The great American documentary filmmaker turns his attention to World War II, telling it through those who lived it in his PBS series and its companion book, “The War.” Here's an excerpt:

Chapter One
Sunday morning, December 7, 1941, began as most days do in Honolulu: warm and sunny with blue skies punctuated here and there by high wisps of cloud.

At a few minutes after eight o'clock, the Hyotara Inouye family was at home on Coyne Street, getting ready for church.

The sugary whine of Hawaiian music drifted through the house. The oldest of the four Inouye children, seventeen-year-old Daniel, a senior at William McKinley High and a Red Cross volunteer, was listening to station KGMB as he dressed.

There were other sounds, too, muffled far-off sounds to which no one paid much attention at first because they had grown so familiar over the past few months.

The drone of airplanes and the rumble of distant explosions had been commonplace since spring of the previous year, when the U.S. Pacific Fleet had shifted from the California coast to Pearl Harbor, some seven miles northwest of the Inouye home. Air-raid drills were frequent occurrences; so was practice firing of the big coastal defense batteries near Waikiki Beach.

But this was different. Daniel was just buttoning his shirt, he remembered, when the voice of disk jockey Webley Edwards broke into the music.

"All army, navy, and marine personnel to report to duty," it said. At almost the same moment, Daniel's father shouted for him to come outside. Something strange was going on. Daniel hurried out into the sunshine and stood with his father by the side of the house, peering toward Pearl Harbor.

They were too far away to see the fleet itself, and hills further obscured their view, but the sky above the harbor was filled with puffs of smoke. During drills the blank antiaircraft bursts had always been white. These were jet-black. Then, as the Inouyes watched in disbelief, the crrrump of distant explosions grew louder and more frequent and so much oily black smoke began billowing up into the sky that the mountains all but vanished and the horizon itself seemed about to disappear.  

At that point, Daniel remembered, "all of a sudden, three aircraft flew right overhead. They were pearl gray with red dots on the wing — Japanese. I knew what was happening. And I thought my world had just come to an end."  

He had no time for further reflection. The telephone rang. He was needed at the nearest aid station right away. A stray American antiaircraft shell had fallen into a crowded neighborhood. There were civilian casualties. "One haunts me every so often," Inouye remembered many years later. "It was a woman clutching a child. Her head was severed, but here she was with her arms around her baby. And so this is what I had to pick up. At seventeen."  

Young Daniel Inouye's first experience of the war was like that of most Americans who lived through it. They would retain vivid memories of the things they actually saw. But each would also be affected by events they could not see, happening just over the horizon or thousands of miles away. The statesmen and strategists who moved so many of them from one place, one peril, to the next, were largely invisible, too. And most people were too busy trying simply to survive to be able to understand the parts that the battles they waged or watched or worried about were playing in the greater struggle. This is their story of the war, as some of them remember it.  

Nothing like the attack on Pearl Harbor had ever happened to Americans before. In less than two hours, Japanese warplanes launched from carriers far out at sea had taken so terrible a toll on the Pacific Fleet that the War Department would keep the exact details to itself for years. Eight of the nine American battleships in the Pacific, including the USS Arizona, were sunk or severely damaged. So were three light cruisers, three destroyers, and four other naval vessels.
(All three American carriers happened to be away at the time of the attack, or they, too, might have been lost.) One hundred and sixty-four American aircraft —three quarters of those based around Pearl Harbor — were also destroyed, all but a few without ever having gotten off the ground. Two thousand four hundred and three Americans, servicemen and civilians, lost their lives. Some eleven hundred more were wounded.

It was around two-thirty in the afternoon when the first news of it reached ordinary citizens in the eastern United States. Katharine Phillips of Mobile, Alabama, was then a sophomore at Auburn University, in the east-central part of the state. She had just returned to her dormitory from church when she heard a scream from down the hall, then the sounds of weeping. "What's the matter?" she asked. "What's wrong?" Her housemates told her what they'd heard. Tears filled her eyes, too, she remembered, "but we comforted each other. The girls all cried and wept because they had boyfriends or relatives who were already in the armed forces. And we realized immediately that this would be war."

At about that same time back home in Mobile, Katharine's seventeen-year-old brother, Sidney Phillips, Jr., was perched on a soda fountain stool at Albright and Woods drugstore at the corner of Dauphin and Anne streets, drinking a nickel vanilla milkshake. It had an extra scoop of ice cream in it, courtesy of the soda jerk, Phillips's friend and former classmate William O. Brown. He and Brown — whom everybody called W.O. — had graduated from Murphy High School that June.  

Suddenly, a distraught woman flew through the door. "Turn on the radio!" she shouted. Someone did. "It kept giving the same information again and again," Phillips remembered, "and we just all sat there quietly, listening." As the news crackled in, Brown kept wiping the same section of the marble countertop over and over again. Phillips just stared at the tiled floor; more than half a century later he could remember its distinctive black-and-white checkerboard pattern. "Everyone was very startled," he recalled, "excited, frightened, very serious. We knew this meant we were in the war. Some ladies started crying." After a time the radio announcer began repeating himself and the stunned customers at last began to talk among themselves. Phillips was the only one in the drugstore who had any idea where Pearl Harbor was; his uncle was a navy pilot and had once been stationed there.  

W. O. Brown stopped wiping the counter and said, "Sid, let's go join the navy in the morning."

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