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What surprised me most when I watched the film was how vivid the recollections of the people interviewed are. It’s as if the subject of the war years switches on a light in their minds and suddenly they are back in the 1940s again. What surprised you about the people interviewed?

Our witnesses' memories are astonishingly vivid. I'm not sure I was surprised by this -- the War was the biggest thing that ever happened to most of them, after all-- but I was amazed at the rich detail they could summon up and which I could independently verify. What did surprise me 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.

The bibliography for "The War" is enormous – more than 350 volumes. From a historical and military point of view, were there certain books and writers that caused you to see America’s involvement in World War II in a different way?

I did consult a lot of histories, mostly to provide context, and I read a lot of war memoirs. One of them — Samuel F. Hynes’, Flights of Passage, written by one our most eloquent witnesses -- seems to me to be a neglected masterpiece: candid, self-aware, spare and elegant. Among the histories, I was especially taken with An Army at Dawn, Rick Atkinson’s vivid account of the little-understood North African campaign and am eager to see his forthcoming account of the fighting in Italy. Most of the surprises came from the men and women who experienced the war and are always at the center of things.

Perhaps the biggest difference between The War and the other documentaries you’ve worked on with Ken Burns is the absence of historians as talking heads – only the men who served overseas and friends and family at home are interviewed on screen. Was the decision not to interview historians made at the outset?

From the first we wanted this series to answer the simple question: What was it like to live through the War? No matter how many books we read and reels of microfilm we spin through, those of us who weren’t around can’t really know. No one respects historians more than I do, but it was a pleasure to be able to do an entire series without anyone telling the viewer what he or she is supposed to think about what’s unfolding on screen.

I think your book and the documentary make about the strongest case I’ve ever seen for the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Frit of all, I hadn’t realized that the fire bob raids on Tokyo were perhaps even more destructive than the atomic bombs. Mostly, though, it was listening to the troops themselves talk about how weary they were and how they were dreading the invasion of the Japanese homeland, knowing that the Japanese would not surrender. There’s a photo in the book that really struck home: the faces of Marines on Okinawa as thy received the news that the war in Europe had ended. There is no elation: they look as if they had just been told of a death in the family.
In your estimation, was the use of atomic bombs justified, and I don’t just men form the point of view of American lives saved -- do you think as horrible as the effects of the bombs were, they might have eventually saved Japanese lives as well?
“Justified” is a loaded word. But it seems to that it was entirely understandable, the ghastly but logical outcome of Allied decisions that turned innocent civilians legitimate targets made before the US entered the war. The bomb did save thousands of American lives — how many thousands no one can say -- and that fact alone seems to me to have made Truman’s decision to drop it inevitable. It also surely saved Japanese lives; even advocates of avoiding an assault on the home islands in favor of continued conventional bombing and total blockade believed the resulting famine would kill nearly two million people, maybe more. There’s a vast quarrelsome literature about the bomb, as you know, and the revisionists are now being revised — see Hiroshima in History, edited by Robert James Maddox, just published by the University of Missouri, for the latest arguments.