What I watched: The twenty-fourth 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 Hugh James and Maurice Joyce. This episode aired at 9:00 PM on ABC on Thursday, October 20, 1949, and is available on DVD and Amazon Prime.
What happened: We start with footage of the celebration of V-E Day in Moscow, with fireworks set off. German prisoners of war are also marched through the streets, with officers particularly subject to abuse. We are told that the USSR had now become one of the world’s major powers. Eisenhower decides not to attend the surrender ratification at Berlin, reasoning that it should be a Soviet affair — a separate surrender had been signed in Western Europe two days earlier. Days later, Ike does travel to Berlin, along with French and British leaders for a summit.
Eisenhower gives a general description of the staggering nature of losses during the Eastern front, and says that the Russians’ vindictive animus towards the Germans was only to be expected. From his conversations with Field Marshall Zhukov, Eisenhower concludes that Zhukov’s army was less concerned with morale than the allies, and didn’t use methods like troop rotations or protecting soldiers from the worst.
While Ike is critical of the Russian army’s treatment of its soldiers, he praises Marshall Zhukov, describing him as the man with the greatest stature in the war. We’re told that Nazis captured by Germans were “much less fortunate” than POWs in the West. There’s footage of the bitter fighting fade to a mass memorial.
We once again return to the Yalta conference, with Eisenhower seeming optimistic against — both were “free from the stigma of colonial empire-building” but were “ideologically […] in diametric opposition.” He sees failure to “bridge the gap” as a potential threat to world peace. This, along with the practical difficulties of traversing 300 miles of German terrain, is offered as explanation for America’s decision not to rush towards Berlin in the final days of the war.
Eisenhower poses with Stalin during a victory parade, standing on top of Lenin’s tomb — reportedly the first foreigner to be invited to do so. The narration stresses Eisenhower’s position that the US and Russia could live side by side with different forms of government. Nevertheless, disagreements about how to govern occupied Germany lead to conflict between the two countries, culminating in the Berlin Blockade.
Next up is footage of the founding meeting of the United Nations in San Francisco, with an Eisenhower narration praising the concept of internationalism. Maintaining world peace is just a question of America retaining its “moral integrity.” Oh, so it should be easy then.
What I thought: I expected this episode to be very obvious propaganda about the evil Russians and their impending threat to America. It wasn’t. I think it was still propagandistic, but in a more moderate and subtle way than most of its Cold War contemporaries.
I’m not sure how much of this material was in Eisenhower’s original book — it reportedly said little to nothing about the Eastern front, and more recent event such as the Berlin blockade likely wouldn’t have been in there. But narrator-Ike’s ambivalent relationship to Russia tracks pretty well with that of the actual man’s. Eisenhower was a good friend of Field Marshall Zhukov, had seen the Russian allies as indispensible allies in the war, and by all appearances genuinely believed that the two nations could coexist. It was for these reasons that the far-right nativist wing of the Republican party, headed by Joseph McCarthy and Robert Taft, were always suspicious of Eisenhower. Indeed, it was likely only his war hero stature that stopped them from painting him as commie.
At the same time, Eisenhower was ultimately loyal to the demands of the American military-industrial complex, as much as he may have chafed at some of them. Both as president and in his role as founding commander of NATO (roughly contemporaneous to this series), he would help to build the institutional and ideological framework that opposed Russia in the Cold War (with plenty of collateral damage.) While not as doggedly anti-Soviet as the presidents immediately following and preceding him, Eisenhower was certainly not a fellow traveller.
We can see this ambivalence in how Russians are portrayed in this episode. On the one hand, Crusade pays lip service to the difficulty and importance of the Russian war effort, as well as the splendour of the victory parade Ike attends. But the Russian military are described in ways that Americans never would be, as tactically inept, harsh on their own men and cruel to the enemy. It’s easy to see how this idea of Russian character would be congruent with the most fearmongering propaganda. And of course, the insistence that peace is possible only makes the Russians more villainous for ruining that beautiful dream.
In a way, Crusade even blames Russia’s staggering war losses on its inattention to Eisenhower’s favourite topic of morale and not their desperate situations. Its hard for me to see how a starving country bearing the brunt of an enemy invasion could rotate its soldiers back to the equivalent of USO shows and army bathhouses, but then again I’m not a general.
Perhaps as a result of his idiosyncratic perspective on the Russian menace, Eisenhower as a character figures much more as a character in this episode and less of a passive observer. There’s a lot of narration by Joyce in his impression of the general, and scenes described directly from Eisenhower’s perspective. I’m still not sure how involved the series’s producers were in the ongoing attempt to draft the general as a presidential candidate, but there’s more than a trace of the campaign speech in the way Ike talks about world peace. The message, it would seem, is that Eisenhower knows the Russians and would know how to deal with them as President. If nothing else, it furthers my impression that Ike was a better politician than a general.
Who won?: It’s a bit of a closer battle between Crusade and Ed Wynn this week, but I still think the documentary would have been my pick.
Coming up next: We move into the last week of October (and ECP’s first year) with the usual appetizer of The Life of Riley.
The Eternal Couch Potato 