By Richard McCann
rmccann@decaturdaily.com· 340-2452

“The War” is a companion publication to the seven-episode documentary on PBS television. Although it covers World War II from Pearl Harbor to the victory over Japan, those who have seen the film know that it is not meant to be an in-depth history of the war.

It is, rather, the story of the conflicts as seen from the perspective of Mobile and three other U.S. cities — Sacramento, Calif.; Luverne, Minn.; and Waterbury, Conn.

In the book, Ken Burns quotes Civil War journalist and poet Walt Whitman as writing, “The real war will never get in the books.” He meant that the experience of combat is so horrible and terrifying that the only way to know it is to live through it.

Yet in getting some of the survivors of the war, whose numbers dwindle daily, to open up about their experiences, the authors give readers a good glimpse of the perils, privations and heartbreak endured by those whom author Tom Brokaw has called The Greatest Generation.

Like many cities and towns, Mobile sent young men into battle. But Mobile felt the war in other ways.

The arrival of defense work transformed it from 19th century gentility into the bustle of the industrial 20th century.

Country girls like mechanically talented Emma Belle Petcher of Millry moved to Mobile to work repairing warplanes and ships. Workers from other parts of the South crowded into the city, to the consternation of old Mobilians. Racial tensions grew when black workers shifted from domestic work to labor beside whites in the defense plants.

Among the soldiers Mobile sent to war was Tom Galloway, who left Auburn his senior year to become an Army second lieutenant.

In the book, he describes the horror of the fighting in Belgium’s Hurtgen Forest, where lieutenants had, the authors say, a 17 percent chance of surviving two weeks in combat, and bodies from the October-November 1944 battle still littered the forest floor when the snow melted in spring.

Such compelling stories and the graphic photographs that accompany them make it no wonder that some soldiers found the enormous strain too much.

The authors quote a wartime U.S. surgeon general report stating that for every five wounded, one soldier died and another broke down mentally.

Early in the book, the authors quote Sam Hynes of Minneapolis, who at 19 trained as a pilot at a base near Mobile. “I don’t think there is such a thing as a good war,” Hynes said. “There are sometimes necessary wars. And I think one might say, ‘just’ wars. I never questioned the necessity of that war. And I still do not question it. It was something that had to be done.”

It was a war that changed the world and had a profound effect on America and the people of the United States. Aside from compiling a highly interesting book, Ward and Burns have done well in preserving a part of the history of that war and contributing to the understanding of its impact on ordinary people and their lives.

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