Films
THE GREAT WAR, 1918
This is the second film I made for the PBS series, The American Experience. It’s been thirty years since I last watched it and I feared it might feel quite dated. Not so.
I was fortunate to have Eric Sevaried for a narrator. He was a war correspondent during World War II and also a longtime CBS commentator. His delivery is both precise and detached in the way of old-time newsmen. It is what I wanted. Just the facts. Only sources contemporaneous to the war are quoted. The film eschews contemporary analysis and yet it has a distinct point of view.
It became an anti-war film: What started as a straight-up narrative about American participation in “the war to end all wars” became personal. I spoke with veterans who were willing to be interviewed in 1988. They are ordinary folks, a medic, an ambulance driver, a navy recruiter, a nurse, and an army lieutenant who witnessed the innocence, suffering, and death of their comrades. They were authentic in a way that no talking head historian or actor could be. They ground us in the archive footage shot in the trenches, hospitals, and along muddy roads that required horses to pull trucks towards the front. What were they fighting for?
George Seldes, a newspaper man who was present when the armistice was signed, said to me in his interview: “We all shook hands and said ‘let’s take an oath that the rest or our lives will be devoted to telling the truth and the whole truth about what wars are really like instead of writing these glorious stories that we’d been writing up until now.’ After all, war is murder you know.”
RESOURCES (click on titles to link to text below)
MEUSE-ARGONNE: THE LAST CAMPAIGN OF WORLD WAR I
In Northern France, at 11:30 P.M. on September 25th, 1918 there erupted one of the greatest artillery barrages of the First World War. For six hours French and British guns pounded German positions along a twenty mile stretch between the Meuse River and the Argonne forest. It was the beginning of a series of offensives called “the big push” or the “knock-out blow” with which allied powers expected to win the war.
Poised for attack was an American army of more than a quarter of a million men. Out of nine front line divisions only four had seen combat. A few recruits had just arrived in France and a some had never handled a rifle. “Pershing’s Crusaders,” as they were called back home, faced German defensive positions ensconced in what one commander called ”a natural fortress beside which the Virginia Wilderness of the Civil War was a park.” Battle plans called for American troops to run a gauntlet ten miles long on the first day — a march up two parallel valleys between the Argonne Forest and the Heights of the Meuse. The valleys were killing fields for German artillery and machine guns strategically placed over four years of occupation. Fittingly the Germans had named their main defensive positions after three Wagnerian witches, Giselher, Kriemhilde, and Freya.
It took three weeks for the American army to reach its first day’s objective. British military .observers were appalled to record the doughboy’s lack of training which resulted in entire platoons being winnowed by the single sweep of a machine gun. One battalion, hopelessly disoriented in the melee, got lost in the Argonne forest, cut-off from command and supply lines for more than a week. F. Scott Fitzgerald, the American author, would later write that the Germans “walked very slowly backward a few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rugs.”
On September 29th, French premier George Clemenceau attempted to visit the American front only to find himself stalled in one of the greatest traffic jams of the war. Three dirt roads had to be used to supply a force which, including support units, had grown to more that 600,000. Virtually incessant rain combined with the failure to repair the roads adequately after the bombardment threatened to bring the American war machine to a grinding halt. The Germans took advantage of the lull to rush reinforcements to the front. As one observer put it “they slammed the door shut on the Meuse – Argonne tunnel and were leaning on it hard.”
With a war of attrition taking its heavy toll and an outbreak of influenza in the American ranks, the next two weeks were the darkest period of America’s involvement in the war. The tide turned on the October 14th when a re-organized and reconstituted army renewed the offensive, this time with crack troops and commanders in the vanguard. Combined allied offensives along the entire Western Front had exhausted German reserves and, in the following weeks, the slow bloody retreat became a rout. German soldiers began to mutiny on the line as Austria-Hungary sued for peace. American soldiers fought and died up to the very last minute of the war at 11:00 A.M. on November 11th when armistice took effect.
The Great War, 1918 tells the story of the Meuse-Argonne in four parts — it’s place on the historical stage, its planning and strategy conceived on an unprecedented scale, the initial bloody “push” against the German strongholds, and the turn of the tide leading to victory and armistice.
THE VOICES AND IMAGES IN THE GREAT WAR, 1918
The Great War, 1918 tells the story largely through the narratives of its participants. There are many famous ones. Eddie Rickenbacker, the flying ace, viewed the opening barrage from his airplane. George Patton participated as a tank brigade commander and Sergeant Alvin York (the famous conscientious objector turned war hero) single handedly killed 28 Germans, captured 132 others, and·35 machine guns. Harry Truman was there, writing letters home to his sister and Bess. He would later claim that this baptism by fire was one of the formative experiences of his life. Douglas MacArthur, then a brigade commander, was mistakenly captured for a German spy because of his famous disregard for wearing the· proper uniform. Directing the movements of half a million men in the entire campaign was the commander of the American Expeditionary Forces, General John J. Pershing. Pershing was highly controversial figure because he had held out against intense allied pressure to place American soldiers under the seasoned commanders of the French and British armies. The Meuse Argonne campaign was, in everyone’s eyes, the big test as to whether Pershing had been right to hold out until a fully autonomous American army could go into battle.·
In addition to the accounts of those destined to become famous, there survive dozens of narratives of the battle in diaries of men for whom the war provided a romantic interlude from ordinary life. These diaries give are not only a gripping account of life on the front lines — they evidence a uniquely American attitude towards the war and its meaning. The idea of waging a crusade for democracy, with “civilization hanging in the balance”, as Wilson had put it, sustained American doughboys as they flung themselves, wave after wave into the withering and relentless fire of 20th century warfare. In view of the loss of virtually an entire generation of Europeans since 1914 the American war narratives of 1918 seem tragically naive. Yet they are also a true and vivid evocation of a peculiarly American combination of traits rawboned, good natured, awkward, and defiantly optimistic — that characterized the nation, at home and at war, in the first two decades of the 20th century.
As of September 15th,1988 there are 129,884 surviving participants of the war. Through veterans organizations the producers have identified candidates for on-camera interviews in the film. Visual materials for the The Great War include motion picture footage selected from over 40,000 feet of film of the Meuse?Argonne battles shot by units of the U.S. Army Signal Corps and photographs from National Archives and The Library of Congress. Materials in European repositories, including the The Imperial-War Museum in London, have been used.
New York Times TELEVISION review
The Great War: 1918, tells how the ebullience of ill-trained young Americans marching to join the Allies in 1917, was transformed by the shock of combat. Sent off amid cheers and brass bands, Pershing’s Crusaders found themselves in a ravaged Europe where a generation of Britons, French and Germans was being decimated. The United States’ casualties, though small compared with the European nations’ battlefield losses, stunned Americans.
Archive footage of the war, shot by the U.S. Army Signal Corps, is accompanied by the accounts of men and women who served with the American Expeditionary Forces. Their memories of the courage amid carnage remain vivid enough to bring tears to viewers today. Half of the Americans sent into the climactic offensive in the Argonne in September 1918 had never been in combat. We see them advancing into an early morning fog that lifted to make them easy targets for German machine gunners. ”Thousands died here in a few hours,” the narrator says. ”In one regiment, nearly all field grade officers were killed or wounded.”
Patriotic songs of the time, including ”Over There” and ”Keep the Home Fires Burning,” add irony and melancholy to the harsh realities of mud, mustard gas and rudimentary medical care on the Western front. When Sgt. Alvin York, America’s most celebrated World War I hero, returned to the battleground, he found ”everything destroyed, torn up, killed.” He spoke for many when he wrote, ”I was mussed up inside worser than I’d ever been.”
—Walter Goodman, Ocober 31, 1989
OTHER RECOMMENDED WWI SERIES
If you are interested in a broad historical context for World War I, check out the 2018 PBS series also entitled The Great War. Running over five hours in length, it’s a well-done history lecture. A diverse range of historians lay out the complex sequence of events that led to the war and the zeitgeist of the world at the time.
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