What I Watched: The third episode of Crusade in Europe, a documentary series adapted from Dwight Eisenhower’s book of the same name. The adaptation was done by Fred Feldkamp, and narrated by Westbrook van Voorhes. This episode aired on ABC at 9:00 PM on May 19, 1949, and is available on DVD and Amazon Prime.
What Happened: Ike tells us that at the start of the war there was plenty of debate and confusion about what to do, but FDR laid out a grand plan. Roosevelt gives a speech about how a US defeat would mean the end of democracy, and demands that Americans give up both their comforts and their disputes with each other. There are insinuations that labour disputes must stop. We are then introduced to Roosevelt’s chief of staff Marshall, who is praised for his “ability to rapidly absorb a presentation.” Heroic stuff. Our man Eisenhower becomes the first head of the Operations Department
Meanwhile, Japan was sweeping aside its enemies in the Pacific, taking over many islands. The US Navy, in a state of damage and disrepair, was unable to resist. A nice graph lets us know about the difficult route US supply ships took to Australia, Britain, Russia and China. There’s some discussion of the combining of British and American resources and command, requiring them to “adjust all nationalistic differences,” in Eisenhower’s stilted words. The “combined machinery of administration” the two nations devised was, at least according to this narration, key to winning the war.
Finally, America decides to focus its energies on the European theatre, aiming to stop the “little fuhrer who wanted to conquer the world.” The “loose lips sink ships” campaign is surveyed and praised, including one faintly authoritarian poster reading “Free speech doesn’t mean careless talk.” There’s footage of sailors lounging and sleeping as the monotony of long sea voyages begin to wear on them, as well as staged images of spying German submarines. U-Boats begin to sink American ships by the dozen.
The Americans set up a base in Britain to assault “Fortress Europe”, a favourite phrase of fascists even today. Eisenhower brings on a General Smith to help him out with the logistics. And just like that, this chapter of our history is over.
What I thought: If the last episode of Crusade in Europe advanced a particular argument, this one has a more workmanlike purpose of getting through a slice of history. As a result, the episode is a bit scattershot, jumping between the various theatres of war and the American domestic atmosphere. The episode almost ends in the middle of a sentence, without the story reaching any sort of natural climax or stopping point. Well, we can’t expect history to generate twenty-six such moments in a war. What’s really noticeable is the slowing of the series’ pace. Whereas each previous episode blazed through about a year, here it takes the whole half hour just for Ike to get across the ocean. This too was likely necessary, especially for a series of this length, but it doesn’t stop the episode from dragging. At least the submarines were cool.
What does carry over from last week is Eisenhower’s focus on the logistical qualities of war. This is, I suspect, how generals see war: as an endless web of supply lines interrupted by occasional gunfire. What Eisenhower calls attention to, perhaps unconsciously, is the immense labour and planning needed just to get soldiers in place for a battle. There’s action, but it consists of papers flying through tubes and quick typing, a technological spectacle of an entirely different scale than the battles we associate with WW2.
We’re given no further explanation of Pearl Harbor than in the previous episode, and again America’s enemies seem to act purely out of some instrinsic, unchecked evil. Their reach and power seems almost infinite, and at times it’s unclear whether the series is actually portraying Japan and Germany as all-powerful devils or simply reporting the popular mood of the time. At one point there appears to be a suggestion that a mainland invasion by Japanese was imminent, but this idea was never more than a fantasy in the mind of the most overconfident Japanese officials and the most terrified American civilians. The narration berates paranoid West Coast politicians for demanding unfeasibly expensive defense systems, while at the same time promoting the monolithic view of America’s adversaries that contributed to such panic.
Hence we see the two sides of Crusade in Europe: on one hand a stirring story of a righteous moral battle (a crusade, even), and on the other hand a rigorous, even dry history of troop movements and supply lines. It’s not surprising that these two sides come into conflict from time to time, and stop the series from being fully engrossing. Perhaps governments always have to pursue a similar balance in times of war: terrifying the population with stories of the enemy’s omnipotence, but making war preparations based on the enemy’s weaknesses and limitations. Sometimes the stories needed in wartime to make the two halves cohere survive long past the end of the conflict.
Coming up next: A tasty melodrama featuring the great Yul Brynner.
The Eternal Couch Potato 