The War: Bradley and Burns

I've been reading Flags of our Fathers by James Bradley. Since our bookclub selection process took place last winter, it's a coincidence that we picked it for the same time period as Ken Burns's The War. In fact, I don't remember why we picked it or who championed it.

The contrast between the two treatments of World War II is interesting. Burns is critical of the Americans. Although he admires the individuals that he interviewed, and in fact makes many of them into heroic figures, he stresses numerous American lapses in policy and military actions.

With all the mistakes the American leaders made, Burns at times makes it seem unlikely that we won at all. He singles out mistakes in battlefield leadership, political mistakes, and moral mistakes. One of the strengths of his presentation is showing how American minorities transcended ill treatment. Despite being deprived of their homes and rights, with their families in internment camps, Japanese-American fighters showed their loyalty and bravery. Despite being segregated and disrespected, black Americans are characterized by the valor of black fighters and dedication of black factory workers. These are important points, but I think it's a weakness that Burns assumed that everyone knew all about the Holocaust, so he spent less time on the discovery and liberation of Hitler's death camps than he spent on ill treatment of American minorities.

In Flags of our Fathers, Bradley, despite a life-long personal admiration and enthusiasm for the Japanese people post-war, gives honest and unvarnished accounts of Japanese atrocities and how they affected the soldiers he was writing about. In contrast, Burns rarely mentions how our enemies' policies and actions -- without justifying our failings -- made our moral failings seem less glaring. Why were we fighting? What was at stake? Burns sometimes seems to lose track of our ultimate goals.

Burns' TV series made a point (maybe even a fetish) of concentrating on the ordinary people in wartime, claiming to focus on a few towns. Actually, he tried to show everything about the war -- all the years, a large number of battles, a wide variety of issues. These two conflicting goals, I think, weakened his presentation and sometimes amazingly even made it a little boring. Even the vast quantity of original film and photos didn't make up for the conflicting visions.

Bradley's concentration on the ordinary people came naturally with his subject: the detailed exploration of the lives of the soldiers shown in the war's most famous photo, the raising of the flag on Iwo Jima -- one of whom was his own father. While Burns's presentation sometimes seemed to imply that America could do nothing right, Bradley made every American into a hero. He also kept stressing that the heroes, as his father said, were the ones who didn't come back. And that often what seems to be heroic is just an ordinary person doing what he has to do.

"We certainly weren't heroes," -- his father's repeated words. (p. 353)

Sometimes Bradley's prose was a little corny -- or a lot. But in the end, all things considered, I like Bradley's work better. (I have not seen the film version of Flags of our Fathers.)

Here is a photo of me during the war. I find it very in tune with what Bradley was saying.