“The War”? Which war? What about the war? The grandiose titles of Ken Burns’s multi-part and seemingly interminable documentaries-cum-marketing opportunities— “The Civil War,” “The West,” “Baseball,” “Jazz”—all irritatingly raise similar questions by their self-important refusal to qualify themselves except by reference to the name of their author, the celebrity documentary-maker Ken Burns. That name is the answer to all the questions raised by the title. Oh, the Ken Burns war. Viewers may or may not have been aware before its seven two- or two-and-a-half-hour installments aired on PBS in September and October that there had been an armed conflict between the years of 1939 and 1945, a conflict which in America is usually called World War II, but Ken’s war was not that war. Most of the fighting and the suffering that took place in the historical war was not done by Americans, but we hear very little of that. All of it was determined by the mind and character of its political and military leaders, but we hear very little of them either. Few people at the time thought the war had anything much to do with race relations in America, but Ken thinks it had a lot to do with them.

In other words, like the Civil War and the rest, World War II has been Burnsified. This is Ken Burns’s “War”—as the name above the title implies—rather than thewar, the war as history knew it before he put the Burns brand