TV REVIEWS : ‘Liberators’ Captures Slice of History

“Liberators: Fighting on Two Fronts in World War II,” a documentary in the “American Experience” series that airs tonight (at 9 on KCET-TV Channel 28 and KPBS-TV Channel 15, 7 p.m. on KVCR-TV Channel 24), is an emotional, high-powered chronicle of two of the Army’s few African-American combat units.

This telling of the story of the 761st Tank Battalion--the “Black Panthers” who spearheaded Patton’s charge across Europe in 1944--and the 183rd Combat Engineer Corps., which helped liberate Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge, captures a slice of history usually overlooked in other documentaries about the era.

(Quick history lesson: Prior to World War II, blacks were only allowed minor roles in the military and were not allowed in combat units. Under pressure, President Franklin Roosevelt reluctantly lifted the restrictions. A year after Pearl Harbor, half a million black men had been inducted into the armed services--which were still segregated. “Model” combat units were created for publicity; few made it into war.)

The liberators of the title provide the show’s framework--and give it its dramatic, ironic wallop: The men of the 761st and the 183rd, plagued by racism in the United States (the other front) and in the service, helped liberate Nazi concentration camps in Buchenwald and Dachau--young men coming face to face with racism carried to its most devastating, evil conclusion.

Producer-directors William Miles and Nina Rosenblum have put together a solid mix of old footage, photographs, diaries and interviews with the veterans. The men’s reminiscences are poignant; for many, basic training in the South was their first encounter with overt racism. And the pain still burns strong: A tale of a general’s racial insult to a wounded vet causes the man’s voice to break 50 years later. Another bitterly says, “We were there for the same reasons (to serve), but we couldn’t do the same things.” Yet another recalls seeing white German POWs getting better treatment.

The concentration camp material is particularly harrowing, the footage raw, the impact on the men visible. “I now knew that human suffering could touch all of us,” one man says at a reunion of Holocaust survivors and their black liberators. “I saw that at Buchenwald. That was evil, that was racism.”

“Liberators” is heavy-handed at times, but overall is an eloquent, frequently riveting work.