A don't miss TV event - The War, a 15-hour documentary on PBS, depicting World War II with special emphasis on the effect it had on four US communities - one of which is Sacramento.

A look at Sacramento during wartime, from the PBS pressroom:

Sacramento expanded rapidly during the war, as tens of thousands migrated to the city to work at the two local aviation installations, McClellan Air Force Base (a repair and maintenance facility for aircraft, engines and flight instruments, as well as a training center for mechanics) and Mather Field (a training school for navigators and one of dozens of flight training bases that grew up all across the country during the war). McClellan was instrumental in providing operating support for many critical missions in the Pacific Theater, including retrofitting the bombers used for Lt. Col. James Doolittle’s raid of mainland Japan in April 1942. McClellan and Mather provided thousands of jobs to Sacramentans during the war; by 1943, McClellan alone employed 22,000 workers.

But not all Sacramento residents shared in the good times made possible by the war. In the spring of 1942, soon after President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 authorizing the War Department to designate “military areas” and then exclude anyone from them whom it felt to be a danger, hand-lettered signs saying “Japs must go” went up all over town. In May, the Japanese residents of Sacramento, with one week’s notice, were forced to abandon their homes, farms and businesses and were sent to inland internment camps. Ordered to bring only “what they could carry,” most would spend the remainder of the war in the camps, fenced in by barbed wire and guarded by soldiers wielding loaded machine guns. Immigrants from Mexico, some of them part of the “bracero” program, were eventually brought into Sacramento to work in the fields in their stead. When the war ended, only 59 percent of Japanese citizens who had been exiled chose to return to Sacramento County to try to reclaim their property and rebuild their lives.

It starts on your local PBS channel this Sunday evening. A companion book by "War" writer Geoffrey C. Ward and a soundtrack album will be released this month; a DVD boxed set of the series is set to bow October 2.

A review in the Washington Post states:

the film tells a collective story that unfolds grandly, horribly, painfully, proudly. It exposes the gaping divide between that era and the current day, while mounting a mighty effort to bridge it.

Simultaneously emotionally wrenching and intellectually challenging, Ken Burns has created yet another masterpiece that illuminates America’s past in a way that should bring us both pride and shame, helping us move forward as a culture.

Gillian Parrillo
The Sacramento Executive