8pm Thursday THE WAR - Documentary - A seven-part series directed and produced by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, tells the story of the Second World War through the personal accounts of a handful of men and women.
The series explores the most intimate human dimensions of the greatest cataclysm in history — a worldwide catastrophe that touched the lives of every family on every street in every town in America — and demonstrates that in extraordinary times, there are no ordinary lives.
The film honors the bravery, endurance, and sacrifice of the generation of Americans who lived through what will always be known simply as The War.
Six years in the making, Ken Burns’ seven-part documentary series chronicles the horrifying historical impact of World War II from an American perspective by focusing on the personal stories of private citizens from four American towns: Waterbury, Connecticut; Mobile, Alabama; Sacramento, California; and Luverne, Minnesota. Together, these four communities serve as a tapestry of the ordeal Americans went through during the four years of the war, as witnesses share their own vivid and often harrowing accounts of how the war dramatically altered their lives as well as those of their friends and neighbours.
A NECESSARY WAR
(December 1941 - December 1942)
The tranquil lives of the citizens of Mobile, AL; Sacramento, CA; Waterbury,CT; and Luverne, MN are shattered on December 7, 1941, as they, along with the rest of America are thrust into the greatest cataclysm in history.
By December 1941, World War II had been raging in Europe for 27 months and in Asia and the Pacific for over four years. The Japanese attack that month on Pearl Harbor drew the United States into the war on both fronts, and the war’s first American combatants were the servicemen and women who withstood the Japanese attack on the Philippines island fortress of Corregidor. Many of the survivors of that attack and those who survived fighting on the mainland were subsequently forced to participate in the infamous Bataan Death March. American war planners soon understood they would have to take back each Japanese-held island one at a time. Back in the States, Japanese American citizens living on the West Coast were evicted from their homes and forced into inland internment camps, where they spent the rest of the war.
