Ken Burns Tackles WWII In New Doc

Sept. 23, 2007 — -- Seventeen years after his landmark film on the Civil War, director Ken Burns returns to PBS with another epic. This time, Ken Burns tackles World War II in a film simply titled "The War," which premieres tonight.

Ken Burns: We are losing 1,000 veterans a day in the United States. We are losing among our fathers and our grandfathers a direct connection to an oral history of that unusually reticent generation. And that if we, the inheritors of the world they struggled so hard to create for us, didn't hear them out, we'd be guilty of a historical amnesia too irresponsible to countenance.

Quentin Aanenson, veteran: It was on one of my early missions that I first realized I had killed men. I remember the impact it had on me when I could see my bullets just tearing into them.

Sydney Phillips, veteran:You just think maybe this will end, and maybe this won't, and maybe we'll all be blown up, and maybe we won't, but who cares -- and you learn to sort of live with it.

Burns: What we were after is that experience common to all soldiers: "I was scared, I was bored, I was hot, I was cold. I saw bad things, I did bad things. I lost good friends."