What I Watched: The eleventh 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 and Maurice Joyce as the voice of Eisenhower. This episode aired at 9:00 PM on ABC on July 21, 1949, and is available on DVD and Amazon Prime.
What Happened: Eisenhower stresses the importance of the conditions that affected ordinary American soldiers (although the book refers to “fall 1944”, which is about a year ahead of where the narrative of ). Van Voorhes tells us that Ike understood the lot of the common soldier, as demonstrated by a set of fictitious soldiers who tell us so. One of the soldiers, playing checkers in a wheelchair, launches into a monologue about his time in Italy, accompanied by archive footage and the occasional interjection from van Voorhes.
Italy was a slog through cold, rainy, and highly mountainous territory. It’s described as the most brutal front of the war. (The Russian military may have had something to say about that.) With so many inexperienced American soldiers, morale naturally suffered — but, as one anonymous veteran says, “there’s nothing wrong with us that a good victory won’t cure.” Still, van Voorhes talks about the loneliness of the battlefield, and the terror it can quickly instill in an untrained man. Fortunately, these are trained Americans, who have an unspecified mental superiority over any other kind of troops.
Eisenhower visits the front in Italy, and realizes the harshness of a winter campaign. The first beer of the campaign is brewed, and handed out to the troops who take Naples. We see a brief clip of a radio request show, including a weirdly sexual request to hear Carol Landis sigh. The fun is soon over, as winter settles in and brings with it worries of pneumonia, frostbite and trenchfoot. On top of that, the nasty Germans have riddled the countryside with mines, including “shoe mines” that couldn’t be found by metal detectors.
There’s a tense, sparsely-narrated sequence of GIs searching a seemingly abandoned town, looking out for snipers and “booby-traps.” They gain valuable intelligence from both Italian civilians and captured Germans. Eisenhower’s voice concludes by telling us about how the American GI inspired and befriended everyone he come across, presumably excepting those he killed.
What I thought: This is another episode of Crusade that you can read either as an essayistic aside or B-roll-heavy filler. Personally, I enjoyed it the most of any episode of the series thus far. Absent some occasional and easily dismissed bloviating about the special spiritual qualities of American infantry, this episode sets aside the story of triumph in order to get at least a little closer into how American soldiers actually experienced the war.
Of course, this episode is hardly brutal realism, with its cheesy frame narrative and intention to uplift the American viewer. But it does admit that, at its heart, war was a spiritually draining enterprise, even when fought for the best moral cause. For the GI, patriotic glory quickly faded to monotnous trekking through mud filled with the occasional fear of sudden death. Pleasures seen as minor at home, such as a glass of beer or a woman’s sigh, are euphoric in comparison. Eisenhower, both as general and as president, always acknowledged the horrors of war and the need to avoid it — although his actions often spoke of different priorities.
For the most part, I try to talk about these episodes in isolation from any material reality they depict. Only the most credulous modern viewer would take an episode like this as unvarnished documentary, and so I don’t see much purpose in a debunking. Rather, I’m interested in how Crusade functioned as propaganda that spoke to both the past (World War II was a moral crusade) and the future (Eisenhower would be a great president.)
But I have also been doing a little bit of research into how the actual war went, and this seems like a good place to acknowledge the gap between hagiography and history. (My main source here has been Jean Edward Smith’s Eisenhower in War and Peace, a biography obviously written in admiration of Ike but candid about his flaws.) In both the book and television versions of Crusade, Eisenhower continually obscured or downplayed the various failings of the US army — including his own strategic mistakes.
For instance, the North African campaign went far less smoothly than Crusade would have us believe — untrained American troops routinely failed against numerically-inferior Germans, and America’s best general (Patton) was mostly left on the sidelines. In Sicily, the Allies allowed Kesselring’s army to evacuate unscathed, which was seen as a major mis-step. And in Italy, the hearty american GI’s life was made more difficult by Eisenhower’s strategy of landing in three places simultaneously, without enough support for any of them. What allowed the Allies to keep advancing and taking territory was not any superiority in tactics or toughness, but rather America’s overwhelming ability to keep producing armaments and vehicles. Eisenhower has stressed the importance of engineering, but perhaps he hasn’t stressed it enough.
But the discovery of truth is not the only possible pleasure of a documentary. In this episode, we have the guest voice-over of the uncredited Dan Frazer. Frazer is convincing in adding a more relatable perspective to the war, and provides a nice break from the booming pronouncements of Eisenhower and van Voorhes. There’s also something to be said for the archive sequences — both the tense searching of the town and the How It Works-style disarming of a mine. The latter is almost soothing, despite the peril at hand. Crusade is an example of how a complex, confusing war can be reduced into palatable twenty-minute chunks, but maybe that isn’t so bad after all.
Coming up next: Crusade finishes up its Italian chapter.
The Eternal Couch Potato 