Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I recommend this series to anyone who is a WWII buff like me. You will see images and movie coverage that you have never seen before. The Ken Burns team did an outstanding job of gathering material that is unique to this series. However, I would have preferred a more balanced approach to the war. Almost every campaign covered is portrayed as thoroughly botched, costing countless American lives, due to our unconscionably negligent and inept generals. I really don't mind an anti-war theme, but when you view these episodes you wonder how we won the war. With the number of American snafu's prominent in this series, we must have been awfully lucky, or the German soldiers were led by generals that were even more incompetent than ours. Also, Ken Burns seems to be obsessed with the race issue in the military, and its adverse impact on our war effort. This is certainly an important subject and must be covered, but there is obviously disproportionate emphasis/time devoted to this part of the series. It would have been a more difficult task for Burns to accomplish, but if he had tackled the subject on a more global scale---he could have still dealt only with the American participation---it could have been a documentary of lasting value! However, he chose the easy way out by confining the details to a few American cities and the interviews of the same people over and over again. In my opinion, the best film history of WWII is still the British series, "The World at War," narrated by Laurence Olivier.