I
had never heard of this series until a couple years ago, but apparently it’s
quite famous in Britain,
and whenever I had been talking about historical documentaries with British
friends, this always ends up popping up in the conversation. After about 4 or 5 people had recommended
this series to me quite highly, I decided I might as well check it out.
The DVD selection in Cambodia is not exhaustive (there are many documentaries I’d love to see,
but have been unable to track down), but it is impressive, and I was able to
find this DVD series on one of the shops on the riverfront.
This
series was produced for British television back in 1974, but has
aged remarkably well.
The
original series is 26 hours, but the DVD set includes another 9 hours of bonus
episodes, plus featurettes on the making of the series, totaling around 40
hours.
I
don’t usually consider myself a World War II nut. I’m interested in World War II in the sense
that I’m interested in all history, but I’m more interested in social,
political, and biographical history, and less interested in military
history. (I know plenty of other history
buffs whose only historical interest is World War II, but I’m not one of
them.) But I enjoyed this documentary. The story telling qualities were quite good,
the use of archival footage impressive, and I learned a number of new
things.
I
have a number of other thoughts, some about this documentary in particular, and
some more philosophical in nature but inspired by this documentary. I’ll deal with these in the subsequent
sections.
Archival
Footage
This
documentary was one of the most expensive shows ever produced for television—which
is somewhat surprising considering all it consists of is interviews and
archival footage. But I suppose it’s
easy to forget how labor intensive it must be to search through all the stored
footage.
Equally
surprising is how much footage there is of World War II.
I
had seen World War II footage before of course on other various documentaries. (We all have.) But I had always assumed that a lot of it was
either reconstructed or just generic battle footage that was applied to all situations. I didn’t think the news cameras were actually
filming at all the battles.
It
turns out though that the news cameras were actually filming just about
everywhere. (Although some of the British and
Russian news footage was actually reconstructed after the events for the
purposes of newsreels—the “Making of” featurettes talked a little about how they
sorted through authentic and inauthentic footage.)
Much
of the authentic footage was without sound.
The sound equipment back in those days was very bulky, and most of the
footage was filmed for the purposes of being used in newsreels, in which
dramatic music would be laid over the footage anyway.
So,
this means that most of the time when you’re watching old World War II footage,
those classic sounds of airplanes diving and guns firing were all added later.
A
brief making of feature at the beginning of the DVD gave some interesting
background information to the documentary, and they claim that they only used
actual footage (not reconstructed footage) and that only footage from the
particular battle was used to illustrate that battle. It’s impressive how much footage they were
able to put together considering these constraints.
All
that being said, if I had to make a complaint about this documentary series, it
would be that there was too much archival footage.
I
know that’s an odd thing to complain about.
A history geek like me should be salivating over all the authentic
footage used in this documentary, but I was more interested in the story and
the narration, and began to regard the long stretches of authentic footage,
unaccompanied by narration, as simply long breaks in the story. I also quickly tired of seeing so much
footage of battle after battle, much of which just started to look the same to
me after a while. (Part of this no doubt
is because I “binged-watched” all 26 hours of this documentary in a few short
weeks. It was originally intended to be
26 episodes broadcast over 26 weeks.)
I
wouldn’t have minded all the archival footage if the narrator had continued to
tell me interesting things while the footage was playing, but all too often the
story would simply stop for 5 minutes or so while I just listened to the rat-a-tat of guns and the vrrooomms of airplanes while watching repetitive
images of airplanes diving and guns firing.
(In
the “Making of” Featurette, someone said that this series was produced during a
time when film documentary makers had an “almost messianic faith in the power
of the image alone to tell the story”, and that documentary styles have since
changed, so that if this documentary had been made today, it probably would be
more heavy on the narration and less heavy on the archival footage.)
Scope
of the Project
The 26
hour documentary has the feeling of being comprehensive. (That feeling is somewhat aided by the
God-like voice of the narrator.) But, as
the filmmakers admit in the “Making of” featurette, they’re actually only just
scratching the surface.
In
the “Making of” featurette, the filmmakers somewhat apologetically list all the
campaigns and areas of the world that they simply didn’t have time to include,
before concluding: “We realize how much we’ve left out, and we hope you realize
how much we’ve left out.”
Nevertheless,
much of what they did include was very interesting.
The
decision was made to include both the military and social aspects of the War,
and to give one episode to describing conditions in an occupied country in
Europe, specifically the Netherlands. (I’ll write about that in the next section.)
The
fact that this was a British television production, and not American, was
occasionally evident in their choice of focus.
The fall of Singapore
got more attention than the attack on Pearl Harbor. But I didn’t mind this. Having been inundated with the American
perspective growing up, it was interesting to see how the British viewed the
war.
Holland in the War
The
episode on the Netherlands
was especially interesting to me, partly because I’m of Dutch descent, and
partly because it’s one of those aspects of World War II that doesn’t usually
get a lot of coverage. Despite being of
Dutch descent, I have very little knowledge of Dutch history, and before
watching this DVD, I had only the vaguest ideas of what Holland’s role in the war was, or how they
reacted to Nazi Germany. Now I feel I
understand it a lot better.
I
was recently talking to an Australian who was also of Dutch descent, and he was
explaining to me how the Netherlands
is actually a very divided country. “When
the Nazis came in,” he told me, “half of the Dutch resisted them, but the other
half welcomed them with open arms, and thought the Nazi program was great.”
The
division of Dutch society during World War II was reflected in this documentary
much like my Australian friend described it.
The
Nazis—Shockingly Evil!
I know I’m
not the first person to arrive at this observation, but it’s incredible how
evil the Nazis were.
The
Holocaust is the main thing everyone remembers, but even excluding the
Holocaust, the Nazis acted with shocking barbarity in every country they
occupied. They brutally crushed
rebellions in Yugoslavia. They used starvation as a weapon in Holland against millions
of people. In Slavic countries like the Ukraine,
they either massacred the villagers or used them as forced labor. When frustrated by the Russian army, they
took their frustration out on the Russian peasants, whom they also
massacred. They took horrific revenge in
Poland after an uprising in Warsaw, and responded by razing the whole city of Warsaw to the
ground. (An act of revenge which seems
especially pointless because at that stage they must have known they were about
to lose Warsaw
to the Russian army anyway). The World at War documentary begins and
ends by recounting an incident when the Nazi soldiers systematically killed
everyone in a whole village in France
(for no apparent reason).
This
was not, of course, my first time learning that the Nazis were no good. I had learned a lot of this in high school
and college history courses, but a lot of this information had since moved to
the back of my brain, and I hadn’t actively been thinking about it
recently. This documentary moved these
atrocities back to the front of my brain, and I was again shocked by how evil
the Nazis actually were.
It’s
especially difficult to account for when you consider that this took place
right in the heart of Western Civilization.
No doubt similar atrocities took place during the barbarian invasions of
ancient Rome, but the fact that the Germanic countries had been for centuries
the intellectual center of the Protestantism makes it all the more difficult to
account for the mindless barbarism.
World
War II and the Problem of Pacifism
In my
younger days, when I was still trying to sort out my politics, I was unsure if
principled pacifism was a realistic world view to have.
I
explained to him that I was attracted to pacifism, but had difficulty in
defending the idea when people brought up World War II. He was used to being asked this question, and
had an answer all prepared. He gave me a
detailed analysis about how it would have been possible to defeat the Nazis
using non-violent resistance, and I’ve since then co-opted his analysis as my
own.
After
watching this documentary, however, I’m having second thoughts.
The
Nazis brutally put down any resistance they encountered, whether violent or
non-violent.
In
the Netherlands,
the Nazis responded to non-violent resistance by simply just diverting the
food, and starving millions of Dutch people.
In
many wars, forced annexation of one country by another has meant little more
than a change in masters for ordinary people.
But this was not the case for the Nazis.
In Slavic countries, the Nazis used the native inhabitants as slave labor.
In
short, it seems hard to imagine any other appropriate response to the Nazi
invasions than a violent counter-reaction.
There
is a rub though. And the rub is that if
World War II presents a problem for pacifists, it presents a problem equally
great for Just War theorists.
From
this documentary, one gets the impression that civilization barely survived the
destruction of World War II. The result
of all out total warfare on a mechanized scale meant that much of Europe’s and Asia’s cities were just completely destroyed.
Given
the advances in destructive capabilities since 1945, I don’t think civilization
could survive World War III. If we ever
again had a total war on a world scale, there would just be nothing left at the
end of it.
Even
assuming that somehow all sides were smart enough not to use nuclear weapons,
conventional bombs alone would be able to completely wipe out all the major
cities of any country in the war (as they did during World War II).
So,
if pacifism doesn’t work, and the Just War theory is no longer an option,
basically we just better hope that the world never, ever, again gets into a
situation which resembles 1939. (The pessimistic
side of me is worried that, like the thousand monkeys on the typewriter
(W), given an infinity of future time it’s an inevitability that
sooner or later another 1939 will occur.
But at least we’ve managed to avoid it for the past 70 years.)
The
Sins of the Allies
I think it’s
pretty well established that the Nazis were pure evil.
The
Russian Army was just as brutal as the Nazi Army in their sweep across Europe (something which was included in the
documentary.) Churchill was just as
concerned about preserving the British Empire as he was about defeating Hitler (something that was not included in
the documentary.)
But
perhaps the biggest reason that neither side in World War II can lay claim to
moral superiority is that both sides practiced total warfare against civilian
populations in the bombing of cities.
Not
that this justifies the atomic bombs at all.
I
personally have been greatly influenced by Howard Zinn’s account of the atomic
bombs [LINK HERE] since I discovered it several years ago, and which told me any number of things I was never told in schools—like
the fact that prior to the atomic bombings the Japanese government was trying
to find surrender, and had even approached the Soviet Union to act as an
intermediary in negotiating a surrender, and that the United States government
knew all this because we had long ago broken the Japanese codes, and we went
ahead and dropped the atomic bombs anyway.
But
inside the United States,
this is information one rarely hears outside of marginal figures like Howard
Zinn.
I
was therefore surprised to find that all of this information was included in The World at War, which fully
acknowledged all of the above. Somewhat
surprisingly, however, they interviewed several U.S. government officials who
acknowledged that the Japanese had been trying to surrender, but said that the
dropping of the atomic bomb was still justified because it probably shortened
the length of the war by several days, and anytime you have the opportunity to
shorten the war you should take it.
This
seemed to me to be an utterly indefensible view, but it was not challenged in the
documentary.
The
Problem of Evil
I’m going
to go on a little bit of a digression here, and mix in a quote from something
completely unrelated that’s another one of my reading projects.
I’m
currently reading The Case for Christ
by Lee Strobel, (which I’ll get around to reviewing on this blog eventually.)
When
discussing the problem of Hell, Lee Strobel argues that Hell isn’t a place
where God is actively torturing people, but simply a place where God removes
his presence, and leaves human beings to their own devices. To quote from that section
“…if God took his hands off this fallen world
so that there were no restraint on human wickedness, we would make hell. Thus if you allow a whole lot of sinners to
live somewhere in a confined place where they’re not doing damage to anyone but
themselves, what do you get but hell?
There’s a sense in which they’re doing it to themselves, and it’s what
they want because they still don’t repent.”
(The
Case for Christ page 165).
The
implication then is that God is currently acting as a restraint on human
wickedness, but it would get a lot worse if God were to remove that restraint.
After
watching this documentary, I’m at somewhat at a loss to imagine how human
wickedness could get any worse than it is now.
To
be fair, there are numerous other ways that Christians could attempt to account
for the problem of evil in the world.
You could argue that after God created the world, he then removed his
influence and left humans to themselves.
Or you could argue, as my 12th grade Bible teacher did, that it’s unfair
to blame God for the evil we humans do to each other—and that’s probably fair
enough.
But
it’s clear to me that what you can not do is try to argue that God is in anyway
moderating or restraining human evil, (or argue that things would get worse if
God wasn’t around to restrain human wickedness.) Because then you would have a quite a problem
accounting for everything that happened during World War II, and asking why God
let this happen.
In
The World at War, the idea that we
seem to be living in a world which God has abandoned is brought to the forefront
in the episode on the Holocaust. One of
the Holocaust survivors recounts the screams of the woman and the children as
they were being gassed, and he says, “To this day, I still don’t understand how
God couldn’t hear those screams.”
In
the same episode, another Holocaust survivor remembers a rabbi among the crowd
of people who were being pushed into the gas chamber. The rabbi lifted his head to heaven and
cried, “God, this goes against everything you stand for. Stop this.”
When nothing happened, the rabbi reportedly then exclaimed, “There is no
God!”
Pearl Harbor Conspiracy Theories
I’m not
sure if this is common knowledge, but on the fringes of American society there
exist various conspiracies about the Pearl Harbor
attack.
According
to the logic of the conspiracy, Franklin Roosevelt desperately wanted to get America into
World War II, but knew that the American public was resistant to the idea, so
he needed some dramatic event to change public opinion. The conspiracy alleges that the American
government knew the Japanese were planning to attack Pearl
Harbor, but chose not to take any actions to prevent the attack.
The
conspiracy is based on the true facts that:
1) Several friendly governments warned the US government
about the attack, and the warnings were ignored.
2)
The primary target of the Japanese attack, the air-craft carriers, were
coincidentally out on training exercises that day, and so the Japanese were
thwarted in their attempt to cripple the American Pacific Navy in one strike.
In America, this
theory is believed only by fringe elements of society: the extreme Roosevelt
hating right, and (closer to home for me) the pacifistic left.
In
Japan, however, the idea
that Roosevelt tricked the Japanese into attack in Pearl
Harbor has achieved mainstream acceptance—(or at least that’s the
impression I got from my small exposure to Japanese media, and political
arguments with my at-the-time Japanese girlfriend.)
I
don’t believe in the Pearl Harbor conspiracy
theory myself, and I tend to dislike conspiracy theories in general. (I agree with Chomsky [LINK HERE]
that the obsession with 9/11 conspiracy theories has been very destructive for
the Left the past 10 years. If you want
to be taken seriously in the real world, you have to stick with what there is
hard evidence for and not get lost in a world of conjecture and supposition.)
However
what I will say, though, is that it’s
sometimes surprising just how slight a nuance sometimes separates “crazy-conspiracy-nut”
from “established-historical-fact.”
If
you claim that the United States
government knew in advance that the Japanese were planning a surprise attack on
Pearl Harbor, you’re into crazy-conspiracy-nut
territory.
But
if you claim that the United
States government knew in advance that the
Japanese were planning a surprise attack somewhere, you’re arguing established
history.
The
United States government
knew negotiations with Japan
had broken down, and because they had broken the Japanese codes, the United States
knew in advance that the Japanese were planning a surprise attack
somewhere. The United States government did not declare war on Japan in advance because the US desired that Japan attack first, for propaganda
reasons.
And
this was the story reported in The World
at War. (It was also, by the by, the
view reported in the movie Tora! Tora! Tora! ,
admittedly a Hollywood movie, but one that
took a great deal of effort to get the history right.)
To
be clear: I don’t believe there was a Pearl Harbor
conspiracy. I don’t believe the United States government knew in advance that
the Japanese were going to specifically attack Pearl
Harbor. (I tend to believe nothing stays secret for long, and if
such a conspiracy had existed it would have come out eventually.) But what I do find interesting is that all
the fuss over the “Pearl Harbor” conspiracy draws attention away from the plain
facts that aren’t even controversial—the United States knew full well in
advance that the Japanese were going to attack somewhere.
It’s
Always About the Oil
An Iranian
friend was once explaining to me the historical antipathy his country feels for
the British, and among other grievances he cited the Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran during
World War II.
“We
weren’t even in the War,” he complained to me.
“And yet they still invaded us anyway because they wanted to control the
oil.” (And for what it’s worth, the
Wikipedia entry on the Anglo-Soviet Invasion largely supports his claims (W).)
It
occurred to me then just how important securing access to oil (and denying oil
to your enemies) is during a war.
During
the Iraq War, you may remember it was common for conservative
pundits to mock the “simplistic” belief among anti-war activists that the War
was all about oil.
But
it occurred to me: of course that War was all about the oil. And it’s not only for the usual theories
about gas prices at the pump, or about Halliburton profiteering off the
war. (Although it’s that as well). But it’s mainly because modern mechanized
armies run on oil, and wither without it.
Airforces, Tanks, Navys, supply trucks—all of them need oil to
function. The United States would not be in the
superpower business if we weren’t securing strategic access to the world’s oil
supplies. If another major world war
ever breaks out, whoever controls the world’s oil will be the victor.
Although
the Anglo-Soviet Invasion of Iran was not in this documentary (one of the many
parts they had to leave out), it was very evident how much of World War II was
fought simply to control the oil fields.
Hitler’s invasion of Russia
was in part to gain access to oil fields.
The
war between Japan and the United States
was entirely about oil. Japan
needed oil to continue its military campaigns in China,
the United States had
embargoed oil to Japan, and Japan wanted to take over the oil fields in the
Dutch East-Indies, but was worried the United States navy would prevent
them from securing that oil. Thus, Pearl Harbor.
Many
of the military campaigns in Europe were
fought to secure oil fields for the use of one army, or for the purpose of
denying the oil fields to the enemy.
So,
don’t let anyone ever tell you the war in Iraq wasn’t about the oil. It’s always about the oil.
The
Olympics
Star
Wars
As every
science fiction fan knows, Star Wars
had a million different influences—from Kurosawa to Flash Gordon to Joseph Campbell.
But
it’s also well known that George Lucas was heavily influenced by World War II
movies and newsreels. Someone of his
generation must have grown up on it.
So
much of this documentary reminded me of Star
Wars that I was constantly thinking to myself: Oh, so that’s where they got that from!
The
World War II airplane fights are an obvious enough parallel to the Death Star
attack in Star Wars, but I hadn’t fully understood before just how much Lucas
had borrowed—the squadron leaders, the formations, the lingo they used to chat
back and forth to each other, and even the command headquarters where everyone else
was listening in is all straight out of the World War II footage.
The
battle on the ice planet in The Empire
Strikes Back is borrowed straight from the footage of the Russian campaign—the
snow white uniforms of the Siberian troops are exactly the same as are used in
the Empire Strikes Back, and the
Imperial Walkers are an obvious stand-in for the Nazi tanks.
The
Nazi uniforms, caps, and military ceremonies are duplicated several times over
in the Star Wars trilogy.
Other
Notes
* I actually watched the bulk of this
series several months ago, but among the bonus episodes is a 3 hour
mini-documentary on the Holocaust. For
obvious reasons, I found that part so depressing that it took me a few months
before I felt ready to force myself through it.
* Interesting, though, that in the “Making-of”
featurette, the filmmakers say that it was only in the 1960s that the cultural
consensus came around that the story of the Holocaust and what happened to the
Jews was the most important lesson to take away from World War II. (Before that everyone had apparently been
focused on the big battles). One of the
documentary film makers hypothesizes that if The World of War had come out a few years earlier, the Holocaust
wouldn’t have received so much attention.
* Because this documentary was made in the
1970s, there’s some interesting stuff about the generation-gap near the end of
it.
I’m
used to hearing about the generation-gap from the literature produced by the
Baby Boomers (who were a very vocal group), but it was interesting to hear the
other side of it—the hurt many of these World War II veterans felt because
their children didn’t understand what they went through in the war, and that
their children were not interested in trying to understand what they went
through in the war.
Link of the Day
Noam Chomsky slaps down 9/11 truther: People spend an hour on the Internet and think they know physics
and
Daily Show interview with Matt Taibbi (a must see)
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