were bombed a few hours later.
I'd heard of Ken Burns before
because I was a fan of a lot of his projects -
'Baseball' and 'Civil War' and 'Jazz'.
They were special.
And then when I actually became part of it I felt really honoured.
BURNETT MILLER: I think that we went to have a great experience.
Then, all of a sudden, we were having more of a great experience
than we really had reckoned for.
We were scared to death, of course.
Parts of the film that struck me the most, I would think,
were the accuracy of the Bulge in the snow.
And having been there,
I remembered it as being terribly, terribly cold
and terribly uncomfortable for a very long time.
But it looked worse than I remembered.
ASAKO TOKUNO: The Lost Battalion was a rescue mission,
which was conducted by the 442 -
that's my brother-in-law's unit.
I knew about the fact that they had rescued these men.
I didn't realise how terrible. It was devastating for them.
It was quite a revelation anyway to know the story the way it happened
and to see it being told by the fellas who were there.
QUENTIN AANENSON: It was on one of my very early missions
that I first knew I had killed men.
And I remember the impact it had on me
when I could see my bullets just tearing into them.
And I was doing it knowing I had to do it.
That it was my job.
I do not look at history
with a cavalier viewpoint.
It has to be right.
Or to me it's totally wrong.
When we saw the entire film...
...the seven episodes -
at the end of each episode, Jackie and I looked at each other
and tried to talk and tried to discuss it.
But it became so overpowering,
in an historical sense, in an emotional sense,
that we almost had to take a break in there
and sit it out for a few days.
This film just did everything that you would hope for and dream about
in a film that related to World War II
and the massiveness of that enterprise.
This memory, which is not distant,
has just been kept so secret in this such admirably reticent generation
that we feel, more than anything, privileged
to have been able to bear witness to their testimony.
To have been ushered in to some of those dark rooms
and been able to construct a narrative based on, not secrets,
but truths that they saw when they were young.
They suddenly realise that their memory was their greatest asset
and our inheritance.
And that somewhere along the line,
those that could began to speak,
and we were just ready to listen.
LYNN NOVICK: Starting this project was definitely intimidating
because it's such a big subject,
and you could go so many different directions.
MAN ON TAPE: On one of the largest sugar plantations
on the Philippine island of Luzon.
Just a few frames, yeah.
KEN BURNS: Those of us who've worked on these films
sort of feel like, "Yikes," at the beginning,
"what have we done?"
But you're sort of like getting up in the morning
and putting on your pants one leg at a time.
You just start.
LYNN NOVICK: It was just a daily process of discovery
that you could find things and be open to them and say,
"Didn't know that. We can put that in."
And, so, that's part of the fun of it,
is that we get to discover things along the way and then use them.
SARAH BOTSTEIN: The organisational process of dealing with this material
is a daunting task.
The producers would narrow down the material
so that when an editor sat down to edit a scene,
he or she could really begin to get the elements to sew a scene together.
It's the night before the Japanese came...
Two nights before the Japanese came into Manila.
And they'd been there for several days.
We can still do this.
So, we go back to the night-time shot of Manila Bay.
KEN BURNS: This is a huge distillation process.
That's what it's about.
Our job, in the end, is to actually figure out a way to make this... this.
Now, 14.5 hours may seem like that, but it used to be more than that.
And we beg your indulgence for the amount of time it takes,
but we think it's worthwhile.
MAN ON TAPE: What followed would be remembered as
the Bataán Death March.
GLENN FRAZIER: If we had known what was ahead of us
at the beginning of the Bataán Death March
I would have taken death.
LYNN NOVICK: We wanted to honour the experience of the veterans
who fought in the war -
the men and women who really put their lives on the line.
And the best way to do that, we came to understand,
was to allow them to bear witness to their own stories
in the most direct and unsentimental way.
NARRATOR: At dawn, on August 7, 1942...
...American land forces went on the offensive
for the first time in the Second World War.
We should come to the second. Why not start it from the get-go?
(All agree) Right?
KEN BURNS: We cover 25 or so battles, pretty -
I don't want to say comprehensively, but you get to know them,
and you feel you know them from the inside out.
And that's what we wanted to do.
And some battles are just atrocious. They're horrible.
And it was so hard for us to do it emotionally.
Then others were simply complicated.
At the end of our first episode is the first major offensive action
that the United States takes in the land battle,
and that's in Guadalcanal.
NARRATOR: No-one had any idea how long, how bloody
and how consequential the battle for Guadalcanal would be.
KEN BURNS: It goes on for months,
and that's a difficult kind of battle to cover
because you want something to happen, and it happens spasmodically.
And you think, "Oh, there it is, and we've won. Oh, we haven't won."
It just keeps going on and on.
And it took us a long time
to sort of break the back of the issues in Guadalcanal,
and I'm now really happy about how we did it.
So that one is a kind of technical problem,
and then there's the emotional stuff.
SIDNEY PHILLIPS: We understood that we might be expendable.
It had become sort of the established thing,
and we knew our country was not yet heavily armed.
And, yes, we did feel that we might be expendable.
We really did.
LYNN NOVICK: I don't think we really understood how horrible the war was
for people who fought in it.
It's hard to really, I think, appreciate from 60 years later
what it would have been like to see your best friend blown up,
or to kill someone at close range
and have their blood splatter over you.
It's kind of unimaginable.
And yet we felt we wanted to try to imagine the unimaginable.
KEN BURNS: It's a long process.
And I'm so grateful that public television
gives us the chance to do that.
It's not a product.
It's not a commodity that has a beginning, middle and end.
This is something that we love,
and we wanna work and caress and cajole,
and rework and re-edit and rewrite and do all those things
until we think, for our own subjective view,
that we've got it right
and it's time to share it with everybody else.
(PROJECTOR WHIRRS)
LYNN NOVICK: All the footage that we were able to get
from commercial archives and from the National Archives
came to us without sound.
It was sometimes extraordinary action footage -
very vivid, exciting.
And you could see guns going off, you could see things exploding,
you could see fire, but you couldn't hear anything.
When we locked our picture and started to add sound,
our sound editors got very excited.
(ARTILLERY FIRE AND EXPLOSIONS)
Found out, for example,
the sound that this particular kind of machine gun -
what kind of sound does that make?
Or what kind of sound does a German 88 artillery piece make
when it's going off, or a tank?
What track's the marching on going out,
and what track the car pass is coming in.
And we were able to collect an amazing assortment of sound effects.
MAN ON TAPE: From 1939 to 19... I like that better.
This is the most sophisticated soundtrack we've ever completed,
and it's taken us more than a year extra.
We finished the film
and for a year after we had locked the picture
been working on the soundtrack.
(EXPLOSION, MEN SHOUT, ENGINE REVS)
(EXPLOSION)
(GUNFIRE)
KEN BURNS: It is hugely important to us that the planes buzz you.
That the debris from an explosion falls on your shoulders.
And to just have just the tiniest fraction of a sense
of what it might have been like
for these kids to have gone through what they did.
We had a veteran who came in
and he said, "I've waited all my life
"to have something show it the way it actually was."
One... two...
...one, two...
...a- one, two, three...
(BIG BAND MUSIC PLAYS)
We had a lot of fun with the music on this show.
I think, going in, we thought we'd probably have
a lot music of the time, and we didn't know what else.
We were lucky enough to get Wynton Marsalis to compose several pieces.
We showed him some clips of the film,
and he really understood what we were trying to do
and composed some spectacular music.
Today is a recording session for the 'War' film.
We've done some cello and sort of standard piano things.
And we've asked Wynton to compose some original music for us
to tell the story of the four towns.
She's wistful. She's describing a pace of life.
First of all, starting off with John Gray,
who lives in a segregated part of town...
And what he's done is created a massive suite
that takes those four towns and divides nearly every one in two,
and creates a set of music that's of the flavour of the town,
but has a unified theme.
(MELANCHOLY MUSIC)
WYNTON MARSALIS: It starts with four towns
where he wanted a central theme that was evocative of America.
Something that was related to kinda the early roots of the country,
but had like American vernacular songs
but could be adaptable to kinda swing and the music of the period.
And a theme that could be utilised in some form...
...in four different ways
to highlight the aspects of the four different cities,
the people who lived there and their way of life.
OLGA CIARLO: Waterbury, where we lived,
there were a lot of Italian people.
They had made a good business for themselves
and were very well-liked.
We had a wonderful neighbourhood.
We had parties every single Sunday.
Every Sunday was a picnic for us.
(JAUNTY MUSIC)
KEN BURNS: This process begins with me,
who, I am completely inarticulate about music.
I sort of know what I like.
I don't have any language to express what I like.
Nor do I have any musical talent to be able to actually do it.
So it becomes a kind of gesturing,
as if you're trying to speak to somebody
in a language that they don't understand.
And Wynton, with this patience,
sits in his living room, on his piano, and sort of says,
"Well, what about this?"
And he'll play different themes. And I'll go, "Yes."
Or, "What about this way?"
And then all of a sudden something emerges.
Just something real light. That's the tempo.
KEN BURNS: To me, these are some of the happiest days of making films.
On a project like this that will last four or five or six years,
the days where you come into this room
and there's bits of wood and brass and catgut and other stuff.
And these people walk in, very much like ourselves,
who suddenly are able to come in and do something.
And that you leave at the end of the day with this new thing - music.
I mean, it seems so obvious, but it makes us happy.
And I just turned to Geoff Ward, our writer, and said,
"We don't deserve this."
It's just too much -
the notion that you would get paid to spend a day like this,
this is like Disneyland for me.
(BIG BAND SWING MUSIC)
KEN BURNS: The fascination for the Second World War
will never end - and it's understandable.
Even as that generation dies away and passes completely,
this is still the biggest event in human history.
LYNN NOVICK: It's seemingly a very clear-cut black-and-white war.
There's the good guys and there's the bad guys.
And the bad guys are so bad.
And we won, so it's a triumphant story
that we can all appreciate and celebrate.
And then it's also this terrible cataclysm
that killed so many millions of people.
There's the twin fascination of the horror of it
and also the triumphant narrative of it.
KEN BURNS: We shoot in film,
and every 12 minutes we have to change the roll.
And inevitably you go into somebody's house,
or you're filming them where they live,
and their wife or their son-in-law or the daughter's there.
And quite often, in between the reel, somebody would say,
"Honey, you never told me that."
And they would have just described a horrific, horrific action.
LYNN NOVICK: You sometimes open things up
that their family members have not heard.
And that was amazing to have someone afterwards say,
"Dad never told us about what he saw.
"He never described it quite in that way."
Or, "We've heard that story a lot of times,
"but never quite the way he told it to you."
We have a sense that this unusually admirably reticent generation
didn't talk about it.
And then towards the end of their life, they began to talk about it.
Intimations of their own mortality.
A sense also of obligation, to posterity,
to their families, to us, I think, got people talking.
We wanted to just bear witness and honour the testimony
of these extraordinarily brave young men and women.
And then just say, "This is what happened to them."
And then let these experiences wash over you.
I hope that viewers who watch this film
will gain an understanding of what war really is.
As much as it's possible for anyone who hasn't been in war to know that.
There's not any family in America
that wasn't touched by the war in some way,
if they dig deep enough.
Everybody did something for the war -
little kids, old people, young people -
everybody was involved in some way.
And so there was a sense of unity, of purpose
that people remember today and wonder why don't we have that.
KATHARINE PHILLIPS: We were all touched by World War II.
Whole families were touched by World War II.
And that, in my opinion,
is the reason we're still so fascinated by it.
QUENTIN AANENSON: World War II was a time unique
in American history.
There has never been a time when this country
was as totally united as we were
back during those critical four years.
KEN BURNS: We were animated with no political agenda.
We had no sense of wanting to make the most comprehensive film.
What we wanted to do was say,
"How did it happen? What was it like?"
And do the best job we can.
So, I can't imagine the Second World War
not being something that we will continually return to
and learn new things about,
see from a different perspective and light,
and ask different questions as our own experiences change.
And realise that it will always, always have so much to teach us.