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World War II, we have been told all our lives, was our greatest triumph, the moment when the forces of light—the Western democracies and the U.S.S.R.—prevailed over the forces of darkness—the Nazis and the other Axis powers. It was a conflict that began in Europe in September 1939 and ended with the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan in August 1945. Or did it?

THE WAR, a seven-part documentary series directed and produced by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, explores the history and horror of the Second World War from an American perspective by following the fortunes of so-called ordinary men and women who become caught up in one of the greatest cataclysms in human history.