The World at War

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The World at War
Created by	Jeremy Isaacs
Directed by	David Elstein
Narrated by	Laurence Olivier
Opening theme	The World at War Theme
Composer	Carl Davis
Country of origin	United Kingdom
Original language	English
No. of series	1
No. of episodes	26
Production
Producer	Thames Television
Running time	22 hours 32 minutes
Original release
Network	ITV
Release	31 October 1973 (1973-10-31) – 8 May 1974 (1974-05-08)

The World at War is a 26-episode British documentary television series that chronicles the events of the Second World War. Produced in 1973 at a cost of £900,000 (equivalent to £13,700,000 in 2023), it was the most expensive factual series ever made at the time.^[1] It was produced by Jeremy Isaacs,^[2] narrated by Laurence Olivier and included music composed by Carl Davis.^[3] The book, The World at War, published the same year, was written by Mark Arnold-Forster to accompany the TV series.

The World at War attracted widespread acclaim and now it is regarded as a landmark in British television history.^[4] The series focused on a portrayal of the experience of the conflict: of how life and death throughout the war years affected soldiers, sailors and airmen, civilians, concentration camp inmates and other victims of the war.^[2][5]

Jeremy Isaacs 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.^[6] 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.^[6] The series took four years to produce, at a cost of £900,000 (equivalent to £13,700,000 in 2023), 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.^[7] 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.

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.^[2] 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" (Latin for "Grant us peace") from the Missa Sancti Nicolai, composed by Joseph Haydn. The series ends with Laurence Olivier saying "Remember". For all but three episodes ("The Desert", "Home Fires", and "Remember"), 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.^[8]

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.^[9] 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 (now American Heroes 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.^[10]

The series was shown in Australia in 1975^[11] 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.^{[citation needed]}

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 (1941-1945)", which dealt with Nazi concentration camps and the Holocaust, was shown uninterrupted without a commercial break due to the sensitive nature of its content .^{[citation needed]}

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 (where known) are:

1. The Two Deaths of Adolf Hitler [30 April 1975]
2. The Final Solution - Auschwitz: Part One [12 August 1975]
3. The Final Solution - Auschwitz: Part Two [19 August 1975]
4. Warrior [11 November 1975]
5. Hitler's Germany: The People's Community (1933–1939) [11 August 1976]
6. Hitler's Germany: Total War (1939–1945) [18 August 1976]
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 [1989]
2. Making of the Series - A 30th Anniversary Retrospective [2003]
3. Experiences of War
4. Restoring the World at War

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.^[12] The restored series was re-released on DVD and Blu-ray in its original aspect ratio in the United Kingdom on 31 October 2016.^[13]

The original book The World at War,^[14] 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.^[15] 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 (Himmler's adjutant), Traudl Junge (Hitler's secretary), James Stewart (USAAF bomber pilot and Hollywood star), Anthony Eden, John Colville (Private Secretary to Winston Churchill), Averell Harriman (US Ambassador to the Soviet Union) and Arthur "Bomber" Harris (Head of RAF Bomber Command).^{[citation needed]}

• All Our Yesterdays – a Granada TV series covering some of this period.
• Apocalypse: The Second World War (2009) – an RTBF documentary on the Second World War
• BBC History of World War II (1989–2005)
• Cold War (1998) CNN TV production also produced by Jeremy Isaacs
• The Great War (1964) – BBC TV production
• The Secret War (1977) – a BBC TV series on the technological advances of the Second World War
• The Unknown War (1978) – an American documentary television series, produced with Soviet cooperation after the release of The World at War, which the Soviet government felt had paid insufficient attention to their part in World War II, the series was narrated by Burt Lancaster
• World War One (1964) – a Production of CBS

• Complete series at Archive.org
• Complete series(with extra episodes) at Archive.org
• The World at War at IMDb
• Jeremy, Isaacs (23 December 2002). "Isobel Hinshelwood". The Guardian. Retrieved 3 September 2021.
• Jeremy, Isaacs (23 November 2006). "Susan McConachy". The Guardian. Retrieved 3 September 2021.
• Tims, Anna (28 October 2013). "Jeremy Isaacs and David Elstein: How We Made The World at War". The Guardian.