For those who are not dodging bullets and bombs or praying for loved ones, war can seem like a distant thing disconnected from our lives.

In his new epic documentary "The War," Ken Burns makes World War II into an immensely personal experience as it tells the stories of everyday people from around the country.

Burns and his co-director/co-producer, Lynn Novick, decided not to focus on those in charge -- Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin.

"We care about ordinary people, like you and me, people we could have had Thanksgiving with, then experience what they experienced in battle," Burns said in an April interview when he was in Sarasota to honor baseball legend Buck O'Neil.

Viewers will see a sprawling story of how young boys became fighting men in Europe and the Pacific, and how the people back home tried to go on with their lives while keeping up with the latest news on the radio, through movie newsreels and in their daily newspapers.

In his previous documentaries "The Civil War," "Baseball" and "Jazz," Burns mastered the art of giving life to still photographs. With "The War," he had the benefit of hours of rarely seen film footage, including some of the battles and campaigns discussed by his subjects, and even of the subjects themselves.

"And we do have footage of things people have never seen before," he said. "Bullets will whiz by your head, those planes will buzz you, like surround sound."

Some of the footage may have been seen in previous documentaries, but often as background. "Suddenly, it is endowed with new meaning," Burns said.

Burns considers "The War" to be his "greatest achievement so far. This is better than anything we've done."

Viewers will have a hard time arguing with that assessment when the series begins at 8 p.m. today on PBS -- "17 years to the moment" of the debut of "The Civil War," which turned viewers into history buffs and Burns fans.

Viewers will feel like they are getting to know some of the 40 or so people who are interviewed throughout the series.

But the process for selecting those subjects stirred a controversy that began in early spring before anyone had seen the series. Hispanic groups complained that their contributions to the American war effort were not being told.

Burns did not dispute that claim. He said he and Novick "arbitrarily took four American towns, geographically distributed, and asked people to tell us their stories. We weren't interested in the surname on their driver's license. We interviewed hundreds of people to get the 40 that we show. It was arbitrary.

"We happen not to have had Hispanics among them. We also didn't have any Native Americans or any women in the service or Filipino Americans or Germans fighting or Irish Americans fighting."

As the controversy became more pronounced over the summer, Burns found people to add into the mix. Three segments have been added at the end of parts three, five and six to include several Hispanics and one Native American.

Each of the seven episodes begins with a title card that reads, "The Second World War was fought in thousands of places, too many for any one accounting. This is the story of four American towns and how their citizens experience that war."

The producers chose Mobile, Ala.; Luverne, Minn.; Sacramento, Calif.; and Waterbury, Conn., to serve as microcosms to the macrocosm of the war. Three of the towns had populations of about 100,000 at the time of the war, while Luverne had about 3,000. "It was your typical small town," Burns said.

Tom Hanks provides the voice for Al McIntosh, the owner and editor of the Rock County Star Herald in Luverne, whose columns chronicled life in the area and the developments of local men in combat. Like "Jazz," the series is narrated by actor Keith David.

Viewers will meet Glenn Frazier of Alabama, who survived the Bataan Death March, and Quentin Aanenson, a Minnesota farm boy who somehow survived 75 combat missions in Europe as a P-47 Thunderbolt pilot.

Katharine Phillips of Mobile keeps viewers updated on what life was like on the home front, and how that life was transformed as towns like Mobile became cities because of the thousands needed at factories to build ships and make ammunition.

There are interviews with Japanese Americans who were forced from their homes and kept in internment camps for several years, and with blacks who put their lives on the line by volunteering for military service only to be segregated from white soldiers.

Burns said the series took about seven years, the longest for any of his extended projects, but it shares several traits common to his work.

"We're emotional archaeologists," Burns said. "I'm looking for touching, deep emotions."

Burns has his own emotional connection to the war. His father was a first lieutenant "who landed in France in the spring of 1945, but he was not subjected to combat."

The background of the main title card of the film is a photo of his father, Robert K. Burns.