Twentieth-Century War and Conflict

A Concise Encyclopedia

Gordon Martel

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781118884652
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

TWENTIETH-CENTURY WAR AND CONFLICT

"With rich entries that highlight the political context, strategic significance, and tactical detail of each conflict, this encyclopedia is an essential reference for students of military history and strategic studies."
Theo Farrell, King's College London

Drawn from the award-winning five-volume Encyclopedia ofWar (Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2013), the single-volume Twentieth-Century War and Conflict provides an essential guide to the conflicts and concepts that shaped warfare in the twentieth-century and up to the present day. This concise reference contains a range of entries from 1, 000 to 6, 000 words long, each written by a leading international scholar.

This concise encyclopedia provides full coverage of global conflicts and themes in twentieth-century war. World Wars I and II are covered by 10 separate entries. Lesser conflicts are also incorporated in this volume, including the Russo-Japanese War, the Greco-Turkish War, the Falklands War, the Soviet War in Afghanistan, the Gulf Wars, and more. Issues such as chemical warfare, ethnic cleansing, psychological warfare, and women and war also receive substantial treatment, making this an invaluable resource for students and general readers alike.

W

War and Cinema

JAMES CHAPMAN

Cinema has been the dominant mass medium of the twentieth century and has played a vital role in shaping popular perceptions of war. Cinema has been employed both as a medium of war propaganda to mobilize popular support for particular conflicts and as a commentary on the “horrors” of war in films such as All Quiet on the Western Front (dir. Lewis Milestone, 1930) and Apocalypse Now (dir. Francis Ford Coppola, 1979). It has served both as a vehicle for recruitment to the armed services and as a means of showing the “reality” of war to those who have not experienced it at first hand. It has popularized the romantic idea of war as an adventure and has promoted the cult of heroism. But it has also examined the dehumanizing effects of war on combatants and has aided in the social and psychological rehabilitation of ex-servicemen. It has documented the genocidal conduct of “total war” and has been a key medium for exploring the historical memory of the Holocaust. And, while cinema has done much to influence attitudes toward war, the medium itself has also been shaped by war.

The Cinematograph Goes to War

Until the advent of photography no one who had not experienced war at first hand could have known what it was really like. The Crimean War (1854–1856) is the first for which photographic evidence is available, though even so it was the dispatches of William Howard Russell of The Times that had more public impact than the efforts of royal photographer Roger Fenton. There is a substantial photographic record of the American Civil War (1861–1865), where Alexander Gardner was the official photographer for the Army of the Potomac. It was only at the turn of the century, however, that visual records of war received wider dissemination due to the invention of the cinematograph in the 1890s. The Spanish–American War (1898) and the South African War (1899–1902) were the first to be covered by cinematographers and short “actualities” of war scenes were one of the first types of genre film.

Pierre Sorlin (1994: 359) calls the cinematograph “the younger sibling of photography.” In the early history of the medium the appeal of film was that it offered, or at least seemed to offer, images of the real world. In 1898, for example, the pioneer Polish cinematographer Boleslas Matuszewski declared: “The cinematograph may not give a complete history, but what it gives is incontestably and absolutely true.... One could say that animated photography has a character of authenticity, accuracy and precision that belongs to it alone” (Matuszewski 1995: 323). It is only to be expected that early filmmakers would make such claims for their work: they were first and foremost businessmen who wanted to sell their films. Yet it is now apparent that many of the early “topicals” purporting to show historical events were in fact dramatic reconstructions. The French pioneer Georges Méliès, for example, produced films of the sinking of the battleship USS Maine (1898) and the assassination of President William McKinley (1901) that were entirely reconstructed in the studio. The first known example of battlefield reconstruction passed off as the real thing was The Battle of Santiago Bay (1898). The cinematographer Alfred E. Smith had traveled to Cuba to cover the US intervention there, but when his footage proved insufficiently dramatic Smith and his partner J. Stuart Blackton restaged the battle in a water tank using model ships and smoke from their cigars.

It was during World War I that the cinematograph came of age as a medium of war reporting. Most of the belligerent nations allowed cinematographers access to the front, though initially at least they were often unwelcome. The antipathy of the War Office toward the film industry meant there was no official film of the British Army during the first 18 months of the war. It was not until late in 1915 that a Topical Committee for War Films was set up, following much lobbying from the trade, to meet the public demand for films from the front. In Germany, too, the military authorities were initially hostile toward filmmakers, and it was not until 1916 that a film and photography unit was established. No less a figure than General Ludendorff was converted to the view that “the war has demonstrated the paramount power of images and of film as a means of enlightenment and influence” (quoted in Jelavich 1999: 360). When the United States entered the war in 1917 it learned from the British and German experience: it immediately designated the US Army Signal Corps as its official film unit.

While there is an extensive film record of World War I, however, its quality is patchy. Sorlin contends that much actuality footage “is tediously repetitive, mostly parades, long lines of prisoners, or tracking-shots of the seemingly inexhaustible build-up of supplies accumulated before offensives” (1994: 360). This also seems to have been the response of audiences who saw the films: they were disappointed that there were no films with close-up shots of actual fighting (Reeves 1999: 31). This changed in 1916 with the release of The Battle of the Somme. It is difficult to exaggerate the historical importance of this film in shaping the popular image of war and in establishing the conventions of the combat documentary. The Battle of the Somme was compiled from actuality footage shot at the front by two official cameramen, Geoffrey Malins and J. B. McDowell. When the rushes were shown to the Topical Committee in London it decided they should be edited into a full-length film. The Battle of the Somme was released in London on August 21 and a general release across the country followed a week later.

The reception of The Battle of the Somme was been well documented: it evidently had an enormous impact on the British public and there are reports of hundreds of thousands of people flocking to see it (Badsey 1981; Reeves 1997). It received what effectively amounted to an official endorsement when King George V had it shown for him at Windsor. Reviews in both the national press and the trade papers were much impressed by its vivid and authentic pictures of the front. One sequence in particular was much commented upon: where a platoon of soldiers go “over the top” and two fall dead. Among those who saw the film was the author Sir Henry Rider Haggard, who recorded in his diary that it “does give a wonderful idea of the fighting.” “The most impressive to my mind,” he went on, “is that of a regiment scrambling out of a trench to charge and of the one man who slides back shot dead. There is something appalling about the instantaneous change from fierce activity to supine death” (quoted in Smither 1993: 149).

As film archivist Roger Smither has conclusively demonstrated, however, this sequence was staged for the camera behind the lines. There are numerous visual clues. The trench is too shallow for the front line and there is no barbed wire on the parapet; the troops are lightly equipped and are not wearing field packs; the position of the camera is too exposed for this to have been taken under enemy fire; and the clinching detail is that one of the “dead” soldiers who falls can be seen crossing his legs. How far does this compromise The Battle of the Somme as a historical record? Smither (1993: 150) points out that “the proportion of such film to the whole work is actually quite small” and that the vast majority of The Battle of the Somme is indeed the real thing. Perhaps the chief value of The Battle of the Somme, however, is that it shows something of the effects on combatants: many of the troops returning from the front look dazed and exhausted, and, while some of them look at the camera, there is none of the waving and cheering that characterized the newsreels marking the outbreak of war in 1914.

The success of The Battle of the Somme prompted the making of two further films in the same vein: The Battle of the Ancre and the Advance of the Tanks (1916) and The German Retreat and the Battle of Arras (1917). The Battle of the Ancre was almost as successful as its predecessor, perhaps because it contained shots of the new tanks, but by the time that The Battle of Arras was released in June 1917 it seems that the public’s appetite for war films was on the wane. At the instigation of Lord Beaverbrook, the press baron, film taken at the front was thereafter incorporated into a newsreel, War Office Official Topical Budget, which was produced twice weekly until the end of the war. By this time there were seven official cameramen in different theaters of war: four on the Western Front, one in Mesopotamia, one in Egypt, and one with the Royal Navy. Among the events that Topical Budget reported were General Allenby’s entry into Jerusalem (December 11, 1917) and the signing of the peace treaty in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles (June 28, 1919).

Cinema and the Memory of the Great War

Cultural historians such as Jay Winter have shown how, following the Armistice of 1918, a culture of commemoration and mourning emerged through which populations decimated by the war “tried to find ways to comprehend and then to transcend the catastrophes of war” (1995: 1). Cinema played an important role in this process. As early as the mid-1920s there were films commemorating the war from most of the combatant nations. These were not necessarily all anti-war films in their ideological orientation. The American films The Big Parade (dir. King Vidor, 1925) and What Price Glory? (dir. Raoul Walsh, 1926) were melodramas that did not shy away from depicting loss but at the same time suggested that the war had been necessary in order to halt the spread of German militarism. Paramount Pictures’ aviation epic Wings (dir. William Wellman, 1927) was the first film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture: with its stirring scenes of aerial combat it was the first truly spectacular war film. Early talking pictures such as Hell’s Angels (dir. Howard Hughes, 1930) and The Dawn Patrol (dir. Howard Hawks, 1930) also celebrated the figure of the aviator: a type of heroic individualism that seemed like a throwback to a more chivalrous age of warfare. A more documentary-style treatment was exemplified by a series of battle reconstructions produced by Harry Bruce Woolfe for British Instructional Films: The Battle of Jutland (1921), Ypres (1925), Mons (1926), and The Battles of the Coronel and Falkland Islands (1927). These were made with the cooperation of the War Office and Admiralty and represent an official view in so far as they “presented the War as a national achievement – an adventure in which brave young Britons won immortality” (Paris 1999: 56).

It was a cycle of films produced between 1928 and 1932, however, which did most to establish the enduring cinematic image of the war. These included films from the United States – All Quiet on the Western Front – France – Verdun (dir. Léon Poirier, 1928) – Germany – Westfront 1918 (dir. G. W. Pabst, 1930) and The Other Side (dir. Heinz Paul, 1931) – and Britain – Journey’s End (dir. James Whale, 1930) and Tell England (dir. Anthony Asquith, 1931). The internationalism of the cycle is significant in that it suggested a shared experience that crossed national boundaries. The most successful of these films critically and with the public was All Quiet on the Western Front, an American film of a novel by German author Erich Maria Remarque directed by a Russian immigrant to the United States (Lewis Milestone). When the film was shown in Britain, the British Board of Film Censors described it as a “wonderfully realistic representation [of] war with minimum national bias” (quoted in Kelly 1998: 113).

Collectively these films were responsible for establishing a visual iconography of the Western Front that persists to the present day. The recurring images are devastated landscapes with ruined buildings and dead trees, tangled fences of barbed wire and, above all, mud: one could be forgiven for thinking that World War I was fought entirely in the rain. They also demonstrate a consistent psychological response to the war. Their recurring theme is that “war is hell.” It is a catastrophic experience that leaves its combatants traumatized physically and mentally. Most of the films show how idealistic young volunteers arriving at the front find their dreams of martial glory shattered by the experience of combat. The protagonists of Journey’s End and Westfront 1918 are alcoholics: drink is a metaphor for their descent into madness. There is no hatred for the enemy in these films: Westfront 1918 ends with a French soldier in a military hospital reaching out for the hand of the dying German in the next bed saying “Moi comrade, pas enemie” (My comrade, not enemy). The overriding impression of the films is of the futility and waste of war: most end in the deaths of one or more of their protagonists.

These films need to be understood as part of a wider anti-war movement that arose a decade or so after the Armistice. This was the time when anti-war literature fl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• List of Entries
• List of Maps
• Chronological Guide to Entries
• About the Editors
• Notes on Contributors
• Editor’s Preface
• A
• B
• C
• E
• F
• G
• I
• K
• L
• M
• N
• P
• R
• S
• T
• V
• W
• Y
• Index
• End User License Agreement