Ken Burns doesn't shy away from big subjects. The Civil War, jazz, baseball, the American West: He's tackled them all. Burns's upcoming documentary on the American experience of World War II is no exception. But beneath the grand, ambitious subject are people, each of whom experienced the war as life, not history.

The statistics - more than 50 million dead, many of them civilians - are staggering and impossible to comprehend. But for families throughout America, the conflict was painfully real.

To make history individual, Burns went small. The documentary brings to life the wartime stories of four American towns, where teenage boys enlisted after breaking up with their girlfriends, where neighbors found themselves overseas, where parents held their breath for weeks on end.

"What it shows, without a doubt, is that there are no ordinary lives," Burns, a Walpole resident, said this week at St. Paul's School, where he spoke with students and showed clips from the 15-hour documentary. PBS will broadcast the film in the fall of 2007.

The War marks Burns's first film about war since The Civil War- now a staple of high school history classes - debuted in 1990. For a decade, Burns shelved the subject, wary of being typecast as a war filmmaker. "It was more out of obstinacy, because people kept saying you should do this," Burns said. "I just didn't think that I was the guy to do war. I'm just a person who's trying to tell stories."

But two statistics spawned the six-year project. Burns heard the first - that 40 percent of graduating high school seniors think the United States fought with the Germans against the Russians in World War II - in the mid-1990s. More recently, he heard that 1,000 World War II veterans are dying every day. The opportunity to humanize the war - to hear the stories of our parents and grandparents who lived those years - was slipping away.

So Burns, his co-producer Lynn Novick and crew set out to find people and towns transformed by the war. Sacramento, Calif.; Mobile, Ala.; Waterbury, Conn., and the small farming town of Luverne, Minn., became their canvases.

What he uncovered were dozens of stories of ordinary Americans -16-year-old farm boys, young men from well-off Alabama families, Japanese-Americans in Sacramento - acting in the most unordinary ways. Like Walter Ehlers pulling 12 Americans off the beach on D-Day, a feat that earned him the medal of honor. Or boys lying about their age to enlist early. "I'm sometimes stunned just by the bravery of ordinary people," Burns said.

"You can just hate war, but there's something seductive about it," Burns said. "Because life is paradoxically most vivifying when you're closest to death. In war, you find some spectacular human behavior."

KEN WILLIAMS / Monitor staff Ken Burns speaks at St. Paul’s School this week. His new documentary, The War, brings to life the stories of those affected by World War II. It is expected to air on PBS in 2007. Zoom Purchase Photos Online

The War, Burns said, is his most intricate film to date. Unlike The Civil War, where the conflict's veterans were no longer around to be filmed, Burns and his crew found 80 Americans to interview about their wartime experiences. Of those 80, 40 are in the final film.

Video clips and still photographs, most of them taken by members of the U.S. military, bring to life the experiences veterans describe, Burns said. The bodies of American soldiers lying in the surf take on a new meaning. "I think we're using it (film clips) in service of a more complicated and deeply emotional story, which changes the stakes a bit."

Each town and city helps convey certain aspects of the conflict.

Sacramento was home to sizable Japanese-American and African-American populations, shedding light on the United States's internment of Japanese-Americans and the wartime service of African-Americans who were still denied basic civil rights at home. Waterbury shows east-coast struggles. Burns read a memoir by a Mobile veteran, which led him to the southern city. And Luverne brings to life the rural wartime experience.

The documentary is a sort of snapshot, capturing a moment in U.S. history. But in the midst of another American wartime experience, the film "does reverberate and echo with all the things that not only this current war has, but I think every war has," Burns said. "Do we have the right equipment? What kind of sacrifices are we going to have to make?"

"We'll look back at the second World War and that may be the last time we were all together. And one of the reasons we were all together is because we were willing to give things up together," he said. Books dispersed wisdom about cooking with rations; families tended victory gardens. But this time around, Burns said, "we haven't been asked anything."

Ending films, especially those lasting 15 hours, isn't easy. "Someone said you never finish a work of art, you abandon it," Burns said. "You get to a place where you begin to have a sort of parental affection for the imperfections."With The War moving towardbroadcast, Burns has turned his attention to his next project: a history of America's national parks.

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