Last week I spoke my piece about Edward R. Murrow and his I Can Hear it Now series. Ed's been dead a long time, but my hunch is that if he were alive, he wouldn't be doing a lot of hand-wringing about World War II, or the "narrative" to which most of us in America still subscribe. Ed was a man of certainty: he loved democracy, he hated the Nazis (and the Japanese militarists as well), and I wouldn't be at all surprised if he lifted a nice, tall Scotch in honor of victory on both V-E and V-J days. Like virtually everyone in his generation, Ed believed there was a war to be won, and sitting under a rain of Luftwaffe bombing in London probably did nothing to change his mind. His broadcasts provided the audio track that guided the nation into war.
As everyone knows, however, the 20th century was the great age of video. We live on images, vivid scenes that tell us how to think and what to feel. Movies are our window into reality—as much as we tell ourselves that what we're seeing is an illusion. And if anyone provided the visuals for World War II, it was a man of humble origins, a Sicilian immigrant who championed his adopted country with the zeal of the new convert: Frank Capra.
Capra is a household word in the history of film. He directed two of the most famous movies of all time. It Happened One Night (1934) featured Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert in a romantic comedy that seems charming to us, but struck audiences of the day as scandalous and titillating in equal measure. And who among us has not thrilled to It's a Wonderful Life, the story of George Bailey and the world as it might have existed had he never been born? Capra stood for the American virtues: family, hard work, and the flouting of conventions.
One of his less well known productions is the series of shorts he produced for the government during the war, designed to explain to U.S. servicemen why they should be leaving hearth and home and going to fight the Axis in a godforsaken backwater like Guadalcanal. Why We Fight, he called them. I've spent more time watching these films than I care to admit, and I love them all. My favorite in the series, however, is the first installment, "Prelude to War."
Talk about certainty! Let us just say that Capra is not a master of nuance. He offers us two images of the globe: "Our World" (bathed in sunlight) and "Their World" (cloaked in darkness). One is freedom, the other slavery. One is peace, the other war. One is love, the other hate. He shows us a map of Fascist Italy that animates into a menacing axe tied in a bundle of rods (the ancient Roman fasces). Japan turns into a dragon devouring its neighbors. And Germany turns into a hideous swastika menacing all and sundry.
The dialog can only be described as lurid. The free world owes its freedoms to the great liberators, "lighthouses" of civilization, Capra calls them, "lighting up a dark and foggy world": Moses, Confucius, Muhammad, Christ. He traces a direct link between these big four and modern America, especially the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address. Meanwhile, the slave world worships "rabble-rousers" and "demagogues" like Hitler, Mussolini, and the God-Emperor. "Stop thinking and follow me!" he has Hitler crying. "I will make you masters of the world!" And the German people answer "Heil, Heil!"
Oh, sure, I know what you're saying: come on, man, don't believe anything you see on TV or the screen. I'm a 21st century guy, and I know better than to be gullible. After all, we live in the age of MTV's "Real World," a show about young adults who live in expensive apartments and have no bills, or "Real Housewives of New York," who are anything but real housewives. Still, World War II was at least partially a contest of ideas. Capra was a master Hollywood film maker, and my inner historian has to ask: how could the Axis possibly win the war of ideas in the 1940s, an era when Hollywood reigned supreme?
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8 Responses to “No Doubt: Frank Capra’s "Why We Fight"”
Good piece, Rob, as always. One thing I wonder about, though. Yes, we live in an age of cynicism and skepticism — but those weren't unknown traits in the 1930s, either. Do we have any indication of what GIs thought about such films? How many of them dismissed them as propaganda, at least until they saw the Germans' camps for themselves?
I always got a kick out of his "Your Job in Germany" for the post-WWII occupation forces.
"You'll see ruins, you'll see flowers. You'll see some mighty fine scenery. BUT DON'T LET IT FOOL YOU! YOU ARE IN ENEMY COUNTRY! Be alert! Suspicious of Everyone, don't take chances! You are up against something more than tourist scenery, you are up against German history. It isn't good."
Most convicted murderers are sorry – that they got caught. In the same vein, it is my honest belief that even the most rabid German, Italian, and Japanese opponents of the Axis governments (with the exception of the Communists) would have been able to live with it if their countries had won. Nothing makes you regret a war more than losing it, despite what the moralkists say. Of course Capra was not objective. Why should he have been? Only fools think the world would be basically the same today if the Axis had won. Simplistic as its themes were, "Why We Fight" told the truth.
From everything I have been told by my uncles and aunts (mostly my aunts…my uncles never talked about their wartime experiences too much), the Axis powers were, indeed, evil, and needed to be stopped. The sad facts of the war was we had to make a "deal with the Devil",(the USSR and Stalin) in order to win against Germany. My Uncle John saw Bergen-Belsen and only spoke of it once in all the years I knew him…and then to tell me to "Sock any Damfool who ever said that the Holocaust was a lie". I told about my Uncle Bernie in another post. Personally, I have no doubt as to who were the "good guys" and the "bad guys"…and, Robert, I agree, we won the battle of ideas, too, with Frank Capra's work…among many others. Good read, and thought-provoking!
Of course the Germans could have won the propaganda war. As long as the real, hard evidence of the holocust was limited. Gobbels was a master of the propaganda war and he readily used the ideas of his enemies. Couple with the fact that there was a sublte anti-semitic attitude in the world. That is why Capra's film series was so important. Men who had been torn from their homes and sent to some of the most hostile enviroments in the US and then the world needed to not only trained to fight, but given the mental edge to destroy the Axis powers.
Great point. The 1940s were a lot more cynical and hard-edged than we sometimes think. After all, these were the same people who had just lived through the Depression. I think soldiers on all sides fought for a simple reason–to survive the ordeal. But I also believe that, at the margins, knowing you were fighting for something moral might have made some difference. And we also shouldn't underplay the impact of the Capra-esque narrative on the Allied home fronts.
That does, however, raise the question (or should, to the historian) of whether ther Allied power were "moral" or merely "more moral" than their opponants.
After all, these very same Allies were, in turn,: 1) (UK)occupying native peoples around the world in the millions, 2) (US) interning citizens of Japanese descent and enforcing horrific racially discriminatory laws, 3) (USSR) enforcing a totalitarian system little better than that being fought.
Moreover, the methods used by these same Allies were not, in any sense, moral.
So I think that no thinking person can suggest that, objectively, the Allies were objectively moral societies who fought in objectively moral ways.
My father joined the US Army in WWII from Puerto Rico. It was not until his infantry regiment deployed from the Island to Panama and South America in 1944, that he experienced the officers separating out the "colored" from the "white" Puerto Ricans, that he realized the US Army was racist. The colored were sent to separate units. At the same time US films told us the Nazi's believed they were the master race. White Continental Americans themselves believed they were superior to minority soldiers. My father quickly learned about segregation, "Jim Crow" laws, and racism within our ranks. No doubt the Allies were more moral than the Axis, but the USA would take decades more to overcome its own racist thinking.
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Good piece, Rob, as always. One thing I wonder about, though. Yes, we live in an age of cynicism and skepticism — but those weren't unknown traits in the 1930s, either. Do we have any indication of what GIs thought about such films? How many of them dismissed them as propaganda, at least until they saw the Germans' camps for themselves?
I always got a kick out of his "Your Job in Germany" for the post-WWII occupation forces.
"You'll see ruins, you'll see flowers. You'll see some mighty fine scenery. BUT DON'T LET IT FOOL YOU! YOU ARE IN ENEMY COUNTRY! Be alert! Suspicious of Everyone, don't take chances! You are up against something more than tourist scenery, you are up against German history. It isn't good."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1v5QCGqDYGo
Most convicted murderers are sorry – that they got caught. In the same vein, it is my honest belief that even the most rabid German, Italian, and Japanese opponents of the Axis governments (with the exception of the Communists) would have been able to live with it if their countries had won. Nothing makes you regret a war more than losing it, despite what the moralkists say. Of course Capra was not objective. Why should he have been? Only fools think the world would be basically the same today if the Axis had won. Simplistic as its themes were, "Why We Fight" told the truth.
From everything I have been told by my uncles and aunts (mostly my aunts…my uncles never talked about their wartime experiences too much), the Axis powers were, indeed, evil, and needed to be stopped. The sad facts of the war was we had to make a "deal with the Devil",(the USSR and Stalin) in order to win against Germany. My Uncle John saw Bergen-Belsen and only spoke of it once in all the years I knew him…and then to tell me to "Sock any Damfool who ever said that the Holocaust was a lie". I told about my Uncle Bernie in another post. Personally, I have no doubt as to who were the "good guys" and the "bad guys"…and, Robert, I agree, we won the battle of ideas, too, with Frank Capra's work…among many others. Good read, and thought-provoking!
Of course the Germans could have won the propaganda war. As long as the real, hard evidence of the holocust was limited. Gobbels was a master of the propaganda war and he readily used the ideas of his enemies. Couple with the fact that there was a sublte anti-semitic attitude in the world. That is why Capra's film series was so important. Men who had been torn from their homes and sent to some of the most hostile enviroments in the US and then the world needed to not only trained to fight, but given the mental edge to destroy the Axis powers.
Geoff Megargee-
Great point. The 1940s were a lot more cynical and hard-edged than we sometimes think. After all, these were the same people who had just lived through the Depression. I think soldiers on all sides fought for a simple reason–to survive the ordeal. But I also believe that, at the margins, knowing you were fighting for something moral might have made some difference. And we also shouldn't underplay the impact of the Capra-esque narrative on the Allied home fronts.
–RC
That does, however, raise the question (or should, to the historian) of whether ther Allied power were "moral" or merely "more moral" than their opponants.
After all, these very same Allies were, in turn,: 1) (UK)occupying native peoples around the world in the millions, 2) (US) interning citizens of Japanese descent and enforcing horrific racially discriminatory laws, 3) (USSR) enforcing a totalitarian system little better than that being fought.
Moreover, the methods used by these same Allies were not, in any sense, moral.
So I think that no thinking person can suggest that, objectively, the Allies were objectively moral societies who fought in objectively moral ways.
My father joined the US Army in WWII from Puerto Rico. It was not until his infantry regiment deployed from the Island to Panama and South America in 1944, that he experienced the officers separating out the "colored" from the "white" Puerto Ricans, that he realized the US Army was racist. The colored were sent to separate units. At the same time US films told us the Nazi's believed they were the master race. White Continental Americans themselves believed they were superior to minority soldiers. My father quickly learned about segregation, "Jim Crow" laws, and racism within our ranks. No doubt the Allies were more moral than the Axis, but the USA would take decades more to overcome its own racist thinking.