The World at War (90 page)

DR FRANKLAND

One of the greatest effects of war on people who take part in it is the extent to which it tends to cut them off from both their elders and their own children. One's parents, when one is at war, really either don't want to know, or are unable to know because warfare developed so rapidly and they can't envisage the circumstances that their sons are in. And the same thing applies in a different way between father and son. In my own relationship with my parents at the time, and with my children today, they in a sense neither can nor wish to envisage the circumstances in which we lived in the war. And we have a rather arrogant sort of feeling that they ought to understand these dreadful things that happened to us, but they don't. Now I think people are
cut off from these generations. There is a generation gap under any circumstances but I think war, as in so many aspects of life, tends to emphasise those sort of considerations, and very much so in creating and nourishing a generation gap.

ALBERT SPEER

Nuremberg defendant

I think the consequences of Hitler's life are still obvious to everybody, not only in Germany but in the whole world, and many things we are suffering from are the direct result of Hitler's activities. So when I am saying that I can't have any land of feelings about him, that's because of what he did to the world. And I am thinking too what he did to my family and myself, because to lose twenty years of lifetime and for children to grow up without their fathers is something which is caused by Hitler.

PRIVATE ROBERT REED

2nd New Zealand Division, Eighth Army

I thought we were part of the British effort – one British effort. In my own case when the war broke out I realised that it had to be fought and in my own heart it was a privilege to serve your country in its time of need.

J B PRIESTLEY

English author and broadcaster

I don't think I'm sentimentalising if I say that, to me – and after all I've lived a good long time now – the British were absolutely at their best in the Second World War. They were never as good, certainly in my lifetime, before it and I'm sorry to say I think they have never been quite so good after it.

GENERAL MARK CLARK

Commander United Nations in Korea

I'm not trying to get sentimental but as I've reached a ripe old age and look back on my experiences in World War Two, where as a comparatively junior officer I was catapulted into High Command, which was hard because I passed over a lot of older, equally capable friends of mine. But I think my greatest feeling of satisfaction was being associated with the British troops. I found them to be fine soldiers, perfectly willing to die if need be to accomplish their mission. We had our differences at times, as you naturally would, but when I was given command of your Fifteenth Army Group, a British Army Group with a completely British headquarters – in the middle of the night notified by Mr Churchill – I think that was my crowning period of happiness and pride. And I did take over the Fifteenth Army Group and I led it until the end of the war and took the surrender, as commander of the Fifteenth Army Group, of the German forces in Italy. I'll always be proud of the privilege of having that opportunity.

MICHAEL FOOT

Left-wing Labour MP

It is impossible to minimise the extent of how the whole public mind seemed to awake people with a great sense of
community spirit during the war. It was the nearest thing that I've seen in my lifetime to the operation of a kind of socialist state – a democratic, socialist state of citizens believing that they could influence by their actions, speedily, what was going to be done, and that the whole world could be changed by the way they operated. They saw the world was changed by their actions in the war and they thought that could be translated into political action as well. It was extremely exciting but some of the political leaders, maybe because they were so deeply involved in their own pursuits, they didn't appreciate what was happening.

NORMAN CORWIN

American 'Poet Laureate of the radio'

World War Two shook us up – it made literally a melting pot of us. Men who had shared antagonisms and hostilities and distrust found themselves together on the same transports, in the same units, in the same trenches and in the same operations. The beginnings of
racial integration I think can be traced back to that war.

BRIGADIER GENERAL LEON JOHNSON

Awarded the Medal of Honor for leading the attack on the Ploesti Romanian oilfields in August 1943

One thing you have to bear in mind – we did win the war. Maybe we made mistakes: I think you could say, well, you could have put this division against that division, this division did a great job and that division didn't do as well, or you could say this force did well and that force did less well. I think there's enough glory to go around – and enough pain and enough effort. You know, war is a nasty business. I'm not even sure who wins the wars. I don't know how you lose a war but it's awfully hard to know when you've won one. But the main point is that put together, working together, the Allies – and I bring in too the Poles and the Czechs and all the other people that belonged to the RAF, the RAF itself, the Free French – all those people, working together with the United States and the Canadians, did a very successful operation with a lot less loss than we had in World War One. We did
accomplish what was set out to be done.

DR GRAY

I don't believe in collective guilt exactly but one of the things that seemed to cause most guilt in World War Two was this failure to discriminate between combatants and
non-combatants. I felt even then, as many other soldiers did, that we were guilty of indiscriminate, terroristic harming. Many soldiers had to (particularly artillery men and flyers) kill innocent women and children. In this sense there is such a thing as collective guilt in so far as this was the decision made at the highest levels and approved by many people. It seems to me there's been a great deterioration in modern warfare in moral sense, because in the old days there was a sharp distinction between soldiers and civilians. More and more you see this distinction disappearing.

GROUP CAPTAIN HAMISH' MAHADDIE

Bomber Command Pathfinder Force

I'm frequently asked what my attitude was at the end of the war. Well, quite apart from an enormous feeling of relief, my own viewpoint was that the war for me had been a complete failure, because of the sixty million square-headed bastards still living.

PRIVATE DENIS GUDGEON

British serviceman, Japanese prisoner of war

Oh, no, they weren't normal human beings, they were definitely bestial. I personally have no time for them, never will. I've always felt that when that B-29 dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, it has always been my regret that the bomb didn't have sufficient power to cause all four Japanese islands to disappear into the Pacific Ocean. That's been my view and it still is.

LORD SHAWCROSS

Chief British prosecutor at Nuremberg

I think the main lesson of the trial is that all men in public life should appreciate that those who are in a position to control the destinies of governments and states are themselves personally responsible for the actions into which they lead the states they control. Hitherto that was not the case, but now it must be realised by those who participate in government that they share a collective and individual
responsibility for any wrongful acts, criminal actions, actions in breach of international law which their governments may take.

AIR CHIEF MARSHAL SIR ARTHUR HARRIS

Commander-in-Chief RAF Bomber Command

People don't like the idea of getting bombs down the back of their neck, especially politicians. The only people who make war in this world, after all, are the politicians. The public doesn't make war, it's the politicians and for the first time those who make wars realise that they'll be the first to get hit in the neck – and a damned good thing.

PRIVATE NOEL GARDINER

2nd New Zealand Division, Eighth Army

We fought because we thought it was right to fight in the circumstances and we would fight again in the same circumstances, but we hope there won't be any further wars. The way the world's being handled at the moment I have my doubts about it, but I still think you've got to be optimistic and positive about these things.

GRAND ADMIRAL KARL DÖNITZ

I think that I now have said enough about the war, which is past now for over twenty-five years. I bow in reverence before the
memory of the men who lost their lives in this war on both sides, and I think that we all hope that we never shall have such a war again.

APPENDIX

ABOUT
THE WORLD AT WAR
TV SERIES

Narrated by Sir Laurence Olivier with a musical score by Carl Davis, Thames Television's acclaimed film history of the Second World War stands as one of the most massive undertakings in television-documentary history.

The World at War
contains remarkable interviews with the statesmen and military leaders of the time and it uses film from national and private sources, much of it never screened before. In fact, film research in eighteen countries yielded over three million feet of archive film and nearly a million feet of interviews and location material. Above all, it brings to the screen the memories and experiences of ordinary men and women – American and Japanese, British and German, Russian and European, in uniform and out – who lived and fought throughout the most momentous conflict in world history.

The idea of producing a definitive televisual history of the Second World War came from Jeremy Isaacs, then a producer with Thames Television. He presented an initial plan for the programme to the board of Thames in the autumn of 1970. It was a daunting project for an independent-television company to take on – 26 episodes of one hour in length, shown once a week over a period of six months. Isaacs delivered a two-line description of each episode and, amazingly, 25 of these went on to be made. Having received board approval, Isaacs set about assembling his team, and they went to work in early 1971. It is a monument to their skills and the subsequent success of the programme that many members of this team went on to even bigger and better things.

Director David Elstein would become Director of Programmes at Thames before being appointed Chief Executive of Channel 5. Writer Charles Douglas-Home became editor of
The Times,
while another producer, Ted Childs, is one of the most influential makers of television drama in the UK, responsible for hits such as
The Sweeney, Inspector Morse
and
Kavanagh QC.
Jeremy Isaacs himself became the founding Chief Executive of Channel 4 Television from 1981 to 1988 and later General Director of the Royal Opera House. He was knighted in 1996 for services to broadcasting and the arts.

Back in 1971 writers were selected, together with the rest of the crew, and the gargantuan research project began. One of the most difficult tasks was identifying and tracking down subjects for interview, particularly as many of those involved in the war preferred that the world forget they existed. Months of painstaking research led to some spectacular results. Among those interviewed were Hitler's Armaments Minister, Albert Speer; Himmler's Adjutant, Karl Wolff; Hitler's secretary, Traudl Junge; Hollywood star and USAAF bomber pilot, James Stewart; then Foreign Secretary, later Prime Minister, Anthony Eden, and Head of RAF Bomber Command, Arthur 'Bomber' Harris.

Isaacs, however, was determined that the series should balance out the 'view from the top' with the 'view from the bottom' – that those on the front line and on the receiving end of bombing were equally as important as the strategists and the politicians. Thus
The World at War
features such fascinating characters as the torpedo-tanker crewman who drifted for weeks in the Atlantic without water but who somehow lived to tell the tale; the Leningrad housewife who endured a 1,000– day siege; the D-Day GI who was there when the ramp on the landing craft went down in front of a hail of bullets, and, of course those who survived the horrors of Auschwitz.

Meanwhile, researchers were going through a huge amount of archive film, much of it held at the Imperial War Museum in London. The Nazis were remarkably thorough in recording even their most abhorrent atrocities – much of it in colour – and
The World at
War would become one of the first television documentaries to exploit these resources completely.

At the same time, work was also being progressed on the script, the logo, the music and the titles. It was to be 18 months before the title sequence was perfected to Isaac's satisfaction – those sombre black-and-white images set over burning text that would become one of the most memorable in television history.

The first programme,
A New Germany,
went out on Wednesday, 31 October 1973, at 9pm, and the series went on to achieve excellent ratings for a documentary. One edition,
Morning,
the story of the D-Day landings, made it into the top 10 that week, unheard of for a programme of that nature.
The World at War
was deemed a great success, and as a result further 'specials' were produced, narrated this time by Eric Porter. Indeed, when shown on BBC2 over Christmas 2002,
The World at War
received a higher rating than
Friends,
which was shown at the same time on Channel 4.

The World at War
has since been broadcast in nearly 100 countries around the world, and, given its length, it is certain that it is showing somewhere at any given moment in time. It has won many 'outstanding documentary' accolades including an International Emmy.