9/24/2007 - Ken Burns shares an old friend’s untold war story

This image from Burns’ seven-part documentary The War, which begins tonight, shows Ward Chamberlin of Westport, Mass., left, at Cassino, Italy, in 1944. Chamberlin, a WWII ambulance driver, helped Burns early in his career.

I knew, of course, about Normandy and other historic engagements of World War II, but watching Ken Burns’ documentary The War is a reminder that there were many lesser-known “D-Days” that had an even greater cost.

Ward Chamberlin, of Westport, Mass., just over the Rhode Island border, was witness to one.

It’s been more than 60 years since Chamberlin served. He’s 86 now. But he still remembers moments in detail, like the half-hour he spent with the first soldier he saw die.

The PBS documentary, a seven-part, 14½-hour epic beginning tonight at 8 on Channels 2 and 36, focuses not on figures such as Winston Churchill and George Patton, but on common souls. Ward Chamberlin is among them, and it has given him a certain celebrity. He does not feel he merits it. Others, he says, faced worse.

But he brings a perspective often overlooked, one reason he was chosen by Burns, the film’s director. It was Chamberlin’s job to rescue the wounded. He was an ambulance driver. He first saw action in Italy at the battle of Monte Cassino — an engagement far more calamitous than I’d realized.

The fighting there went on for over a month, and when done, more than 4,400 Allied soldiers died. On D-Day, 2,500 were lost.

It began in January 1944, five months before Normandy. An elaborate plan was put together to push the Germans from Rome, and part of it meant taking the mountainous town of Cassino. Chamberlin was with the British as they launched their part of the assault. It was late afternoon.

He was less than a half-mile from the front in a four-wheel-drive ambulance. Rain had been constant, turning the dirt roads around Cassino into mud. The hope had been for the British to make it across a river called the Garigliano. But the Germans were waiting and sent down both artillery and rifle fire. It was a slaughter.

“War is war,” said Chamberlin. “It’s chaos. It never works out the way you plan.”

Chamberlin was waiting at an advance dressing-station when stretcher-bearers brought back one of the early casualties. It was Chamberlin’s first exposure to combat-wounded. Not long before, he had been a student at Princeton. Now he was in the mud of Cassino. He was 23.

Like many Americans, he was not prepared for the horrors of war. Burns’ documentary explains that this was, in part, by U.S. government design. For the first years of World War II, all images showing American dead were censored. It wasn’t until September of 1943, after Chamberlin had left for Europe, that Life magazine was allowed to print a photograph of three American corpses on a beach. People on the home front were shocked to see it so explicitly, and had the same reaction when similar images were shown on newsreels in theaters.

Now Chamberlin saw it first-hand. He talks briefly about it on-screen in the third episode of The War, which will air Tuesday night, but I asked if he could describe it in more detail.

He told me he can still picture the soldier on that stretcher.

“He was such a mess, wounded so badly,” Chamberlin said. “His face was partly gone. He’d lost a leg and an arm.” The soldier was unconscious.

Chamberlin walked to the side of the ambulance and got ill. Then he came back and helped load the man into the ambulance bay.

He took the wheel and began grinding back toward a tented British field hospital. Rain continued and it was slow going.

“The mud was horrible,” Chamberlin told me. There was no partition between the driver and the bay. The trip was a half-mile, but took a long time.

Finally, they were there. The soldier was taken in. Chamberlin could see the man was in his final moments.

Then he and his fellow driver headed back to wait for the next casualty. What he didn’t know was that this was the first day of a five-day battle, which itself was the first of three battles in this same valley lasting over a month.

GIVEN ALL THE millions who played a part in the war, both home and overseas, I asked Chamberlin how Ken Burns settled on him for a notable role.

There were many reasons. One is that the film tells the story through four American communities — Mobile, Ala.; Luverne, Minn.; Sacramento, Calif.; and Waterbury, Conn. Chamberlin grew up near Waterbury.

He also represents a different perspective. He served, but not in the military. As a child, he lost his right eye to meningitis and, in 1942, was rejected by the draft board. But he wanted to be part of the war, so he left Princeton and joined 1,500 others in the American Field Service (AFS), a civilian corps in uniform that ran ambulances at the front lines.

There was a third connection that made Chamberlin a prospect for the movie. It turns out Burns had known about his service for years, and for his part, Chamberlin played a critical part in Burns’ career.

Chamberlin helped found the Public Broadcasting Service and later became president of the Washington, D.C., affiliate station. One day in the early 1980s, a young man talked his way into his office asking for money to help finish a documentary on Louisiana Gov. Huey Long. Chamberlin says Burns’ age and wide eyes made him look like a cross between a college freshman and Steven Spielberg’s E.T.

Plenty of filmmakers came Chamberlin’s way with their hands out, and he was forced to say no to almost all. His station didn’t have a lot of money. Skeptically, he agreed to view the Huey Long footage. Afterward, he looked at Burns.

“How much do you need to finish this?”

When he got the answer, he told his comptroller to cut Burns a $30,000 check. The comptroller looked at Chamberlin, his boss, and said, “You’re crazy.”

Two years later, Chamberlin helped stake Burns’ Civil War epic. Halfway through production, Burns contacted Chamberlin again.

“Usually,” he says, “when a producer calls you it means they’re out of money.”

Burns was. He said he wanted to expand The Civil War from 5 hours to 11.

Now it was Chamberlin’s turn to say, “That’s nuts.” He added, “No one can look at that box for that long.”

But he saw the rough cuts, gave more, and the film established Burns as the country’s preeminent historical documentary maker.

Almost five years ago, Burns called again. This time, with Chamberlin retired, it wasn’t for money, but to shoot an interview.

“I’m doing this film on World War II,” Burns said.

IN ONE OF HIS on-screen moments, Chamberlin says something that reflected a common experience among those in the war. In describing that first wounded soldier at Cassino, he pauses to observe, “I don’t think I’ve ever said this to anybody.”

I asked what he meant by that.

Most World War II veterans, he said, didn’t talk about it. The memories were unsettling, and though they didn’t call it post-traumatic stress back then, plenty had a form of it, and coped by avoiding the subject. His own brother-in-law had been a pilot in the Marine Corps, and it was only after he died a year ago that Chamberlin learned he had been awarded a Distinguished Flying Cross with three clusters.

“He never spoke about it,” Chamberlin said.

There was also a feeling among veterans that the war left you years behind in life, and everyone’s focus was on catching up. Chamberlin, for example, squeezed a three-year Columbia law school regimen into two years after the war. You wanted to get back to living, he said.

CHAMBERLIN OBSERVES in the film that few of those in combat in World War II did their jobs with bravado. Most were just scared. He counts himself among them.

Some days he would transport more than a dozen wounded.

“It’s a horrible experience,” Chamberlin told me. He remembers bringing back a soldier who began to look as though he wasn’t going to make it. They stopped.

“I went to the back of the ambulance,” Chamberlin recalled. “He was in terrible shape. I held his hand. He kind of looked at me and blinked, and he was gone.” He covered the man up and continued on.

That same monthlong engagement saw another Allied disaster when American infantry were sent to cross a swift river near Cassino named the Rapido. Germans were waiting, dug in on high ground with enormous firepower trained on the open shore. They’d also mined both sides of the river. The U.S. troops were slaughtered. Chamberlin was driving his ambulance when he came across a line of returning survivors.

“I saw these guys walking down the road as if they were zombies,” he told me. “One foot after the other, eyes half closed. What they’d been through nobody should have to go through. The slaughter was unbelievable.”

He added: “Glamour of war? Glamour, my foot. That’s what it’s really like; those poor bastards.”

A NUMBER OF ambulance drivers were killed by shrapnel. Chamberlin’s superior, an AFS lieutenant named Bob Bryan, was near the front one day at Cassino when a shell landed nearby.

“Bob got a big chunk of stuff in his gut,” said Chamberlin. He died 30 minutes later in the arms of his fellow driver. Chamberlin later was promoted to fill the spot, putting him in charge of a platoon of 45 people and 35 ambulances. In time, he became a major, running all four ambulance platoons in Italy.

Looking back, he agrees with many historians who feel the fight up through Cassino, and the related American landing at Anzio that met heavy resistance on its way to Rome, were not worth it. The campaign may well have diverted German troops from Normandy, he said, but there were enormous casualties without enough to show for it.

That, too, he observed, is war. He worries that in time, if things keep going the way they are, the same might be said of Iraq.

CHAMBERLIN WAS part of one other legacy. After the war, in 1947, he remembers a big meeting of American Field Service veterans in New York’s Waldorf Astoria. They shared stories not just about combat, but all the different armies they had worked with. Chamberlin was typical, having been attached at different times to troops from Britain, India, Poland and New Zealand.

The group’s leader pointed out to all that they had a unique experience of having gotten to know many cultures.

“You could scatter,” the AFS leader said, “or you can do something worthwhile.”

They decided to create cultural understanding by focusing AFS on the novel idea of creating foreign exchange education for high school students.

“Academicians said it was hopeless,” recalled Chamberlin. “You couldn’t bring a 17-year-old kid who didn’t speak English to this country or send an American kid to Scandinavia. They were dead wrong.” Today, there are 11,000 students per year in AFS programs.

Chamberlin and his wife, Lydia, have been in Westport full-time since 1993. They moved there to be close to their two daughters, both of whom settled in Massachusetts.

He said that the war is still with him here.

“Anyone who has been in combat, or close to it — you don’t get over it,” he said.

But he is proud of his role, and feels, as Burns’ documentary stresses, that if it wasn’t a “good” war, it was a necessary one.

Ward Chamberlin offered this lesson from it: “When the American people are unified in what they think to be a worthy cause, they can do anything.”

From the couch of his living room, he looked at an American flag on a pole just outside.

He said it’s a remarkable country.