<p> Many of us grew up thinking of World War II in black and white, but in recent years, more and more color footage from the war has surfaced. A History Channel program showcasing some previously unseen documentary film has been released in an olive drab box as a DVD set, \"World War II in HD.\" A few scenes are actually in black and white, and not owning a high-definition television, I can\'t comment on the \"immersive\" experience but only on the content. </p> <p>The producers followed the current populist practice of putting human faces to the war and have built the series around the memoirs and letters of a handful of American veterans, some of them interviewed for the program and others represented by unseen actors reading their words. The footage came from various sources and was edited together, usually appropriately but with some repetition, to form a visual montage accompanying the narrations. The pace is often breathless, as if the war were a video game, but some of the scenes are impressive, including glimpses of the Bataan Death March and the Nazi hanging of Serbian civilians, plucked at random from a town in occupied Yugoslavia. </p> <p>An effort was made to choose a cross-section of American veterans, including a woman from Wisconsin, an African American and a Japanese who served in the European theater while his parents were interned in a camp in Idaho. Perhaps the most interesting story was from an Austrian Jewish refugee who enlisted in the U.S. Army before Pearl Harbor. For him, the fight against oppression was a cause worth dying for, but he doubted whether many of his fellow soldiers understood what was going on. \"The majority of \'The Greatest Generation\' didn\'t have a notion of what was at stake,\" he insists. They were just boys swept up in a conflict that engulfed the world. </p>