What I watched: The twenty-sixth 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 27, 1949, and is available on DVD and Amazon Prime.
What happened: James narrates how for most Americans who served WW2 was one of the most memorable times of their life — excluding, of course, the dead. We then jump right back to Hitler’s rise to power, with lots of swastikas on display. Hitler sweeps over Europe, and… you know what? You know the story. I’ve spent twenty-five episodes telling you the story. So let’s just skip to my thoughts.
What I thought: As a final episode, this is a bit of an anticlimax, basically being a recap of the previous 25 episodes. There may have been some previously unused footage involved, as there were parts of the first half of the episode I don’t remember, but it’s likely just the length of time that’s passed since I first watched these episodes. Condensing the whole series into 20 minutes makes it seem almost comically manic, with the Nazi threat rising and being crushed in less time than it takes for the Lone Ranger to catch the rustlers.
On the other hand, this type of conclusion makes sense for the essayistic structure of Crusade in Europe. After all, an essay or non-fiction book usually doesn’t introduce new ideas in its conclusion — indeed, when giving feedback on student essays, this is something I explicitly tell them not to do. Instead, the conclusion is for summarizing and re-stating something you’ve already said. This is, however, in stark contrast to the serialized television form, which delays the resolution of the conflict to as late as possible and probably later. In your ordinary TV finale, you might have ten minutes after the final conflict is resolved to wrap up lose ends and have everyone ride into the sunset, not a whole episode of denouement (although series like The Wire have changed this somewhat.)
But if Crusade is an essay, what is its thesis? The answer that one gathers from this conclusion is pretty much just “Dwight Eisenhower is great.” While Ike has been a spectral presence for many of the series’s episodes, here he is almost constantly on screen, giving orders, making speeches, and generally winning the war. The other individual who appears in great focus is Hitler, first ominously rising to power then becoming a panicked and scared weakling. All of the earlier details about the institutions of war and the importance of infrastructure are left out: as war becomes simplified, it becomes the story of two great men, Eisenhower and Hitler, locked in a duel of wills. Eisenhower’s victory speech is the final thing we see in the series, cementing the impression that it was ultimately he who won the war.
As I’ve written before, Eisenhower personally wrote the book which Crusade is based on, but had little to no involvement in the TV series. It seems likely that Fred Feldkamp and the other people involved in putting the show together were among the camp of Americans who wanted to draft Eisenhower for a future presidential campaign — a campaign he would ultimately begin 15 months after the series finished airing. Which party was almost irrelevant: Ike’s cult of personality was so strong that people wanted to vote for him regardless of any other political loyalty.
Thus, Crusade buttressed Eisenhower’s most important identity: The Man Who Beat Hitler. Dwight Eisenhower had many good character traits, and some bad ones, but few of them mattered compared to the identity of the conqueror that was constructed through media like Crusade in Europe and the newsreels it was fashioned out of. Eisenhower’s narration here was dry and a little condescending, but it was what he embodied — the libidinal joy of victory, the historical triumph of conquering the continent that had once spurned America — that attracted people.
I’ve written at length in these recaps about the ways in which historical memory is made, and how the particular idea of World War II this series relates would soon become established truth and, in turn, a convenient tool to use in arguments for more war. Outside of its forays into describing dictatorships, there’s not that much moral speechifying,but the word “crusade” in the title does a lot of work. America’s triumph in World War II was to become a religious narrative, one in which good proved it was good by triumphing over evil. That Hitler’s Germany, Tojo’s Japan and Mussolini’s Italy were
(These days the word “crusade” has a bit of a different edge, suggesting self-righteous fanaticism, which is probably more true to the historical Crusades. But the American public sphere was much more obviously Christian than it is today, which is saying something.)
As I noted in my Golden Potato write-up, on a technical level Crusade is far and away more sophisticated than its television contemporaries, splicing together film to create Eisensteinian montages. It was a big, prestigious achievement for the nascent medium, and treated as such. But it’s hard to fully recommend to a contemporary audience. It’s not that its way of thinking about history is outdated — it’s become so commonplace that it’s hard to imagine a WW2 buff finding anything new in the series. For better or for worse, Crusade laid the groundwork for every Hitler-themed documentary, pious or salacious, that would fill the History Channel and other networks for the next half-century and beyond.
But who won?: It may just be the fact that I’ve seen most of this footage before, but I preferred the chaos of Fireball Fun-for-All to the ordered recapping of Crusade, and would have probably had my dial tuned to NBC on these fall Thursday nights. Commercially and critically speaking, however, Crusade was the more successful show. It was one of the first TV programs to win a Peabody award, and was evidently popular enough to warrant a follow-up series about the Pacific front and multiple home-video re-releases decades later. I’m not sure if Crusade in the Pacific is available, but if it is I’ll be in for another round of black-and-white war footage whenever we get to it.
Coming up next: I investigate Uncle Mistletoe, whatever that is.
The Eternal Couch Potato 