World War II in Film

Abstract

World War II was unprecedented both in its magnitude and its horror. The massive conflict—which lasted six years, spread across thirty countries, and involved some seventy million combatants—left more dead, both civilian and military, than any other war in history. As if the brutality of the Blitz, Bastogne, Guadalcanal, the siege of Leningrad, the bombing of Dresden, the D-Day invasion, and countless other instances of death and carnage were not enough, there were Hiroshima and Nagasaki—and, of course, the unfathomable evil of the Holocaust. The nature of that evil, the stark polarization of the world between the Allies and Axis powers, the storytelling potential of men and women confronting the dangers of combat or the challenges of life on the home front, and the propagandistic capacities of the film medium all help to explain the powerful pull that World War II has exerted on filmmakers. Yet another factor is the sheer diversity of the contexts in which the war unfolded. There were the multiple theaters of war in Europe, the Pacific, and North Africa; the expansion of naval and aerial warfare in addition to land combat; new and frightening technologies of destruction culminating in the apocalyptic power of the atom bomb; widespread social changes resulting from the war; the exploits of antifascist Resistance movements; and the multiple dimensions of the Holocaust. These varied and numerous facets of the war seem almost to demand some form of cinematic representation—the result being an enormous, and still growing, number of films dealing with World War II. That the war’s beginning coincided with the maturation of the global film industry—and, ironically, with what has often been called Hollywood’s greatest year, 1939—only underscores the seemingly inevitable association of this war with its renderings on screen. Recent scholarship on World War II has shifted its emphasis from those in high command to the subaltern perspectives of the rank and file; a similar pattern has gradually emerged in film. To be sure, some earlier productions also emphasized the perspectives of common soldiers—two famous examples are The Story of GI Joe and Ballad of a Soldier. But this tendency has become more prevalent in recent years, so that once popular movies about generals (e.g., Patton and Tora, Tora, Tora) have given way to films that focus on enlistees and lower-ranking officers, such as Saving Private Ryan, Band of Brothers, Dunkirk, and The Pacific, among others. Moreover, films today increasingly depict the participation of women and racial minorities in the war (as in Pearl Harbor and Fury). Black fighting units especially have received more attention in such films as Red Tails, The Tuskegee Airmen, and Miracle at St. Anna. These and other patterns of historical continuity and change in films of World War II receive attention in the scholarly studies reviewed in this essay. And, not surprisingly, the scholarship about World War II films is immense. To keep the list of citations manageable, the focus here is primarily on feature films, with categories including broad-based overviews, studies of individual directors, and discussions of such issues as genre, gender, race, the Holocaust, and the war’s depiction in different national cinemas. These categories are intended not to be comprehensive, but rather to indicate the range of scholarly work already completed, and to suggest pathways for yet further explorations of a seemingly infinite subject.