The World at War

Jeremy Isaacs had been inspired to look at the production of a long form documentary series about the Second World War following the BBC's broadcast of its series The Great War in 1964. However, the BBC series, which had been produced in collaboration with the Imperial War Museum, featured a mix of contemporary film footage from the period, and film recreations, which caused a souring of relations between the BBC and the Imperial War Museum.[4] As a consequence, Isaacs was determined to have his programme be as authentic as possible.

The World at War was commissioned by Thames Television in 1969. At that time, the government had halved the levy it took on television advertising revenue, with the proviso that the money the independent television companies saved had to be reinvested in programming. Thames had a pot of money available from this tax break, which Isaacs persuaded them to use on his Second World War documentary.[4] The series eventually took four years to produce at a cost of £900,000 (equivalent to £11,000,000 in 2019). At the time this was a record for a British television series. It was first shown in 1973 on ITV.

The series featured interviews with major members of the Allied and Axis campaigns, including eyewitness accounts from civilians, enlisted men, officers and politicians. Among these were Sir Max Aitken, Joseph Lawton Collins, Mark Clark, Jock Colville, Karl Dönitz, James "Jimmy" Doolittle, Lawrence Durrell, Lord Eden of Avon, Mitsuo Fuchida, Adolf Galland, Minoru Genda, W. Averell Harriman, Sir Arthur Harris, Alger Hiss, Brian Horrocks, Traudl Junge, Toshikazu Kase, Curtis LeMay, Vera Lynn, Hasso von Manteuffel, Bill Mauldin, John J. McCloy, Lord Mountbatten of Burma, J. B. Priestley, Saburo Sakai, Albert Speer, James Stewart, Charles Sweeney, Paul Tibbets, Walter Warlimont, Takeo Yoshikawa, and historian Stephen Ambrose.

In the programme The Making of "The World at War", included in the DVD set, Jeremy Isaacs explains that priority was given to interviews with surviving aides and assistants rather than recognised figures. The most difficult person to locate and persuade to be interviewed was Heinrich Himmler's adjutant Karl Wolff. During the interview he admitted to witnessing a large-scale execution in Himmler's presence. Isaacs later expressed satisfaction with the content of the series, noting that if it had been unclassified knowledge at the time of production, he would have added references to British codebreaking efforts.

In a list of the 100 Greatest British Television Programmes compiled by the British Film Institute during 2000, voted for by industry professionals, The World at War ranked 19th, the highest-placed documentary on the list.

The series has 26 episodes. Producer Jeremy Isaacs asked Noble Frankland, then director of the Imperial War Museum, to list fifteen main campaigns of the war and devoted one episode to each. The remaining eleven episodes are devoted to other matters, such as the rise of the Third Reich, home life in Britain and Germany, the experience of occupation in the Netherlands, and the Nazis' use of genocide. Episode 1 begins with a cold open describing the massacre at the French village of Oradour-sur-Glane by the Waffen SS. The same event is referenced again at the end of Episode 26, while the "Dona nobis pacem" (Latin for "Grant us peace") from the Missa Sancti Nicolai, composed by Joseph Haydn, can be heard. The series ends with Laurence Olivier saying "Remember".

The series was originally transmitted on the ITV network in the United Kingdom between 31 October 1973 and 8 May 1974, and has subsequently been shown around the world. It was first shown in the US in syndication on various stations in 1974.[5] WOR in New York aired the series in the mid-1970s, although episodes were edited both for graphic content and to include sufficient commercial breaks. PBS station WNET in New York broadcast the series unedited and in its entirety in 1982 as did WGBH in the late 1980s. The Danish channel DR1 first broadcast the series from August 1976 to February 1977 and it was repeated on DR2 in December 2006 and January 2007. The History Channel in Japan began screening the series in its entirety in April 2007. It repeated the entire series again in August 2011. The Military History Channel in the UK broadcast the series over the weekend of 14 and 15 November 2009. The Military Channel (now American Heroes Channel) in the United States aired the series in January 2010, and has shown it regularly since. BBC Two in the UK transmitted a repeat run of the series starting on 5 September 1994 at teatime. In 2011, the British channel Yesterday started a showing of the series and it has been shown continuously to this day at various times. The series was shown in full on SABC in South Africa in 1976, one of the first documentary series broadcast after the launch of the first television service in South Africa in January 1976.

The series was shown in Australia in 1979 and has been shown on various TV stations at various times since then. It has also been shown on Australia's Pay TV Provider Foxtel in the early 2000's and a number of times since.

Each episode was 52 minutes excluding commercials; as was customary for ITV documentary series at the time, it was originally screened with only one central break. The episode "Genocide (1941–1945)" was screened uninterrupted.

The series was released in various territories on VHS video as well as on 13 Laservision long-play videodiscs by Video Garant Amsterdam.

In 2001–2005, DVD box sets were released in the UK and US. In 2010, the series was digitally restored and re-released on DVD and Blu-ray. In the latter case the image is cropped from its original 1.33:1 aspect ratio down to 1.78:1, to better fit modern widescreen televisions.[6] The restored series was re-released on DVD and Blu-ray in its original aspect ratio in the United Kingdom on 31 October 2016.[7]

From 2004–2005, A&E Home Entertainment, under licence from Thames, talkbackTHAMES and FremantleMedia International released all 26 episodes of the series on Region 1 DVD, uncut, uncensored and remastered.

The original book The World at War,[8] which accompanied the series, was written by Mark Arnold-Forster in 1973. In October 2007, Ebury Press published The World at War, a new book by Richard Holmes, an oral history of the Second World War drawn from the interviews conducted for the TV series.[9] The programme's producers shot hundreds of hours of interviews, but only a fraction of that recorded material was used for the final version of the series. A selection of the rest of this material was published in this book, which included interviews with Albert Speer, Karl Wolff (Himmler's adjutant), Traudl Junge (Hitler's secretary), James Stewart (USAAF bomber pilot and Hollywood star), Anthony Eden, John Colville (Private Secretary to Winston Churchill), Averell Harriman (US Ambassador to the Soviet Union) and Arthur "Bomber" Harris (Head of RAF Bomber Command).

• All Our Yesterdays – a Granada TV series covering some of this period.
• Apocalypse: The Second World War (2009) – an RTBF documentary on the Second World War
• BBC History of World War II (1989–2005)
• Cold War (1998) CNN TV production also produced by Jeremy Isaacs
• The Great War (1964) – BBC TV production
• The Secret War (1977) – a BBC TV series on the technological advances of the Second World War
• The Unknown War (1978) – an American documentary television series, produced with Soviet cooperation after the release of The World at War, the latter of which the Soviet government felt paid insufficient attention to their part in World War II
• World War One (1964) – CBS Production

• The World at War at IMDb
• Tims, Anna (28 October 2013). "Jeremy Isaacs and David Elstein: How We Made The World at War". The Guardian.