Fifty years of The World at War

When I joined the Thames Television Documentary Department some years after The World at War had been made, the influence of the series was everywhere. Many of the programme-makers who had worked on it were still there. Its success had prompted Thames to set up a History Unit to go on producing history series, and I was privileged to cut my teeth as Researcher on extraordinary series like Palestine (producer-director Richard Broad, 1978), on the British Mandate in Palestine before the creation of Israel; and The Troubles (producer-director Richard Broad, 1981), on Britain’s troubled relationship with Ireland over many centuries.

The World at War had been a phenomenal success. Its 26 episodes had cost an estimated £880,000 – making it at the time the most expensive documentary series ever made. The series was first shown simultaneously in the UK and the US from the autumn of 1973 every week to spring 1974. It had an immense impact, with reviewers claiming that ‘no superlatives’ could sum up the quality of the programmes. More than one UK reviewer called it ‘definitive’. In the US, The Baltimore Sun called it ‘the best war documentary ever shown on TV’.

The series intercut superb archive footage, hunted down in archives around the world, with the personal testimony of those caught up in events. It was scored by Carl Davis, whose memorable theme tune still stands out today. And the commentary was read by Laurence Olivier, recorded between productions at the National Theatre, at which he was then Director. Olivier hated the work. He was used to performing for an audience and did not like being stuck in a tiny sound-recording studio reading lines when the cue-light flashed. Initially he read the scripts as though he was on stage, totally over the top. They were re-recorded, and his final deliveries give the concisely worded commentaries both drama and authority.

The series sold to more than 60 countries around the world, including the defeated nations Germany, Japan, and Italy. It won awards on both sides of the Atlantic: an Emmy and a Peabody in the US, and best documentary series awards from the Royal Television Society and the Broadcasting Press Guild in Britain. For 50 years, it has never been off air. For decades, the Arts and Entertainment channel in the US ran the series for six months and then started running it again. In Britain, it has been repeated on ITV, Channel 4, and BBC2. Digital and satellite channels still compete to show it. First, VHS box sets and then, more recently, digitally enhanced DVD sets have been produced. Even after Thames Television lost its franchise in the 1990s, the series has gone on making money for its successor company, Freemantle Media, earning probably tens of millions of pounds since its launch.

But, after half a century, how does the phenomenon of The World at War stand up? Is it still as good as everyone thought 50 years ago?

Witness to history

The first point to make is that, although more than 50 people worked on the series and it took over two years to make, the vision behind the project was the product of the creative and ambitious mind of one man: 38-year-old Jeremy Isaacs, at the time Head of Features at Thames Television. His concept was to produce a series that did not celebrate Allied victory or talk of winners and losers, but one that captured the experience of ordinary people caught up in the biggest war in world history. Isaacs had himself been evacuated as a boy of six from Glasgow when war broke out. In addition to the soldiers, sailors, and airmen on all sides who fought in the conflict, Isaacs wanted to hear from housewives who had been bombed out in Coventry, Berlin, or Tokyo, from civilians caught up in great events in occupied Amsterdam or in beleaguered St Petersburg, and from Jews rounded up in Warsaw or Prague. This was not to be a series featuring Generals, Admirals, and Air Marshals, but one that would capture the experiences of people around the world at war.

Isaacs asked Dr Noble Frankland, then Director of the Imperial War Museum, to be historical adviser. Frankland had been a Lancaster navigator in the war and had written the official history of the bombing offensive. He agreed totally with the general concept, and wanted to include as much on the Eastern Front and the war in Asia and the Pacific as on the better known stories from the war in the West. The two men thrashed out an outline for 26 episodes that, over two years of production, largely survived unchanged. And Frankland also encouraged Isaacs to use archive footage, much of which would come from the IWM, honestly and accurately.

Despite the many claims that the series was ‘definitive’, looking back on it now, it was far from that. After the defeat of Poland in September 1939, that country barely features. There is nothing about the role of Polish airmen and soldiers in the Allied forces from the Battle of Britain to the capture of Monte Cassino. There is nothing about the divisions inside the country after its occupation. Isaacs became very aware of this omission, and ten years later, as Chief Executive of Channel 4, he commissioned a nine-part series called Struggles for Poland (producer Martin Smith, 1985) to help make amends.

There is nothing much about China in the series, even though parts of that country were at war with Japan from 1931 continuously to 1945. Yugoslavia hardly gets a mention, even though it is difficult today to see how the role of Tito and the partisans could be ignored. South-east Asia, by comparison, gets considerable coverage – no doubt reflecting the fact that the Vietnam War was coming to its messy conclusion when the series was being made.

More than anything, within months of the last programme being transmitted, the first revelations started to come out about the role of the code-breakers at Bletchley Park. Within a couple of years – as more was revealed about the German codes that were cracked and the importance of the intelligence gained, generically referred to as Ultra – the histories of several Second World War campaigns were being rewritten, especially those of the Battle of the Atlantic and the see-saw war in North Africa. None of this is even hinted at in The World at War.

Personal testimony

However, I would argue that none of this really matters. The World at War is utterly brilliant at storytelling, and it does this from all angles of the war. For instance, in the episode on the Holocaust called ‘Genocide’ (Episode 20), the director Mike Darlow wanted to hear not only from the victims of mass murder, but also from those who had perpetrated some of the worst crimes in human history. Most senior SS figures who were still alive in the early 1970s were lying low. However, the researchers managed to persuade Karl Wolff to appear. Wolff had been adjutant to Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS. He had been so close to Himmler that he was imprisoned after the war, but had served his term and been released. Eventually, Wolff agreed to be interviewed, and his explanation of how and why he came to believe in the concept of Aryan supremacy during the Nazi era is still chilling. As is the testimony of those who ended up in extermination camps such as Auschwitz. Thomas Vrba vividly described life in the death camp, and Dov Paisikovic as a member of a Sonderkommando unit described emptying the gas chambers of bodies. Rivka Yosilevska told how she had been left for dead under a pile of bodies after the Einsatzgruppen had rounded up and shot all the Jews in her Polish village. Today, the Holocaust is seen as one of the central events of World War II – but that was not the case in the 1970s. The World at War uses personal testimony to reveal its true horror.

Isaacs wanted to tell the story of what it was like to be occupied by the Nazis. The French experience would have been an obvious one to tell, but Isaacs and his producers chose instead the Netherlands. The programme ‘Occupation’ (Episode 18) shows how an initially benign military occupation slowly and insidiously became tyrannical and racist. All Dutchmen and -women, whether civil servants or railway workers, had at some point to make a conscious and moral choice, whether to turn a blind eye, collaborate or actively resist.

Cold War tensions meant that Moscow refused to allow the team access to Russian interviewees. The programme ‘Stalingrad’ (Episode 9) is the only episode made up entirely of archive footage. But it uses the film brilliantly, by revealing what was Soviet-inspired propaganda and what was authentic record of this great turning-point battle. ‘Red Star’ (Episode 11) also relied purely on archive material and extracts from Russian wartime poetry. It begins with the words ‘No country, no people, suffered so terribly in the Second World War as the Soviet Union’. It spoke of 20 million Russians being killed in the war (today the figure is accepted as being 27 million). Carl Davis wrote Russian-inspired music for the episode and recorded the main theme on a balalaika. Then, when it was nearly complete, Moscow announced that the director, Martin Smith, could interview individuals they had selected. Smith rushed to Moscow and filmed interviews with Soviet soldiers and Leningrad civilians, adding much to the impact of the programme.

There are six episodes on the war against Japan. David Elstein, the youngest director on the team at 28, produced one of the more unusual programmes, ‘The Bomb’ (Episode 24). This includes evidence about the debate in Washington as to whether or not to drop the atomic bomb, and the debate within the Tokyo War Cabinet as to whether or not to surrender. And it features harrowing testimony from those who survived the Hiroshima bomb. Then the final two episodes, ‘Reckoning’ and ‘Remember’, step back from the narration to look at the experience of both victory and defeat, and of the broader legacy of the war.

Many other episodes on the war in the West and on the Home Front in Britain, Germany, and America still stand out today. Partly because they include interviewees then in their 70s or 80s who are now dead – such as Albert Speer and Traudl Junge, one of Hitler’s secretaries who was in the bunker with the Führer in April 1945 – and hosts of ‘ordinary people’ telling extraordinary tales, but partly also because the commentaries are refined into succinct and moving accounts of the terrible events they describe.

Final analysis

While much popular television history plays on the cosy celebration of victory – that ‘we won’ – that is not the case with The World at War. Certainly there is a feeling that justice was done in defeating the Nazis in Berlin and the militarists in Tokyo, but there is no sense of cheering the Allied victory. There are programmes that deal with courage and sacrifice, and how war can bring out the best and the worst in individuals. But more than anything the series shows how people caught up in conflict at whatever level are nearly always confronted with either having to fight or to make a moral choice. This is a universal story of war, not a partisan celebration of victory.

My verdict: although The World at War gets more out of date every year, it is such a powerful piece of film-making that it will probably be as popular and timeless in another 50 years as it is today – 50 years after it was first made. •

Taylor Downing is the author of The World at War, a BFI TV Classic (2012; available in paperback).

Television history in the 1970s

From the early days of television, history documentaries proved popular in Britain. Two formats dominated the small screen. First there were big, archive-led series like the American Victory at Sea (NBC, 1952-1953) or the weekly Movietone newsreel-based series All Our Yesterdays with Brian Inglis (Granada, 1960-1989). Second, there were presenter-led series like Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation (BBC, 1969) or the television lectures of A J P Taylor (ATV and then BBC, 1957-1969).

In 1964, to celebrate the launch of its new channel BBC2 and the 50th anniversary of the First World War, the BBC produced a massive 26-part series The Great War. This combined archive film with interviews of veterans then in their late 60s and 70s, describing with great vigour and freshness the war they had fought. The problem was that there was relatively little authentic archive footage, so the producers freely mixed feature- film footage with the real thing. But by using dramatic music and a sonorous commentary read by Sir Michael Redgrave, The Great War set the tone for epic history-programming on television. The series showed that history could be serious, powerful, and hugely popular. The BBC felt that it now ‘owned’ television history, and had the expertise to produce fine, award-winning documentaries.

In 1966-1967, the BBC produced a follow-on series to The Great War devoted to the 1920s and early ’30s, called The Lost Peace. It was inevitable that producers would begin to think about a series on the Second World War. But much BBC investment in the late 1960s went into colour television, delaying production of what was thought would inevitably be a black-and-white series.

As the corporation delayed, so ITV in the form of Thames Television focused its ideas. After a series The Life and Times of Lord Mountbatten (Thames, 1969), in which the famous Sea Lord and ex-Viceroy narrated the story of his life, illustrated by archive film, Thames thought it had the skills and the money to make high-end history programmes. And, in Jeremy Isaacs, they had a young producer with great ideas and ambitions. So it was ITV that got to the Second World War first.