The World At War
Jeremy Isaacs
Initial release: October 31, 1973-May 8, 1974 (26 episodes)
Network: ITV
Eighty-some years ago the world erupted into a storm of violence and racial and ideological hatred unlike anything that had ever seen before or since. No corner of the world was left untouched by the flames. It left between 60 to 75 million people dead and changed the world irrevocably. How do you even begin to grasp the scale of a conflict that stretched around the whole globe? How do you account for the monstrosity of it, the sheer amount of effort, the time spent, the blood shed? 28 years after the end of the war, British television network ITV decided to try. The result: The World At War, a 26-episode long documentary series that combines hours of real wartime footage with extensive contemporary interviews with people at all levels, from refugees all the way up to people close to those who held the levers of power.
War documentaries are a dime a dozen. You can point at any war of the last three hundred years and find at least one documentary about it. World War II, being the massive global event that it was, naturally has dozens, on all manner of topics. But The World At War is the definitive World War II documentary, a sprawling retrospective that, over the course of its run, covers some of the most important battles of the war. It also spends a great deal of time laying down the political context for the war: from the collapse of the German economy leading to the rise of Hitler, to Imperial Japan eager to take its place on the world stage whatever the cost. And the cost, the human cost, does not go unaccounted for; the series opens and closes with a somber visit to a French village that had been massacred by the SS almost in its entirety one day in June 1944, its ruins left as a monument to the dead.
And there are so many dead. I have seen more footage of real dead bodies watching this show than in my entire life, and most of them weren't in the Holocaust episode. In all those hours of archival footage, cameras linger on the dead; some of them lay on the ground as if deflated, invisible under their bundled clothes. Others lay in pieces, or come apart as they're pulled away from where they fell. A dead Japanese soldier's guts fall out in living color as an American marine turns him over looking for cigarettes.
Much of the archival film was shot without sound; the producers added sound themselves, even voice acting at times. This isn't perfect: there's a lot of reuse of certain sound effects, especially gunfire. In particular there's a sound that gets used for every goddamn rifle we see, regardless of what kind of rifle it is. But it's still an important step towards giving a little life to footage that at times can feel far away.
Of course, a project of this size isn't without its flaws: leaving aside the obvious problems of certain things still being classified at the time (and even today,) you can't really trust what some of the former Nazis say: Albert Speer himself gets interviewed, and while in the years since the war he tried to frame himself as "the good Nazi," you don't have to be a historian to know that he was full of shit. Some aspects of the war don't quite get as much attention as they deserve, like the Lend-Lease program, or the Eastern front. But sometimes you get moments of cleverness, like the very unsubtle editing together of General Curtis LeMay arguing that the bomb was necessary to force Japan's surrender, followed immediately by Toshikazu Kase, who was Japan's Foreign Secretary during the war, stating, in no uncertain terms in plain, clear English, that the bomb wasn't necessary at all, because Japan was already on the verge of surrender anyway.
The World At War is the essential World War II documentary. It is a harrowing experience that does not shy away from the darker parts of the war: the racism, the genocide, the war crimes on all sides. But we also see life on the home front, life at the front line. Even now, over fifty years later, there has yet to be anything that rivals the scale of this series, all of it narrated by none other than that British legend of stage and screen, Laurence Olivier. So much interview footage was shot, so much wartime film discovered and restored, that a couple of years after the original series aired, they released another eight episodes to cover some stuff a little outside the original show's scope as well as give more time to the Holocaust. (Olivier wasn't available this time, so they got Eric Porter.)
I suppose I'm a bit of the odd girl out when it comes to stuff like this; most of my friends have no interest in watching such a sprawling series about such an unhappy era. World War II has long been seen as a "traditional masculine interest" (mostly because it's a useful gateway to fascism among a certain genre of young men) but I don't think it should be. I think everyone could learn something from this series; there wasn't a single person on Earth that the war didn't touch, and the effects of that war are still being felt today. The final episode exhorts the audience to remember the dead, to remember the living, to remember all that happened, and to remember what it took to bring it all to an end. The war ended eighty years ago last year. The people who lived through that war are gone. Much has changed since those difficult days, but not enough has: When we look outside our windows and see what is happening on our streets, what we are seeing are the lessons of World War II, unremembered.
World War II will forever remain a lifelong interest for me, not least because the war's most important lesson is this: fascism must be crushed, and crushed utterly, so that what happened before doesn't happen again.
-june❤