The Axis powers fought by the U.S. and its allies were, indeed, nasty and brutal regimes. Japan's militarist government launched a war against China beginning in the early 1930s that killed millions. Mussolini's Italian fascists rampaged through Ethiopia and North Africa.

And of course, Germany's Nazis slaughtered their political opponents, carried out the Holocaust of 6 million European Jews and exterminated between 3 million and 5 million others, including ethnic minorities, socialists, unionists, gays and lesbians, and other "undesirables."

But the usual portrayal of the Second World War minimizes the atrocities carried out by the Allied powers--and even justifies them as unavoidable lapses in a war against evil regimes that had to be destroyed at all costs.

So it is with Ken Burns' multi-part documentary The War.

What else to read For a more comprehensive (26 hours long!) and far more accurate documentary series on the Second World War, though not from a left-wing point of view, look for Thames Television's The World at War, narrated by Laurence Olivier. Roll Me Over by Raymond Gantter is a very good personal account of a U.S. infantryman's survival in 1944-1945 and the horrors of the war. Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse-Five describes the firebombing of Dresden and the nightmarish aftermath. Sidney Lens' The Forging of the American Empire provides a left-wing account of the U.S. government's imperialist interests in the war. Also excellent are these articles from the International Socialist Review: "World War II: The good war?" by Ashley Smith; "The occupation of Japan," also by Ashley Smith; and "The U.S. occupation of Germany," by Jeff Bale.

To his credit, Burns does show injustices within the U.S. during the Second World War--such as the internment of Japanese-Americans, who were viewed by the Roosevelt government as an "enemy within." Also, racism against African Americans in the war industry and the hypocrisy of a segregated military are documented.

But Burns, like most mainstream U.S. historians of the war, focuses on Americans at the expense of the rest of the world.

As a result, he understates or neglects to mention at all the horrific truth about the Second World War--that civilians became legitimate, if not the main, targets of not only the Axis powers, but the Allies.

At the beginning of the war, Germany bombed Poland and western European cities, causing civilian deaths on a large scale. The six months of the German blitz against Britain killed 40,000. These attacks were rightly seen as atrocities.

But the Allies responded in kind. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill gave the okay for the Royal Air Force to target German civilians.

As author Sven Lindqvist writes in A History of Bombing, "British air attacks on Hamburg killed more people than all German air attacks against English cities put together. About 50,000 died in a single night, the night of July 27, 1943. The majority of them were women, children and old people."

On February 13, 1945--with the Nazis nearly defeated--the German city of Dresden was slated for annihilation. Britain's bombardment caused a firestorm so severe that corpses were reduced to ash, making only an approximate body count possible. Estimates suggest that 100,000 people were killed.

The U.S., meanwhile, applied the same policy against Japan in the Pacific war. On March 9, 1945, Tokyo came under attack--U.S. incendiary bombs killed 100,000 and left 1 million residents homeless.

By July 1945, 66 of Japan's largest cities were burned to the ground. Only four major urban targets remained unscathed--Hiroshima and Nagasaki were two of them. The stage was set for the use of the ultimate weapon: the atomic bomb.

On August 6, 1945, the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, planning the attack purposely for the morning rush hour. Some 100,000 people were killed instantly, 95 percent of them civilians. Another 100,000 would die over time from radiation poisoning. Two days later, the US bombed Nagasaki, with the same catastrophic effect.

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