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 (equivalent to £12,900,000 in 2025), making it the most expensive factual series ever made at the time. It was produced by Jeremy Isaacs, narrated by Lord 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

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. 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. 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.

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.<!--WTOP (9) now WUSA, in Wash D.C., Fridays 7:30 pm in half-hour increments--> 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.

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 (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.

Additional episodes

So extensive was the amount of footage both shot and 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 World at War: Another Look

A follow-up series was produced in 1983 by Jerry Kuehl (who had worked on the original The World At War) 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 (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).

See also

  • 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

References

  • Complete series at archive.org
  • Complete series(with extra episodes) at Archive.org