The World at War

I've been watching through the documentary series The World at War lately, and figured it was worth talking about here. For those who don't know, it was aired in the early 70s, and is generally acclaimed as one of the greatest documentary series ever. I'm not much of one for documentaries in areas I'm familiar with, because they're frequently not particularly efficient and I often find myself frustrated by the editorial decisions made, but The World at War mostly manages to avoid these problems, and illustrates a conscious approach to doing history for the public that I really like.

The most obvious problem that any series like this is going to run into is simply how to divide up the war, because even with 26 episodes, a lot is going to be left out. TWAW handled this particularly well, abandoning any real pretense that it was going to be comprehensive and instead making each episode a self-contained story about a specific aspect of the war. This could be a battle or a campaign, the home-front experience of some nation or it could be something narrower like the Holocaust or the occupation of Holland. Particularly groundbreaking at the time was a significant focus on Russian experience during the war, and those portions were still some of the most interesting to me, as it's not an area I've studied extensively. But more importantly, each story generally does a really good job of balancing the human stories with the broad operational story of the war. Often history focuses either on "what happened and why?" or on "what was it like to be there?", and TWAW manages to balance both rather well.

But more than that, there's a definite choice to present a wide array of different pieces of the war to choose from. The Burma episode (a particular standout) covers not only the back-and-forth fighting and interviews soldiers from both sides about the experience of the war, from battle to mud, but also includes a section about Vera Lynn's morale tour to the theater. There's some really lovely variety, and it shows what can be done with the documentary format when the people doing it take seriously their responsibility both as historians and as producers of entertainment. I also respect its commitment to using archive footage, which is extensive, and almost all of the people interviewed are speaking from first-hand experience.

This isn't to say that the series is perfect. Some of this is simply a matter of age and improved historical understanding of the events in question. On the whole, I think they did very well for the time, and I was frequently surprised at what they got right, but there are a few areas worth mentioning where they didn't. One obvious example is Ultra, which was revealed to the public a year or so after the series was broadcast, and significantly changed our understanding of the Battle of the Atlantic, among others. On the other hand, the current picture makes Ultra so prominent that it's almost a useful corrective. Another is their episode on the German home front, which draws heavily on Albert Speer's version of events (including interviewing him), another person history (and by history, I mostly mean Adam Tooze) has not been kind to. And I think their episode on the atomic bombing is a bit too sympathetic to the view that Japan would have surrendered without the bombs being dropped. There's probably other errors I didn't catch, but that's always a risk when dealing with older works of history, and in at least some cases, the quality is high enough to be worth that tradeoff.

I only have two major complaints about the series. First, I think it generally does not do a particularly good job of dealing with the naval aspect of the war. The only episode dedicated to naval matters covers the Battle of the Atlantic, and coverage elsewhere is spotty. A lot of this is probably downstream of their admirable commitment to the use of real footage and interviews with participants, and the simple fact that naval battles are hard to film compared to their counterparts in the air and particularly on land, limiting how much raw material they had to work with, and it was generally done well enough that I didn't find it too irritating most of the time.

Second, the series' coverage of the Pacific War is very limited. Of the 26 episodes, only five are about the Asia-Pacific side of the war: one on the early Japanese victories, one on Burma, one on the Japanese experience during the war, one on the atomic bombing and the Japanese surrender and one to cover the entirety of combat in the Pacific from 1943 to 1945.¹ The last one in particular is clearly overstretched for a single episode, and the situation was made far worse by the selection of a director, John Pett, whose style was entirely unsuited to telling that story, and who turned in the worst example of ignoring naval aspects of the entire series. Pett also did the episodes for Burma and the Normandy landings, and in all three concentrated largely on the experience of the men on the front lines. This was an entirely reasonable decision for the other two episodes, both of which cover relatively simple campaigns where the guy with the rifle is clearly at the center. But it completely fails when it's used on the episode with the largest scope in the entire series. The only naval battle to get any serious coverage is Philippine Sea, with 9 minutes of a 52-minute episode. There's a few minutes on the experience of being under Kamikaze attack at the end, but three-quarters of the episode's runtime is taken up by a discussion of fighting ashore, most notably Tarawa and Iwo Jima, sections that felt so padded that I initially suspected that the episode had been originally planned as two separate episodes, hastily stitched together at the last minute, before I went digging and confirmed that, no, this was intentional.

The handling of Leyte Gulf was particularly bad. There's a nice 20-second setup for a quick description of the battle, laying out roughly where everything is, and I was fully prepared for at least a few minutes of discussion of some of the most interesting actions of the war. Instead, the setup is followed series of pans over still photos of the battles, and the narration "After a series of confused engagements hundreds of miles apart, the Imperial Japanese Navy suffered heavy losses. It ceased to be an effective fighting force." Then things move on to land fighting in the Philippines. The largest naval battle in human history got the same amount of screentime as the bombing of Darwin or the rocket bombardment of Okinawa, and half the time that was spent showing newsreel footage of Peleliu with neither narration nor interview voiceovers.

Pett said in an interview that he wanted to do a naval battle, but didn't have the footage for it, and I agree that this is probably true if he was wanting to do 10 minutes of basically unbroken newsreel footage on Leyte Gulf. But I'm pretty sure there's enough out there that a clever filmmaker who wanted to talk about the battle would have been able to give it at least a few minutes without actively cheating. Interview a few participants (Leon Kintberger, captain of Hoel, was still alive at the time) and use them talking to the camera to pad things out. Use graphics to illustrate where everyone was. And get off your high horse about not having enough footage that's 100% accurate, because you illustrated a lot of Philippine Sea with footage of Corsairs landing at dusk despite the fact that there were a grand total of four of them with TF 58 during that battle. Show the battle line at Surigao doing a bombardment. Find some footage of one of the carriers in Taffy 3 doing something. Or if you absolutely cannot bring yourself to do that, spend 10 minutes on the experience of the fleet, because I know there's plenty of footage of that.

But that one episode aside, it's a remarkably good series. The use of almost entirely real footage makes it visually distinct, and the tone is serious rather than sensational. One failed episode aside, I've never seen a better exploration of WWII in documentary form, and I don't think I ever will.