The Making of The War: An Interview with Geoffrey C. Ward

An American fighting man near Huertgen, Germany, December 1944.

(National Archives)

Geoffrey C. Ward is the writer of The War, the 15-hour Ken Burns documentary about World War II that airs on PBS beginning this Sunday evening, September 23. He also wrote the extremely good companion volume, The War: An Intimate History, which was reviewed on this site last week. He has won five Emmys and two Writers Guild of America awards for his work for public television, having collaborated with Ken Burns on his earlier films about the West, Mark Twain, jazz, baseball, the fighter Jack Johnson, and the Civil War. He also is the author of the award-winning A First-Class Temperament: The Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt, and was from 1978 to 1982 the editor of American Heritage magazine. Here he discuses what went into making The War and what he learned from the experience, from his home in Manhattan.

Before I read The War and watched the film, I was wondering what there still was for me to learn about World War II. Now I have the answer: nearly everything. I was amazed at how much went on in my own country from 1941 to 1945 that I hadn’t known about. I think what I liked best is the focus on four American towns—Waterbury, Connecticut; Luverne, Minnesota; Mobile, Alabama; and Sacramento, California. Where did the idea of selecting four representative towns come from, and how were the towns selected?

The subject is so vast we needed some simple organizing principle, and four towns seemed like a good one. But the war was so universally felt that I suspect we would have had the same impact if we’d thrown darts at a map. However, Lynn Novick, Ken’s codirector and coproducer—probably the most unsung member of our team—did the preliminary winnowing. Luverne was picked because the eloquent pilot Quentin Aanenson came from there. Mobile was the home of the late Eugene Sledge and of his boyhood friends Sid and Katherine Phillips. Sacramento was picked in part because we were interested in the Japanese internment story and knew that several veterans of the segregated 442nd combat team lived there. We also wanted a Northeastern town, and when Lynn discovered the surviving members of poor Babe Ciarlo’s family, Waterbury was added to the list. In every case, we found more riches than we could possibly use.

Like all organizing principles, ours proved inadequate, and we felt free to pepper both the series and the book with people who did not live in our towns, ranging from Sen. Daniel Inouye to Arthur Mayer, a guy who happens to swim next to me at a pool on West 63rd Street and lived through the fighting in Normandy and the Battle of the Bulge. Everyone we interviewed lived through the war. No historians needed to apply.

Perhaps the biggest difference between The War and the other documentaries you’ve worked on with Ken Burns is the absence of historians as talking heads. Only men who served overseas and friends and family at home are interviewed on screen. Was the decision not to interview historians made at the outset?

From the first we wanted this series to answer the simple question, What was it like to live through the war? No matter how many books we read and reels of microfilm we spin through, those of us who weren’t around can’t really know. No one respects historians more than I do, but it was a pleasure to be able to do an entire series without anyone telling the viewer what he or she is supposed to think about what’s unfolding on screen.

What surprised me most when I watched the film was how vivid the recollections of the people interviewed are. It’s as if the subject of the war years switches on a light in their minds and suddenly they are back in the 1940s again. What surprised you about the people interviewed?

Our witnesses’ memories are astonishingly vivid. I’m not sure I was surprised by this—the war was the biggest thing that ever happened to most of them, after all—but I was amazed at the rich detail they could summon up and that I could independently verify. What did surprise me was how rarely they seemed interested in placing what happened to them in relation to what was happening in the world at large. For a good many of them, that puzzle evidently seemed too big to try to solve.

The bibliography for the book is enormous, more than 350 volumes. From a historical and military point of view, were there certain books and writers that caused you to see America’s involvement in World War II in a different way?

I did consult a lot of histories, mostly to provide context, and I read a lot of war memoirs. One of them, Samuel Hynes’s Flights of Passage, written by one of our most eloquent witnesses, seems to me to be a neglected masterpiece: candid, self-aware, spare, and elegant. Among the histories, I was especially taken with An Army at Dawn, Rick Atkinson’s vivid account of the little-understood North African campaign, and I am eager to see his forthcoming account of the fighting in Italy. Most of the surprises came from the men and women who experienced the war, who are always at the center of things.

I think your book and the documentary make about the strongest case I’ve ever seen for the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. First of all, I hadn’t realized that the firebomb raids on Tokyo were perhaps even more destructive than the atomic bombs. Mostly, though, it was listening to the troops themselves talk about how weary they were and how they were dreading the invasion of the Japanese homeland, knowing that the Japanese would not surrender. There’s a photo in the book that really struck home, of the faces of Marines on Okinawa as they received the news that the war in Europe had ended. There is no elation. They look as if they were just told of a death in the family.

In your estimation, was the use of atomic bombs justified? I don’t just mean from the point of view of American lives saved. Do you think as horrible as the effects of the bombs were, they may have eventually saved Japanese lives as well?

“Justified” is a loaded word. But it seems to me that it was entirely understandable, the ghastly but logical outcome of Allied decisions that turned innocent civilians into legitimate targets, made before the United States entered the war. The bomb did save thousands of American lives—how many thousands no one can say—and that fact alone seems to me to have made Truman’s decision to drop it inevitable. It also surely saved Japanese lives. Even advocates of avoiding an assault on the home islands in favor of continued conventional bombing and total blockade believed the resulting famine would kill nearly two million people, maybe more. There’s a vast quarrelsome literature about the bomb, as you know, and the revisionists are now being revised—see Hiroshima in History: The Myths of Revisionism, edited by Robert James Maddox, just published by the University of Missouri Press, for the latest arguments.

Despite the tumultuous state of much of the world in 1941, our entry into the war still seems to have come as a shock to most Americans. Did our leaders do enough to prepare us for a war that in retrospect seemed inevitable?

In concentrating mostly on our four towns and beginning in December 1941, we managed to avoid dealing in detail with the infinitely complicated story of how Franklin Roosevelt steered his sinuous course toward readiness for the war he knew was coming. But it was clearly a close thing. The best symbol of how chancy things were is that the terms of duty for draftees were extended by a single vote in 1941. Yet somehow we emerged from the war four years later the most powerful nation in the history of the world, prepared to play an active part overseas. That transformation remains an astonishment.

—Allen Barra is a contributing editor of American Heritage magazine.