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Ken Burns’ documentary The War hopes to do for the Second World War what The Civil War did for that terrible American event. We awaited it eagerly in my house, and are now a little over halfway through. So far, it has been a disappointment, although to be honest, a lot of that disappointment comes from our own extraordinarily high expectations. More, however, can be laid at the feet of Burns’ insistence on documenting the American experience, to the virtual exclusion of anything else.

I came to the realization that the fault lay with Amerocentrism in a roundabout fashion. First, we both noticed a very fragmentary feel to the narrative: we just get whisked along from battle to battle, and from home front to home front, without enough context to understand why the battles are being fought, or how rough the home front deprivation felt, or whether the results were as striking as the narrator’s tone of voice suggests. Three thousand American troops died in such-and-such battle. Is that a lot? Is that miraculously low? How many Americans were fighting? How many died in the previous battle? How many Germans, Japanese, Russians, or Brits died in the same battle, or in another battle going on at the same time?

Oh, look! Now we’re at Anzio. Why are we in Anzio? If the fighting was that bloody, why didn’t the generals fight somewhere more congenial to an invasion? Look, we won. Hooray! What did that victory contribute to the war effort? Whoops, no time to answer that, we’re back in the Japanese-American internment camps. The documentary is so choppy that I had to check once whether they were sticking to chronological order.

This dissociation is a direct result of writing off the experiences of every country but the U.S. We were in Anzio because Italy was a natural progression from Africa, where we had to go to protect England’s vital supply line to the rest of its empire through the Suez canal. We were also in Anzio because Churchill rightly felt the Russians could not be trusted once the war was over, and wanted an Anglo-American presence in southern and eastern Europe ahead of Germany’s surrender. We were also in Anzio as a gesture of good faith to Stalin, who was, with some justification, complaining that Russia was bearing the whole weight of the war. But none of that is explained in any depth; we hear literally a single sentence, maybe two, on the global context of these historic decisions.

The war itself is given very little explanation, because the documentary starts with Pearl Harbor. When the U.S. joined the war in December 1941, immediately after the day of infamy, the war had already been formally been running for over two years, not to mention another five or six years of pre-war annexations and strategic maneuvers. Because The War only describes American action, and because America was initially most active in the Pacific, the narrative gives the impression that Nazi Germany was a sort of distraction from the main effort. The first battle covered is Midway, and treated as a great turning point—which it was—inexplicably without a prior string of losses to turn. We just see an unbroken string of victories from Midway on. Stalingrad, El Alamein, the Battle of Britain: already over.

In addition to anticipating an Allied victory as inevitable, which I must insist was emphatically not the American experience at the time, the documentary anticipates post-Civil Rights attitudes towards women, black soldiers, and the Japanese internment. Our pride for these groups, or our shame at their treatment, was also not a major part of the American experience at the time, but we hear only from the free thinkers who realized at the time (or claim to) that female laborers and black marines and Japanese infantrymen are as normal and natural as any war institution can be called normal and natural. And we hear from them repeatedly, especially about the Japanese-Americans. Three or four times as much as we hear about the Normandy invasion. From the bigots who made policy, or agreed with it then, we hear nothing at all.

Handling the Civil War, Burns had the luxury of treating only American events. Our civil war was an American event, almost in its entirety. Europe merely looked on with curiosity from thousands of miles away, and participated as trading partners. Asia, Africa, and South America didn’t even go that far. The Second World War was, as the name implies, a world war, and can only be understood in a global perspective. Denying the global perspective makes the American experience seem disembodied, even meaningless.

This weird detachment is magnified by something beyond Burns’ control. WWII was far more varied a war than the Civil War, varied in terrain and weapons and the number of antagonists. A soldier at Shiloh had much the same experience as a soldier at Gettysburg, at least in terms of the minute-to-minute fighting. The same cannot be said of airmen over Dresden, marines at Guadalcanal, tank crews in Tunisia, and submariners scouring the Pacific trade routes. Portraying all these in any depth would be a Herculean task. Add the additional differences of experience for Germans, Russians, Japanese, Brits, and a host of smaller powers, and perhaps the story couldn’t be told at all.

If there’s anything satisfying about the show, it’s the personal interviews. Burns has taken the same care selecting eyewitnesses as he did selecting contemporary writers from the Civil War, and it shows. The ordinary soldiers and civilians taken to represent the various theaters of the conflict are alert and engaging, and do not flinch from sharing the details, even when it’s clear it hurts to do so. Professional actors play a much smaller narrative role, since many who saw the war can still speak for themselves, but are selected with equal skill.

Burns also deserves praise for airing some rare footage, though I’m sure the film record is nothing like he’d wish. A brief shot of a tank skidding sideways along an icy road was a treat. The propagandistic tone of the newsreels is simultaneously transparent and disturbing. Some of the interviewees admit they believed it, others recognized it for what it was, but Burns himself, speaking through an actor’s voice-over, is silent on the issue of propaganda.

Perhaps Burns, in his eagerness to grasp the essentially American experience of the war—which he unfairly confuses with being an essentially American war—sees no irony in the newsreels’ cheerleading. Like them, he skips from headline to headline without stopping to examine the causal relationships stringing them together. Also like them, he skips from photogenic barrage to photogenic barrage, painting an inaccurately optimistic picture of the American experience he seeks to capture.