SMALL TALES OF FEAR AND HEROISM MAKE ... GREAT WAR STORIES.

Byline: >BY DAVID KRONKE

>TV CRITIC

Ken Burns isn't one to shy away from big pictures and bigger challenges. He emerged as America's premiere documentarian by essaying "The Civil War" in 1990, and unspooled quintessentially American stories by spanning more than a century to relate the histories of "Baseball" and "Jazz."

But to capture the essence of America's involvement in World War II, a global conflagration that claimed 48 million lives, Burns had to bring order to chaos, to figure out a way to tell a story that took place simultaneously across the planet. After six years of work, the seven-installment, 15-hour "The War" will premiere 17 years to the minute after the debut of his first colossal achievement, "The Civil War."

"They're all huge logistical nightmares," Burns says of his epic films, "but none more so than this one."

Burns and his team -- writer Geoffrey Ward and co-director and co-producer Lynn Novick -- opted to tackle this monumental subject by focusing on ordinary Americans, to transform the story into the most intimate of epics.

"We knew that a bottom-up version, free of the distraction of celebrity generals, was the best way to organize our material," Burns says. "For a couple of days our conceit was to focus on just one town. But that was not fully representative of all the combat experiences, so we chose geographically diverse towns."

Thanks to locating veterans with remarkable stories and other resonant dramas, bucolic portraits of four cities were chosen as the focus of "The War:" Luverne, Minn., Mobile, Ala., Waterbury, Conn. and Sacramento.

Personal stories of both veterans and residents of those towns were deemed more valuable and instructive than rote explications of military strategy, Novick notes.

"With the help of veterans who were so generous to let us be the vehicle through which they could bear witness to their stories, we could delve a little deeper into the sort of human experience of the war in a very granular way, an anecdotal way," says Novick, "but it would hopefully get at some universal truths through this very specific focus on individuals."

"Everyone we interviewed lived through the war," Ward adds. "No historians needed to apply. I was amazed at the rich detail (the veterans) could summon up and which I could independently verify.

"What did surprise me," he continues, "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."

Next came the tricky art of melding the anecdotes of small-town heroes with the deadly campaign that stretched from all of Europe to tiny islands lost in the vast expanses of the Pacific Ocean.

"We used as our frame 'World War II 101,'" Burns says drolly. "It served as a scaffolding that we could remove when we mastered these individual stories."

Burns and his collaborators met with hundreds of people from the communities chosen. "We got hundreds of people who were tight-lipped," he says. "We were rooting out people not on the front lines, people who were reticent to speak, people who had no story to tell, people who had too practiced of a story to tell." Though Burns interviewed celebrities who were history junkies, they didn't make the final cut: "This is about so-called ordinary people."

Many veterans, however, have been famously reticent to say much about their involvement in the war. Quentin Aanenson, a fighter pilot from Luverne and the source of a few jaw-dropping anecdotes in "The War" (his family had no idea he was almost killed when his bullet-riddled plane caught fire on a mission until they saw a photo of him jauntily walking from its wreckage in a magazine), explains that many vets keep mum because they know those who weren't there could really never understand what soldiers went through.

"We noticed that as we came home, unless there was someone who had been in similar circumstances to what we had been in, they couldn't understand anything we might say about it," he says.

"So I think we learned to just draw it inside ourselves and deal with it that way. And that is not necessarily the best way to deal with it. But perhaps it was survival, some way to deal with what you had seen and what you had done."

When drawing out such painful memories, Burns says, "It's all about listening, not walking them through their story. You let them tell you about their experiences. In this way, we got material we didn't even know about. Families would be listening to the interviews and say, 'Pop, you never told us.' That's what accounts for the success of this film -- that moment of birth, the birth of a memory.

"That's a very special moment."

Burns acknowledges there are pundits who may watch "The War" and declare it an anti-war film or implicitly critical of America's current war in Iraq, but he argues that was never its intent. For example, tonight's episode is entitled "A Necessary War," which seems to call out the war of choice with Iraq, but Burns notes that both the interview that inspired the title and the choice to give the installment said moniker occurred before America invaded Iraq.

Still, he concedes, "History is a set of questions we ask of the past, and the past can't help but reverberate with the present," he says.

"There's not a single conscious attempt to make a political comment; we're only attempting to bear witness to the extraordinary sacrifices made in World War II, the shared sacrifice Americans were willing to make. But people have drawn parallels to moments in the film -- people talk about a shortage of supplies and they think of the inadequately armored vehicles in Iraq. Certain images suggest to some people Abu Ghraib.

"That's OK," Burns continues. "People are allowed to read into it. The film exhumes the cost of war, so it's OK to think about this war now and its costs, as well."

Freelance writer Allan Barra contributed to this report.

David Kronke, [phone]

[e-mail]

THE WAR

>What: Ken Burns' epic documentary about World War II.

>Where: KCET Channel 28

>When: 8 tonight through Thursday and Sept. 30-Oct. 2; repeating at 10:30 p.m. or 12:30 a.m. each night, plus marathon weekend airings and weekly repeats after the series concludes Wednesdays at 9 p.m.

CAPTION(S):

10 photos

Photo:

(1 -- 5 -- cover) 'THE WAR'

No generals, no scholars. Just veterans telling their own stories

(6) For his epic documentary series on World War II, Ken Burns passed on historians and famous generals in favor of interviews with enlisted men and the families back home.

JIM COLE>ASSOCIATED PRESS 

(7) Luverne, Minn., newpaper publisher Al McIntosh's wartime writings are brought to life in the Ken Burns documentary "The War."

(8 -- 10) Ken Burns turned to the often chilling accounts of men on the frontlines and interwove them with stories of the loved ones who waited at home to make a ground-up account of World War II in his documentary series "The War."