The World At War
1 9 7 3 - 1 9 7 4 (UK)
26 x 60 minute episodes
5 x specials
 Produced by Jeremy Isaacs and narrated by Laurence Olivier, The
World At War took four years to make, cost £1 million and
deserved its success for its skilful use of archive news film with
new interviews.
The 'stars' of the series were the interviewees, including;
Albert Speer (Hitler's Armaments Minister); Karl Wolff (Himmler's
adjutant); Traudl Junge (Hitler's personal secretary); James
Stewart (the Hollywood star, but then a USAF bomber pilot);
Anthony Eden (then Foreign Secretary, later Prime Minister); John
Colville (Parliamentary Private Secretary to Winston Churchill);
Averill Harriman (US Ambassador to Russia); Arthur 'Bomber' Harris
(the Head of RAF Bomber Command); and Karl Doenitz (the head of
the U-boat fleet, and later head of the whole German Navy and
Hitler's anointed successor).
A cast of total unknowns also featured, with fascinating tales
to tell - the torpedoed-tanker crewmen who drifted for weeks in
the Atlantic without water but somehow still made it; the
Leningrad Housewife who endured a 1000-day siege which led to
mass-starvation; the D-Day GI who was there when the ramp on the
landing-craft went down in front of a hail of bullets; the
Auschwitz survivor.
Altogether, the interview teams for The World At War
gathered nearly a million feet of interview and location material.
At the same time, researchers went through 3 million feet of
archive film and attempted to make sense of the increasingly vast
amount of material that was being assembled.
The finished series contains thousands of different clips of
footage, all of which was meticulously logged and filed into a
central log book for future reference.
The program went on to achieve very good 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
program of that nature.
The World at War was deemed a great success, and as a
result some further specials were produced, sometimes making use
of material that was left out of the original series - the
specials were narrated by another Shakespearean actor this time,
Eric Porter.
The series 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 and the George Polk Memorial Award.
EPISODES
A New Germany 1933 - 39 | Distant War 1939-40
| France Falls 1940 | Alone Britain 1941
| Barbarossa 1941
Banzai - Japan Strikes | On our way - America enters
the war | Desert - The war in North Africa
| Stalingrad
Wolfpack | Redstar - The Soviet Union |
Whirlwind - Bombing Germany | Tough Old Gut
| It's a Lovely Day Tomorrow | Home Fires
| Morning | Occupation |
Pincers | Genocide | Nemesis |
Japan 1941 - 1945
Pacific - The Island to Island war | The Bomb
| Reckoning | Remember | Warrior
SPECIALS
The Two deaths of Adolf Hitler | The Final Solution -
Auschwitz | Hitler's Germany | The Only
Hope 1933-1936
The People's Community 1937-1941
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