The World at War


The World at War is a 26-episode British documentary television series that chronicles the events of the Second World War and aired between 31 October 1973–8 May 1974 on ITV. Produced by Thames Television in collaboration with the Imperial War Museum, it took four years to make at a cost of around £880,000, making it the most expensive factual series ever made at the time. It was produced by Jeremy Isaacs, narrated by Laurence Olivier and included music composed by Carl Davis. A tie-in book of the same name was written by Mark Arnold-Forster and published in 1973.
Hundreds of hours of interviews were filmed, primarily with surviving aides and assistants to prominent figures, soldiers, sailors, airmen, civilians, concentration camp inmates and other victims of the war. The episodes covered the 15 most prominent battles of the war, along with related topics such as the Holocaust, the political context and civilian experiences of the affected countries. So much footage went unused that Thames Television commissioned a further eight episodes of various lengths, which were narrated by Eric Porter and aired between 30 April 1975–18 August 1976.
The World at War attracted widespread acclaim and now it is regarded as a landmark in British television history. In the British Film Institute's 2000 list of the 100 Greatest British Television Programmes, The World at War placed 19th, the highest-placed documentary on the list.

Overview

had been inspired to look at the production of a long-form documentary series about the Second World War following the BBC's broadcast of its series The Great War in 1964. The BBC series, produced in collaboration with the Imperial War Museum, featured a mix of contemporary film footage from the period and film recreations, which soured relations between the BBC and the Museum. As a consequence, Isaacs was determined to have his programme be as authentic as possible.
The World at War was commissioned by Thames Television in 1969. The government had halved its levy on television advertising revenue, with the proviso that the money which the independent television companies saved must be reinvested in programmes. Isaacs persuaded Thames to use the money to pay for the production of his Second World War documentary. The series took four years to produce, at a cost of £900,000, a record for a British television series. It was first shown in 1973 on ITV.
The series featured interviews with major members of the Allied and Axis campaigns, including witness accounts from civilians, enlisted men, officers and politicians. The interviewees included Sir Max Aitken, Joseph Lawton Collins, Mark Clark, Jock Colville, Karl Dönitz, James "Jimmy" Doolittle, Lawrence Durrell, Lord Eden of Avon, Mitsuo Fuchida, Adolf Galland, Minoru Genda, W. Averell Harriman, Sir Arthur Harris, Alger Hiss, Brian Horrocks, Traudl Junge, Toshikazu Kase, Curtis LeMay, Vera Lynn, Hasso von Manteuffel, Bill Mauldin, John J. McCloy, Lord Mountbatten of Burma, Sir Richard O'Connor, J. B. Priestley, Saburo Sakai, Albert Speer, James Stewart, Charles Sweeney, Paul Tibbets, Walter Warlimont, Takeo Yoshikawa and historian Stephen Ambrose.
In the programme The Making of "The World at War", included in the DVD set, Isaacs explains that priority was given to interviews with surviving aides and assistants rather than recognised figures. The most difficult person to locate and persuade to be interviewed was Heinrich Himmler's adjutant Karl Wolff. During the interview, he admitted to witnessing a mass execution in Himmler's presence. Isaacs later expressed satisfaction with the series's content, noting that if it had not been secret, he would have added references to British codebreaking at Bletchley Park. In a list of the 100 Greatest British Television Programmes which was compiled by the British Film Institute during 2000, voted for by industry professionals, The World at War ranked 19th, the highest-placed documentary on the list.

Episodes

The series has twenty-six episodes. Isaacs asked Noble Frankland, director of the Imperial War Museum, to list fifteen main campaigns of the war and devoted one episode to each. The remaining eleven episodes are devoted to other matters, such as the rise of Nazi Germany, home life in Britain and Germany, the experience of occupation of the Netherlands, and the Holocaust. Episode one begins with a cold open describing the massacre at the French village of Oradour-sur-Glane by the Waffen SS. The same event is referenced again at the end of Episode twenty-six, accompanied by the "Dona nobis pacem" from the Missa Sancti Nicolai, composed by Joseph Haydn. The series ends with Laurence Olivier saying "Remember". For all but three episodes, the last scene of each episode either ended as a photograph or would be a freeze-frame shot of a film, and then change to a textured photograph before the credits roll. They would show the textured photograph only when The World at War logo appeared in both "The Desert" and "Home Fires" episodes. In the "Remember" episode, it would show the fire used during the title part as the credits roll before extinguishing itself at the end.

Broadcast history

The series was originally transmitted on the ITV network in Britain between 31 October 1973 and 8 May 1974, and has been shown around the world. It was first shown in the US in syndication on various stations in 1974. WOR in New York aired the series in the mid-1970s, although episodes were edited both for graphic content and to include sufficient commercial breaks. PBS station WNET in New York broadcast the series unedited and in its entirety in 1982 as did WGBH in the late 1980s. The Danish channel DR1 first broadcast the series from August 1976 to February 1977 and it was repeated on DR2 in December 2006 and January 2007. The History Channel in Japan began screening the series in its entirety in April 2007. It repeated the entire series again in August 2011. The Military History Channel in the UK broadcast the series over the weekend of 14 and 15 November 2009. The Military Channel in the United States aired the series in January 2010, and has shown it regularly since. BBC2 in the UK transmitted a repeat run of the series starting on 5 September 1994 at teatime. In 2011, the British channel Yesterday started a showing of the series and it has been shown continuously since.
The series was shown on SABC in South Africa in 1976, one of the first documentary series broadcast after the launch of the first television service in South Africa in January 1976, but the episode showing the Nazi holocaust was not shown.
The series was shown in Australia in 1975 and has been shown on various TV stations at various times since then. It has also been shown on Australia's Pay TV Provider Foxtel in the early 2000s and a number of times since.
Each episode was 52 minutes excluding commercials; as was customary for hour-long ITV episodes at the time, it was originally screened with only one central break. On its original television broadcast in the UK the twentieth episode "Genocide ", which dealt with Nazi concentration camps and the Holocaust, was shown uninterrupted without a commercial break due to the sensitive nature of its content.

Additional episodes

So extensive was the amount of footage both shot and meticulously collected by Isaacs and his team that much went unused in the original 26-episode series. As a result, eight further documentaries were commissioned by Thames Television, ranging from 30 minutes to 100 minutes in length. The topics of these additional programmes include the theories and myths surrounding Hitler's death, the Auschwitz death camp, Germany under the rule of the Nazis, and a full interview with Hitler's personal secretary Traudl Junge. Due to Laurence Olivier being unavailable these additional documentaries were narrated instead by actor Eric Porter. These were released as a bonus to the VHS version and have been included on all DVD and Blu-ray sets of the series since.
The additional episodes and their original UK broadcast dates are:
  1. The Two Deaths of Adolf Hitler
  2. The Final Solution - Auschwitz: Part One
  3. The Final Solution - Auschwitz: Part Two
  4. Warrior
  5. Hitler's Germany: The People's Community
  6. Hitler's Germany: Total War
  7. Secretary to Hitler
  8. From War to Peace
Four further documentaries were created specially for home video releases, these are:
  1. The Making of the Series: The World at War
  2. Making of the Series - A 30th Anniversary Retrospective
  3. Experiences of War
  4. Restoring the World at War

    ''The World at War: Another Look''

An intriguing follow-up series was produced in 1983 by Jerry Kuehl called The World At War: Another Look, a Channel 4 series re-examining the original programmes with the benefit of a decade's hindsight. Transmitted at the end of 1983 and early 1984 - one episode a month - it features a number of academic historians and news cameramen who were responsible for filming some of the archive footage used in The World at War. The first episode was described in The Times as dealing “with the political, ethical and strategic pressures on cameramen covering war, and asks how much we should believe of what we are shown.”

Home media history

The series was released in various territories on VHS video as well as on 13 Laservision long-play videodiscs by Video Garant Amsterdam. In 2001–2005, DVD box sets were released in the UK and US. In 2010, the series was digitally restored and re-released on DVD and Blu-ray. In the latter case the image is cropped from its original 1.33:1 aspect ratio down to 1.78:1, to better fit modern widescreen televisions. The restored series was re-released on DVD and Blu-ray in its original aspect ratio in the United Kingdom on 31 October 2016.

Books

The original book The World at War, which accompanied the series, was written by Mark Arnold-Forster in 1973. In October 2007, Ebury Press published The World at War, a new book by Richard Holmes, an oral history of the Second World War drawn from the interviews conducted for the TV series. The programme's producers shot hundreds of hours of interviews, but only a fraction of that recorded material was used for the final version of the series. A selection of the rest of this material was published in this book, which included interviews with Albert Speer, Karl Wolff, Traudl Junge, James Stewart, Anthony Eden, John Colville, Averell Harriman and Arthur "Bomber" Harris.