The War (2007)
Florentine Films

Description

The War is a seven - episode series, produced by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, that examines the myriad ways in which the Second World War touched the lives of every family on every street in every town in America.

By telling the stories of ordinary people in four quintessentially American towns – Waterbury, Connecticut; Mobile, Alabama; Sacramento, California; and the tiny farming town of Luverne, Minnesota – the series portrays this enormous worldwide catastrophe on an intimate, human scale.

Collected reviews and ratings

7.0 Washington Post | Rick Atkinson

Perhaps "The War" is best viewed as one views an art exhibition, focusing on the pictures and not on the captions or the curator's exegesis. The narrative is just scaffolding for the images, many of which linger long after an episode ends: the vivid color footage of flamethrowers on Saipan; the photo of pedestrians strolling past a smoking body next to a burning city bus.
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7.0 Wall Street Journal

The result is a war documentary whose tone of unyielding glumness is, itself, at war much of the time with the story it tells -- with, indeed, the character of the Americans who come so vividly to life in it.
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7.0 New York Times

The London blitz, Stalingrad, Bergen-Belsen and the Warsaw uprising are parentheses in this respectful, moving and meticulously illustrated anthology of small-town lives turned upside down by what one elderly veteran calls “a necessary war.”
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7.0 Variety

Ken Burns continues his long march through key passages in U.S. history with "The War," a characteristically serious, patriotic yet flawed account of Americans and their memories of World War II.
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5.0 documentaryfilms.net

The War could have come off more successfully if it weren’t for its format. Burns shows us WWII through the eyes of four towns, three of which we’ve heard of. This approach makes for questionable parallels and coincidences, and fails to deliver the emotional impact of, say, the story of four people involved in the European or Pacific Theater, or on the home front.
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