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The World at War/Great War klaxon

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These two epic doco series have turned up on archive.org, complete episodes streaming in good quality and downloadable. Essential viewing of course – I can’t remember how many times I’ve watched them. Last time I was in England I started laboriously ripping the box sets but got bored, so it’s good to have them so easily available.

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    • Same. A brilliant documentary series for many reasons, not least that many of the key people were still alive in the early 70s and were able to be interviewed at a reflective distance from the events. This also predated the awful modern trend of documentaries being about some B-Grade celeb’s ‘journey of discovery’ on the given topic.

      This, Cosmos (original) and the Ascent of Man (and maybe Shelby Foote’s Civil War) are exemplars in the form.

      • The PBS Ken Burns series on the American Civil War and Vietnam are similarly definitive. I watched the Civil War one with fascinated horror and went back to episode 1 as soon as I’d finished it. The Vietnam one also has lots of good TV footage of the time and interviews with the participants of course, being more recent. Sadly neither currently on streaming AFAIK. The Beeb had a cut down version of Vietnam but a lot was cut out. Find the real deal if you can.

  5. Yeah, I have the “World at War” box set. It’s an incredible series. Thank goodness they didn’t wait any longer before making it. Some of the older interviewees are simply astonishing.

    I must admit I wasn’t aware that there had been a previous series called “The Great War”. I’ve certainly never seen any of it.

  6. Haven’t seen the Great War one, but TWaW has to be considered one of the best doco series ever made.

    From Olivier’s intro about the massacred village to the account of the Holocaust, it was full of scenes that have stayed with me years later, I think largely because the story, for want of a better word, was given space to breathe. The production team gave the interviewees plenty of time to tell their version of events without cutting away to reconstructions, a celeb walking round a battlefield, or other modern TV frippery. They understood that sometimes words from the people who were there are all you need.

    I wonder if such a series could be made today. I have an awful (maybe too cynical) feeling that a commissioning producer would say that our attention spans have grown shorter, you need a celeb on screen to grab viewers, and, erm, wouldn’t some of the archive footage look better in colour? I see that Netflix is running a WWII series with colourised footage. It never looks quite right (unless you make the effort that Peter Jackson and his expert crew did with that WWI footage), and are so many people that shallow that they need something to be in colour so that it looks more “real”?

    I will have to watch my TWaW boxset again.

  7. @captain-darling

    TWAW is indeed a magnificent program and one I dig out every few years for a rewatch. Have not seen the earlier TGW but will definitely give it a go

    Still some excellent documentary series around on UK TV

    If you’ve not seen the BBC’s recent Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland series do yourself a favor and dig it out.

    The earlier Once Upon a Time in Iraq is every bit as good

  8. I remember watching both series several times on tv. The only caveat I would have is that there has been more revealed since then that was still secret at the time – e.g. code breaking – but the first hand accounts are so valuable.

    • The quiet dignity of the old soldiers on TWAW is incredibly moving – even more so when today’ Z-list celebs are inclined to scream about
      developing PTSD after spending a couple of weeks training for shows like Strictly

      • Quite right. My grandfather fought across North Africa and right through Italy, but as far as I recall never once talked about what he had experienced. I was allowed to see his collection of war photos only once, and it was obvious just from them that he must have been right in the thick of it for a long time. But rightly or wrongly, his generation kept their thoughts and feelings to themselves. Maybe, given our greater knowledge now of PTSD and the impact of trauma, he and his peers might have been helped by being more open, but that was not the attitude back then.

        Their modest bravery does seem quite different to today’s society (and particularly social media) where you have to endure practically every celeb’s opinion about everything.

        • Indeed. German friend of mine’s Dad was in the blitzkrieg dash to the Channel, then Barbarossa, Stalingrad and years in a Russian POW camp for years after the war. He actually came home though. He said the day the invasion of the UK was cancelled their sergeant told them “we just lost the war”.

          • My father was at Dunkirk and quite happy to talk about it, including how deciding to get on a full ship rather than an empty one saved his life.
            However he never mentioned he was at Bergen Belsen until Schindler’s list came out. And never discussed it again.

            • My father was on of the never for discusssion brigade, and he never did. As a guest of the Japs for 4 years, working as a medic in the Burma railway camps, it was something to be filed away forever. You would never meet a man with a cleaner plate after any meal, including Sunday lunch. Spotless, despite his liberal use of the gravy boat.

        • My grandad was in North Africa and never spoke about it until after his stroke. Then the floodgates opened and he talked about very little else for the last couple of years of his life. He lived just long enough to watch the 50th anniversary of VE day on the telly, and I can never see veterans’ parades without thinking of him saluting his old comrades on the screen with his quavery old hand.

          • My Dad was never one for parades but I took him and my Mum along with Donna over to Normandy for the 1994 commemoration mainly because of the involvement of two of my Mum’s brothers in the D-Day landings. Her youngest brother was an infantry man and her middle brother served in the Royal Navy on minesweepers. He was onboard one of the first two ships into the engagement that day.
            My Dad couldn’t get over how many pretty young French girls kept wanting to kiss him and say thank you to him for helping to liberate France. I think he enjoyed himself immensely. My Mum thought his obvious embarrassment hilarious.
            I witnessed one of the most moving events I have ever seen on that trip. We attended a service at the Normandy American Cemetry at Colleville-sur-Mer. The truely memorable part of the service was when a Marine choir stood in the sunshine in immaculate dress uniforms and sang Shenandoah before a lone bugler played taps.

  9. My father served. He was a radio ops in RAF bomber command. He saw action in Nth Africa and Europe. He finished his war service in Norway based at Stavanger on mopping up. He rarely talked of his experiences and when he did it was invariably of the amusing events never of the many difficult situations he had found himself in.
    I was privileged to care for him up until his death, indeed he died in my arms of a heart attack in the hallway of our old family home. I asked him once during those last years of his life why he had seemed to be so content with a very quiet ordinary life spent in the company of his family and very few friends, working every day and spending his weekends tending his much loved garden, listening to his jazz records with a book open on his lap or washing his car on a sunny Sunday afternoon. He never asked for much preferring to treat his family before himself. His answer has always stayed with me. He said that for himself and many of his generation he believed it was enough to simply live peacefully and be grateful that they had survived to do so as after what he and far too many others had witnessed being allowed the privilege of a quiet life was all he required or dared to ask for.
    Needless to say I love my Dad and miss him on a daily basis. In his own quiet, unassuming way he was a great and gallant gentleman.

  10. Worth remembering that TWAW was made by – or more accurately for – ITV (a fact slightly confused because it’s been repeated on BBC2 at least once). I’m sure most people would automatically think of it as as Auntie project.

    A reminder that in the 70s, and some of the 80s the third channel was pumping out some quality grown-up content and wasn’t wall-to-wall shite like Tarby and Friends.

    Incredible theme music by the recently departed Carl Davis.

  14. TWAW is really what TV was invented for and a fantastic legacy for producer Jeremy Isaacs.
    As kids growing up in SE London/Kent we were all steeped in the impact of ‘the War’ – Biggin Hill was half an hour away, doodlebugs had detonated in local streets we all knew & every other suburban house had an air raid shelter often still loaded with unregistered weapons & ammo – we all read ‘Commando’ comics & ‘Victor’ & ‘Valiant’ & the overall impression we had was that the whole enterprise was massively exciting.
    Watching TWAW on quiet Sunday afternoons disabused me of this notion. It was sombre & unflinching in conveying the scale of the monstrous savagery that the conflict unleashed.
    It’s no exaggeration that my 11 year old mind was blown on one of those Sunday afternoons as I discovered the reality of genocide.
    None of the comics I’d read or black & white films I’d seen on TV had ever referenced it directly & none of the adults I knew had ever mentioned it although they *all knew*. It seemed to my young mind that the horror was so vast that the grown up world held onto it like an obscene secret that mustn’t be mentioned out loud.
    The whole ‘point’ of the war came into focus for me that day & part of me ‘grew up’ overnight.
    Talk about the impact of TV!
    I got hold of the box set as soon as I found an affordable one & have periodically revisited it.
    As far as the historiography of the series’ take on the War goes, it’s interesting as a document of the time it was made. Veterans of both sides often look shockingly young & rather surreal sporting ‘long’ hair & sideburns & wearing the finest colourful togs the 70s could conjure.
    The hideous excesses & almost complete disregard for human life of our Soviet ‘allies’ seem under emphasised to our post Cold War/ post Antony Beevor historical view- with the main thrust understandably being focussed on the apocalyptic stakes of total war.
    Any such minor quibbles aside, it is a brilliant documentary achievement & cannot be endorsed highly enough.

  16. World at War is truly great TV. One thing I realised last time I saw the episode on the Battle of Atlantic (my grandfather has been a merchant seaman on the convoys) was that the full truth of Bletchley Park/Enigma code breaking was still a state secret in the early 1970s and so never mentioned.

    • @Pessoa

      My uncle Paddy was a merchant seaman during WW2 as well. In common with several other posters’ relatives and friends, he hardly ever spoke of the hardships he experienced.

      When my last remaining uncle died four years ago, he left his cottage and papers – including all of Paddy’s seaman’s logs to me and my sister. Since this year is the 25th anniversary of Paddy’s death, I’m using those logs to write up a celebration of his life for the local paper.

      While doing so, I learned from one of my two uncles’ closest friends – alas no longer with us himself – that Paddy had been shipwrecked twice during the war

    • Absolutely true.
      My late Mum was a BP veteran & never mentioned it all at home until well into the late 80s.
      I’m still not sure if my Dad (himself a Sapper officer & no stranger to keeping schtum) was fully aware of what she got up to for many years – he knew she was a Wren of course, but I think she kept the specifics close to her chest.
      In later life, ( the late 90s) there were a couple of reunions & other recognition in the form of some kind of certificate/ veterans badge but I was always struck that they were all incredibly discreet & would have been just as comfortable taking their secrets to the grave.
      As for the Battle of the Atlantic, as Al Murray & James Holland continue to point out in the excellent We Have Ways podcast, it really should be renamed the War Of The Atlantic such was its scope & importance.

  17. To accompany the excellent World at War, I would recommend reading Daniel Todman’s 2 volume ‘Britain’s War’. It covers the period from 1937 to 1947 from a social, economic, political and military perspective, and it is incredibly readable.

    • I’ll look out for that – thanks for the tip.

      Nobody’s talking about the mums. Apart from a brief period when the primary school she taught in was evacuated to Highclere Castle – better known these days as Downton Abbey – she spent the whole war in Willesden, teaching by day and working in reception centres for bombed-out families at night.

      She was in far more danger than my dad, by and large. After a brief period in the PBI he escaped to the Intelligence Corps in Shetland, who were on the hunt for Norwegian speakers to interrogate Norwegians arriving on the Shetland Bus. (He could speak Danish, which was considered good enough.) My Boy Scout sleeping bag was confiscated from a Norwegian he felt was a bit iffy.

      Then it was off to Cairo and a bit of a Baedeker war. He became an aerial photo specialist, interpreting what he saw and passing info on. But there was plenty of time for tourism – Pyramids, Shepheard’s Hotel, Aswan, Petra, Jerusalem etc, all of which featured heavily in his photo albums. Then it was on to Athens for more of the same. When the war ended he was in Florence – we have a photo of him grinning on the roof of the Duomo. As far as I know he never heard a shot fired in anger, unless it was distant guns in the desert when he was in Cairo.

      It was my mother who never really talked about the war. To hear her talk, you’d think having her bottom pinched by the Earl of Dorchester at Highclere Castle was the most exciting thing that happened to her.

      • My Mum built Wellington Bombers before moving on to repairing Lancs. She met my Dad in a cinema queue. They were immediately smitten with one another and after a brief courtship they married. Shortly after my Dad finished his basic training and was shipped out to the Middle East. They didn’t see one another again for three years.
        My Dad’s death in 2009 parted them once more after sixty four years together. My Mum died two years later.

        • Chips Channon spends a lot of time in his diaries castigating Churchill for being a warmonger and praising Chamberlain in particular for his heroic efforts to avoid war. More out of admiration for Hitler, probably.

    • The record for the largest indoor political meeting was set by a rally of the British Union of Fascists and National Socialists, at Earl’s Court. on 16 July, 1939. Mere weeks before the outbreak of war. Photographs show a similarity to the Nuremberg rallies.

      Arthur Donaldson, future SNP leader, was interned for his pro-Nazi activities (he thought they could be relied on to install a separate Scottish government, should they invade).

      Things could so easily have turned out very differently.

  20. Just reading Denis Healey’s autobiography (it’s excellent btw) and came across a quote that seems relevant here. Healey notes the number of post-war politicians who had seen active service (himself included) and says “Thatcherism became possible only when the wartime generation was passing from the stage.”

    I think there’s something in that, partly in the shared experience of the state being used effectively to do things but also in the sense of a shared social consensus.

    • Yes, the fact that Churchill was turfed out at the earliest possible opportunity speaks volumes. I think a fair number of new MPs were still in uniform. I seem to remember a pic of Major Denis Healey addressing the HoC.

  21. What a remarkably interesting and very moving thread this is. It completely passed me by.

    I can certainly relate to your accounts of parents who did not want to talk about their wartime experiences.

    By a strange coincidence, I’ve just been reading a very quirky 1973 novel by Dinah Brooke: Lord Jim at Home. The central character, Giles, signs up for the Royal Navy at the onset of WW2, and Brooke’s descriptions of life as a sailor are magnificent.

    All these very ordinary guys, first enduring the icy horrors of the North Sea and then being sent down to the unbearable heat of the Indian Ocean to battle the Japanese Navy.

    https://www.mcnallyeditions.com/updates/dinah-brooke-the-brilliant-forgotten-novelis

    A remarkable read!

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