What I Watched: The fifteenth 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. This episode aired at 9:00 PM on ABC on August 11, 1949, and is available on DVD and Amazon Prime.
What happened: This episode concerns the Allied actions between D-Day and the breakout on July 25, known as The Battle of the Beachhead, which Eisenhower describes emphatically as “a definite phase.” The Allies begin constructing artificial harbours along the beaches of Normandy, allowing them to deliver supplies to their new foothold in France.
Less than a week after D-Day, Eisenhower takes George Marshall (who was running the war back in Washington) and his crew on a tour of the camps. The German V-1, a self-piloted bomb and a predecessor to the modern drone, hits London. There’s lots of footage of British people looking nervously up in the air and shots of devastated cities. Van Voorhes assures us that American anti-aircraft gunners did their best to destroy the V-1s before they landed. A bigger version, the V-2, is set to make its first combat launch by the end of the summer.
Before that can happen, the weather again becomes an enemy. A hurricane hits England, causing a whole new host of problems for the Allies. America’s mighty production line is able to replace all of the wrecked ships fairly quickly. General Omar Bradley began preparations to take Cherbourg. After heavy bombardment, GIs storm the city and finish off the entrenched German soldiers one-by-one. The city was captured within three weeks after D-Day.
The Allies now controlled an actual port, further developing their beachhead. Meanwhile, British and Canadian forces under Montgomery are involved in a heavy, month-long battle with Rommel’s forces over Caen. Liberated towns and villages show their appreciation through demonstrations, like a French-accented version of “God Save the Queen.”
The Allies decide on Saint Lo as the next point of attack, the capture of which would allow them to break out into the rest of France. They capture the town, but the Nazis respond with a fierce counterattack. The armoured attack continues until August 12, but the Allied Forces hang on to the territory they’ve won.
What I thought: This is another transitional installment of Crusade, although thankfully it’s more interesting than the previous one. Much of the action consists of minor battles designed to harden America’s beachhead so that they can break through and spread the seeds of liberation all over France. See what I was saying about phallic imagery?
I was struck by one particular sequence in this episode. When discussing the artificial harbours used by the British, there’s a long plane shot of the walls of one of the ports. The shot goes on and on, conveying its scale of the structure through the length of time it takes to film it. Feldkamp, who has done a pretty good job selecting choice footage throughout the series, has the wisdom to let the pan finish even after the relevant narration ends.
It is worth remembering that, while television was largely produced and directed by second and third-rate professionals, the newsreel footage that composes most of Crusade was done by the best that the US could muster. For Hollywood, the war was its own kind of service, with just about everyone pressed into productions that would bolster the war effort in one way or another. So we get moments of directorial brilliance like that long pan.
Of course, for someone of my generation, using such a technique to convey scope recalls immediately the opening shot of Star Wars: A New Hope. That’s not a coincidence: Lucas’s film captured nothing so much as a child’s impression of WW2, likely influenced by newsreel footage such as this one.
With the V-1 and the V-2 rockets, Crusade gets into the territory of Nazi super-weapons, the fodder for countless lurid History Channel documentaries far in the future. As he began to lose ground on both Western and Eastern fronts, Hitler became obsessed with phantasmal plans of superweapons that would turn the tide of the war. He hoped that the material conditions aligned against him, namely the unceasing production of the Americans and Russians, would be solved by near-magical technological innovation. (There are, of course, no modern parallels to this.)
By positioning Hitler’s rockets as imminent threats that could doom the Allies, Crusade is weaving a compelling narrative, but also ironically indulging in Hitler’s fantasies. The series is often torn between needing to establish the Germans as a fearsome threat and mocking them as overconfident fools. Hence, in this episode van Voorhes speaks of the Nazis with almost a kind of respect as “matching us weapon for weapon”, but later mocks German POWs who “were surprised to be defeated so quickly.” We’ve seen this contradiction before, as in the characterization of Mussolini in “Rise and Fall of a Dictator.” Indeed, perhaps this is a constant of propaganda: the enemy are both foolish subhumans and fearsome conquerors, sometimes both at once.
Coming up next: Something completely different, as some puppets from Chicago teach us how to make and market lemonade.
The Eternal Couch Potato 