The World at War is a 26-episode British television documentary series chronicling the events of World War II. Produced by Thames Television and first broadcast on ITV between October 1973 and May 1974, it attracted widespread acclaim and is now regarded as a landmark in British television history.
The series was produced by Jeremy Isaacs and narrated by Laurence Olivier. The music was composed by Carl Davis. The series used a combination of archive footage and interviews with surviving participants — among them service personnel note , politicians, civilians, concentration camp inmates and even Nazi officials. Hundreds of hours of interviews were shot, of which only a fraction was used for the final version of the series.
Each episode was 52 minutes excluding commercials; as was customary for ITV documentaries at the time, it was originally screened with just one break in the middle — with the exception of episode 20, "Genocide (1941–1945)", which was screened uninterrupted.
The World at War was partly inspired The Great War, the BBC's 1964 documentary on World War I. Isaacs later produced a similar series on the Cold War entitled Cold War, which was first broadcast in 1998. In a list of the 100 Greatest British Television Programmes compiled by the British Film Institute in 2000, The World at War ranked 19th, the highest-placed documentary on the list.
The VHS and DVD releases included bonus material in the form of footage and interviews which were not used in the original series but which were edited into documentaries narrated by Eric Porter.
- 1 "A New Germany (1933–1939)"
- 2 "Distant War (September 1939 – May 1940)"
- 3 "France Falls (May–June 1940)"
- 4 "Alone (May 1940 – May 1941)"
- 5 "Barbarossa (June–December 1941)"
- 6 "Banzai!: Japan (1931–1942)"
- 7 "On Our Way: U.S.A. (1939–1942)"
- 8 "The Desert: North Africa (1940–1943)"
- 9 "Stalingrad (June 1942 – February 1943)"
- 10 "Wolf Pack: U-Boats in the Atlantic (1939–1944)"
- 11 "Red Star: The Soviet Union (1941–1943)"
- 12 "Whirlwind: Bombing Germany (September 1939 – April 1944)"
- 13 "Tough Old Gut: Italy (November 1942 – June 1944)"
- 14 "It's a Lovely Day Tomorrow: Burma (1942–1944)"
- 15 "Home Fires: Britain (1940–1944)"
- 16 "Inside the Reich: Germany (1940–1944)"
- 17 "Morning (June–August 1944)"
- 18 "Occupation: Holland (1940–1944)"
- 19 "Pincers (August 1944 – March 1945)"
- 20 "Genocide (1941–1945)"
- 21 "Nemesis: Germany (February–May 1945)"
- 22 "Japan (1941–1945)"
- 23 "Pacific (February 1942 – July 1945)"
- 24 "The Bomb (February–September 1945)"
- 25 "Reckoning (April 1945)"
- 26 "Remember"
Tropes:
- Cold Opening: The first episode begins with (then) modern-day footage of Oradour-sur-Glane
and Olivier describing the massacre that happened there in 1944. - Dated History: In the making-of content for the DVD set, Jeremy Isaacs stated that the series would have featured the work of the code breakers at Bletchley Park had it not still been classified at the time.
- Talking Heads: The many, many interviewees, all surviving participants — among them Jimmy Stewart, Anthony Eden, Vera Lynn, Lord Mountbatten and Traudl Junge (Hitler's secretary).
