The World at War

To tell the story of the Second World War

in 26 hours of film on television,

each film to be an essay on an aspect of the war,

taking in, as well as the fighting,

the social and political experience of the countries involved:

to present Britain's war

and to compare and contrast it with the effort and suffering of other nations:

to appeal, if we could, to different audiences of different age groups,

presenting events to those who experienced them

in, if possible, a new light,

and to their children,

without the crusty covering of another generation's nostalgia:

to omit nothing of supreme consequence, but to leave out a very great deal,

rather than try to cram everything into the limited airtime available:

to produce programmes worth watching

which might also help us understand the times in which we live:

that's what I and my colleagues at Thames Television set out to achieve

in The World At War.

The series has now been sold and seen all over the world,

and in the United States, since it was finished,

it's never been off the screen.

It's the making of that series that I'm going to tell you about now.

I was seven years old in 1939,

and most of the people who worked with me on The World At War

were younger than I,

born, like more than three-quarters of all Germans and Japanese alive today,

after the war began or even since it ended.

Not many of us knew all that much about the war.

Distanced by a generation,

we were not interested in just another telling

of our parents' old soldiers' tales.

Old men forget, particularly when it hurts to remember.

And many in Britain had happy memories of the war.

They remembered the excitement, the danger, the comradeship, the fun.

But Britain was bombed, not invaded, not occupied, not fought over.

Britain's war was not Poland's war and not Russia's war.

The Desert Rats and the Africa Corps shared a common experience.

Theirs was a clean war: there were no civilians in the way.

Theirs was a very different war

from that of Poles or Yugoslavs or Ukrainians,

who met and suffered under the Gestapo and the SS.

Most of us were British on the production team,

but we would try to do justice to others' grimmer experience.

There was bravery, heroism, glory, even, in it.

But the Second World War caused untold suffering

and cost many millions of lives.

It was important that the series should begin as we meant it to go on,

and The World At War began like this.

Down this road on a summer day in 1944, the soldiers came.

Nobody lives here now.

They stayed only a few hours.

When they had gone,

a community which had lived for a thousand years, was dead.

This is Oradour-sur-Glane in France.

The day the soldiers came the people were gathered together.

The men were taken to garages and barns,

the women and children were led down this road,

and they were driven into this church.

Here, they heard the firing as their men were shot.

Then they were killed, too.

A few weeks later many of those who had done the killing

were themselves dead in battle.

They never rebuilt Oradour. Its ruins are a memorial.

Its martyrdom stands for thousand upon thousand of other martyrdoms

in Poland, in Russia,

in Burma, in China,

in a world at war.

We started work in April 1971. The time was right.

Some vital witnesses were already dead when we started

and all were getting older.

Often our researchers were told, "if only you'd called last week."

The fellow they were looking for had died only the other day.

The first problem would be what to leave out.

There simply couldn't, wouldn't be room, even in 26 hours of television,

to do justice to everyone.

I'm not a military historian.

I asked our historical adviser, Dr Noble Frankland,

then director of the imperial War Museum,

to write down for me on one sheet of paper,

he actually used an envelope,

not more than 15 decisive campaigns which I mustn't omit.

I wanted each film that we made to tell only one story, as all good films do.

And I asked for a list of only 15 military subjects

because I had different plans for the other dozen or so programmes.

There would be one programme on the causes of the war.

There would be one to deal with the results.

There would be programmes on the war economy, the politics, the morale

of each of the major five combatants:

America, Britain, Germany, Japan, Soviet Russia.

The Second World War was total war.

In it, civilians were in the front line in the factories and under the bombs.

And they suffered as many casualties as did the men and women in uniform.

In the First World War, the point is AJP Taylor's,

the news that a relative had been killed came in the telegram from the front,

telling a wife that she was widowed.

In the Second World War, the news quite often went the other way.

The British soldier in Africa, in Italy and in France,

would learn in a letter from home

that his parents or his wife had been killed in the Blitz on London,

on Coventry, on Plymouth.

And many a German fighting man on the Eastern Front, say,

must have heard that he'd lost his family

in the fires of Hamburg, Cologne and Dresden,

and perhaps fought on all the harder for it.

There would be a programme on occupied Europe.

The moral choices faced by those who live under tyranny

have a compelling fascination for me and I think for us all.

"What would I have done?" we ask ourselves.

"Raised my voice? Acted?"

"Risked my life? Risked my family's life?"

"Stayed silent? Done nothing?"

"Collaborated, perhaps?"

In Nazi-occupied Europe, everyone had to choose.

There would be a programme on what the Nazi doctrine of racial supremacy

did to the Jews.

This is not a military subject, it doesn't appear in military histories,

but I couldn't leave it out.

Our historical adviser made a list of military musts on one sheet of paper.

It read: The German attack on Poland.

The German attack in the West, leading to the fall of France.

The battle for Britain.

The German invasion of Russia.

Pearl Harbor and the Japanese sweep to Singapore.

The battle of the Atlantic: war against the U-Boat.

The war in the western desert.

Stalingrad: the first massive German defeat.

The Allied air assault on Germany.

Russia's great victories of 1943, particularly at Kursk,

the biggest tank battle in history.

It was clear, by the way, that one object of the series

must be to try to help people to be aware

of the importance of the Eastern Front.

The vast Russian and then the vast German losses there.

Battles in which millions fought on either side.

Two-thirds of all Germans who fought fought on the Eastern Front.

The campaign in Italy.

The Allied invasion of Europe in Normandy in June 1944.

The land assault on Germany itself in the battle for Berlin.

Naval air war in the Pacific.

American industrial might, as well as Russian manpower,

assured victory in both wars in Europe and in Asia.

The dropping of the atomic bomb.

And each of these great themes would have only one hour.

Burma squeezed in because it had been forgotten

and because it looked different. The film was wet with monsoon.

But there was no room for Abyssinia or Syria or Dakar,

and only a mention of Dieppe and of the Arctic convoys

and nothing on Yugoslavia,

where in civil war and in resistance, 1 .5 million lost their lives.

And there'd be nothing on the fate of Europe's gypsies, all but exterminated,

and no film on Poland,

though according to some estimates one in three Poles died.

We wouldn't be able to deal with the experiences

of particular regiments or divisions,

though when we'd finished, lots of folk wrote in

to tell us that they'd served in the best damn flying squadron

or fighting regiment in World War ll.

Our style would be simple.

No narration to camera,

no authority to fix the viewer with his eye, as I am looking at you now.

You can do without the piece to camera in handling 20th-century history

when there are plenty of visual documents and eye witnesses available.

You can't deal so easily with earlier centuries.

Nor would we venture into the dangerous territory of reconstruction.

If there were no visual records of an event, we would look for eye witnesses.

If there were none adequate to tell the story for television,

or if we could find no other honest way to tell it,

we might have to leave the subject matter out.

Resistance in Europe suffered as a subject.

There's no film of it and we hardly touched it.

Sea battles suffered also.

There's very little film of battles at sea

and the same goes for battles fought at night.

We used diagrams, therefore, and graphics

to show what a U-boat assault on a convoy was like.

But our rule was, don't invent, don't reconstruct,

don't use material that you know to have been reconstructed

unless you absolutely have to,

and don't do so even then without saying that you're going to.

When the Russian army closed the ring round Von Paulus

and the German 6th Army at Stalingrad,

newsreel film shows two masses of troops advancing towards each other

in long, long Eisensteinian lines across the snow,

meeting to embrace with warm bear hugs just opposite, would you believe,

the Soviet newsreel's camera position.

We made the point when we used the film. For our film on the Western Desert,

we didn't use the bits of desert victory that were shot at Pinewood.

We used to look very suspiciously at, but we sometimes did use,

battle scenes where the camera is suspiciously steady

or is apparently quite safe in a supposedly dangerously exposed position.

We met some Sherwood Foresters who fought from El Alamein to Tunis

and from Anzio to Rome.

One of their most frightening encounters though was with Pathé Gazette.

We got pulled out the... well, we were out of the line at the time.

Of course, this... I don't know what officer it was,

but he detailed so many of us to go to a certain place in this truck.

And when we got there, he gave us...

"Right," he said, "put these on."

German green uniforms and Jerry helmets.

I thought, "What the hell...?"