The War (Season 1)

The War (2007) is a Ken Burns and Lynn Novick documentary series you can watch online on iFILM — seven episodes for PBS that retell the Second World War not through generals and grand strategy but through the lives of ordinary Americans from four towns: Luverne, Minnesota; Waterbury, Connecticut; Mobile, Alabama; and Sacramento, California.

Veterans describe Pacific and European front combat in detail most history books skip. Wives recount waiting. Japanese-American families in Sacramento describe internment. Keith David narrates; Eli Wallach is among the voices. The series runs around fourteen hours in total, and it earns every one of them — the war arrives as something personal and total rather than a sequence of chapter headings. Watch all episodes of The War (2007) online on iFILM.