There’s often a significant flaw in Ken Burns’s documentaries. In “The Civil War” (1990), it was an ending that emphasized the healing of whites in the North and South without making clear that, at the war’s end, the situation of most blacks in this country would not change for decades. In “Baseball” (1994), it was the director’s failure to accommodate the when-it-was-a-game nostalgia with the hard realities of the players’ revolution in the 1970s. And in “The West” (1996), it was an inability to reconcile the 19th-century belief in manifest destiny with the 20th-century notion of imperialism. But then, Mr. Burns isn’t a historian, he’s a storyteller with an uncanny — let’s face it, unprecedented — ability to weave a vast array of threads into a single cohesive narrative.

Compared with the flaws in his previous films (and what film, or diamond, doesn’t have flaws?), the one causing all the controversy for “The War,” Mr. Burns’s seven-part, 14-hour documentary about America’s role in World War II, is relatively minor. But then again, that’s easy for me to say: I’m not Latino, and the addition of interviews with two Mexican-American veterans seems tacked on and doesn’t fully address the experiences and contribution of Hispanics to America’s war effort.

There’s no getting around this, and Mr. Burns would have been better off acknowledging the fact instead of double-talking around it. That being said, the major strength of the Brooklyn native’s documentaries has always been the acknowledgment of minorities in American history — or stated another way, the revelation that we Americans are all minorities. “Baseball” spent nearly as much time on the Negro leagues as the major leagues, and gave a nice, sidelong glance to the women’s professional leagues that sprang up during World War II.

“The Civil War” had the guts to take on revisionists and state the truth — namely that the Civil War was about slavery — and if Mr. Burns dropped the ball at the end of “The Civil War,” he picks it up and runs with it in “The War,” which will make its premiere Sunday on PBS. In 1941, black Americans were asked to fight for their country for the second time in 23 years, then found themselves returning home to Jim Crow; Mr. Burns never allows the euphoria of victory to mitigate their bitterness. And if Japanese-Americans are given some of the footage that should have gone to Mexicans, Mr. Burns at least makes the most of it. Perhaps the greatest disgrace of 20th century America — the removal of citizens to barbed wire compounds while their sons were sent to fight in Europe (and accumulate more medals than any other outfit of its size and length of service in the U.S. Army) — is imprinted, indelibly, on our collective memory.

The first thing you notice about “The War” is the stark edginess of Keith David’s sonorous narration, a far cry from the anesthetizing drone of David McCullough (who narrated “The Civil War”) and John Chancellor (“Baseball”). The second, though it may take a while to sink in, is the absence of historical talking heads, which, to put it as plainly as possible, reduces the film’s pomposity factor by about 95%. Most of the interviewees are from four representative towns — Waterbury, Conn.; Luverne, Minn.; Mobile, Ala., and Sacramento, Calif. — and all either served or waited for those who served. Their stories not only follow the main currents of the war to the South Pacific, North Africa, and Europe, but several fascinating tributaries as well, including a Marine from Alabama who was held captive in Japan for three years, and a young girl from Sacramento who spent the entire war with her family at the Santo Tomas Internment Camp in Manila.

The first-person accounts are what make “The War” compelling, but what make it history are the uncanny instincts of co-director Lynn Novick, who selected the subjects, and writer Geoffrey Ward, who once again sifted through a veritable library to provide not merely a text, but one with a perspective and a bite lacking in nearly all recent American histories about World War II. In recent interviews, Mr. Burns has indicated that he wants his film to rescue America’s war experience from the fog of dramatic myth that has obscured it since the release of Steven Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan” and Clint Eastwood’s “Flags of Our Fathers” and “Letters From Iwo Jima.”

If he has succeeded, it’s not just because the war left the GIs denuded of all romance, but because Mr. Ward’s clear-eyed analysis of Allied strategic blunders — for example, MacArthur’s irrational insistence that he could hold the Philippines in 1942, the fiasco of the Anzio landing in Italy in 1944, President Eisenhower’s premature optimism about the end of the war in Europe, etc. — allows no glossing over of the periodic ineptitude of American leaders. (You’d wonder why we won if you didn’t know that the Axis made even bigger blunders.)

There is, I think, a built-in reluctance of many from my generation — let’s just round us up under the label of baby boomers who came of age during the Vietnam War — to appreciate the sacrifice made by our parents’ generation. This is probably due in large part to having grown up in the cynicism and disillusionment of the Cold War, but also partly because our parents (I’m speaking from my own experience here, but I know a lot of people around my age who would agree) never talked much about it. The result is that we tend to look on almost any film about World War II as tinged with what Tom Carson refers to in the October issue of GQ Magazine, as a “Hallmark-card notion of history.” Mr. Carson’s remark, though, is wrongly applied in his sneering dismissal of “The War.” I’d like to know when Hallmark gave us images of human skeletons liberated from Nazi concentration camps, or 8-foot-tall heaps of German corpses — old men, women, and children — in Dresden, or the dismembered bodies of U.S. Marines washing up on the beaches of now-forgotten islands like Peleliu.

Messrs. Burns and Ward and Ms. Novick make no populist attempt to leave us feeling good about the Second World War: What they want is for us to feel the sense of relief that the veterans felt when this war, that at times seemed unwinnable, was finally over. Those who maintain that we shouldn’t have dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki should first look upon the faces of the men who would have had to invade Japan (and, not incidentally, kill perhaps millions of Japanese in the process). “The War” will tell you more about America between 1941 and 1945 than you ever knew. It may also tell you some of what your father or grandfather didn’t — or couldn’t.