Growing up in the 1950s and `60s, we listened, in our way, to war stories. With World War II as the central experience of their lives, our fathers and mothers would reflect on battles vividly remembered, marriages arranged in haste and torn by circumstance, children born with fathers at war in North Africa or Leyte Gulf.
The generation that fought World War II is now well past middle age, and we have a voting-age generation that does not remember Vietnam, except in the guise of Hollywood`s ”Rambo.”
Television has nodded in the direction of the 40th anniversary of the end of World War II, but never as honestly, or in as moving a fashion, as it will Monday night on Public Broadcasting.
”The Unknown Soldier,” which airs at 9 p.m. on WTTW-Ch.11, is part history and mostly biography. Produced by Arnold Shapiro and directed by Carol Fleisher, a Winnetka native, the piece moves back through what will seem to many viewers to be ancient American history, to the lives and deaths of six men lost in battle in World War II.
The conceit here is that one of these men may lie in one of the four
”unknown” crypts at Arlington National Cemetery. The legend inscribed on the Tomb reads ”Here Rests in Honored Glory an American Soldier Known Only to God.”
For the families of more than 78,000 men in World War II, there was no body shipped home, no tangible resolution of this most wrenching of all questions.
”The Unknown Soldier” tells six human stories, with a capsule history of the notion of Tomb working through the narrative. The producers have consciously, and perhaps too consciously, broken the stories down along racial, geographic and service lines.
We learn about Wallace Kinder, a 19-year-old kid from Williams, Ind., who fled the horrors of the Bataan Death March in the Philippines only to be captured and executed by the Japanese. There is Billy Frazier, a small-town high school hero from Rawson, Ohio, killed at Utah Beach on D-Day, 1944.
We learn about Alfonza Davis, a black airman from Nebraska, a fighter pilot waging a war in a segregated Army Air Force, a hero of the so-called
”Tuskegee Airmen.” Davis, shot down over Italy, was part of a racist American ”experiment” to see if black men were capable of functioning as combat pilots. For Berdyne Scott, Davis` wife of just a few months during the war, the answer came in the form of a telegram and a Distinguished Flying Cross.
All of the stories here are small, intimate ones, just the sort your father might have told as you feigned interest in his home-grown memories, memories never quite so interesting as John Wayne`s or Audie Murphy`s.
”The Unknown Soldier” makes the point that people still remember after 40 years, that a country holding the graves and the memories of 400,000 dead between 1941 and 1944 cannot forget, even if the society in 1985 comes equipped with an adolescent attention span.
Naomi Henry was engaged to Billy Frazier at a time when hard choices, and sometimes wrong choices, were made as a generation trooped off to war. Divorced now, still living in Rawson, Naomi Henry says she remembers Billy Frazier on most of the days of her life. ”After Billy, there was a shadow on my marriage,” she says with the saddest, kindest of smiles.
They are the stories this worthy production tells best. Narrated by Jason Robards, ”The Unknown Soldier” is unabashedly sentimental, a documentary that perhaps has more in common with the spirit of Thornton Wilder`s ”Our Town” than with standard military documentaries.
”There`s a kind of glory in combat footage,” says Arnold Shapiro.
”It`s built in, I suppose. The story here is that for thousands, maybe millions of people, a war that ended 40 years ago never ended. And without a body, without a real grave, the loss is all that much greater.”
The families and friends set in profile for ”The Unknown Soldier” seem to take a kind of tragic comfort in the notion that the elaborate, secretive procedure that brought this military everyman to Arlington National Cemetery might have brought Billy Frazier or Wally Kinder or Alfonza Davis home. The production does the same, though the heart of the matter is far from a military graveyard.
”Men and women just loved him,” Berdyne Scott says of Alfonza Davis, dead 41 years and a month after his 25th birthday. And then, with a smile just like Naomi Henry`s, she tells us, ”Romeo and Juliet never had an anniversary, either.”
