Sunday 29 November 2015


The Century of Warfare: Shooting the enemy

When wars began to be filmed, conflict's perception changed, as chronicled in 'Century of Warfare', free with the Telegraph from tomorrow.

vSeeing action: protected by a Bren gunner, a sergeant of the Army Film Photographic Unit records a British infantry attack in North Africa in 1942
Seeing action: protected by a Bren gunner, a sergeant of the Army Film Photographic Unit records a British infantry attack in North Africa in 1942  Photo: 2004 Topfoto

I've often wondered whether, had there been television cameras recording the carnage on the Western front during the First World War, the peoples of Europe would have allowed their governments to persist with the slaughter that was ultimately to result in nine million deaths.

War was not the only option available as the fierce rivalry and mutual suspicion that affected relations between the major European powers brought them to the precipice of conflict. The desperate diplomatic effort that followed the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, nearly succeeded in avoiding bloodshed.

Had the ordinary citizens of Britain, France and Germany – not to mention Russia, Turkey and all the other powers that were drawn into the conflict – been able to witness the awful reality of trench warfare on their television screens, the pressure on the politicians to return to the negotiating table would, I believe, have been overpowering.

You have only to look today at how squeamish the Western democracies have become about the prosecution of modern conflict to understand the power of the camera lens to alter public perceptions radically. Even when faced with rogue dictators such as Saddam Hussein, or the modern menace of Islamist-inspired terrorism, all it takes is one stray bomb to kill a number of innocent civilians for the public clamour to commence for the hostilities to cease.

We saw this during the Kosovo conflict during the 1990s, when the headquarters of Serbia's state television was accidentally bombed by Nato planes, while the current Nato mission in Afghanistan has been bitterly criticised for the high number of Afghan civilians killed during operations.

Indeed, the most compelling theme underscoring The Century of Warfare, the set of seven DVDs that are being issued free to Telegraph readers from tomorrow, is how, during the course of the 20th century, there was a dramatic shift towards civilians, rather than soldiers, being the primary victims of conflict.

During the First World War the vast majority of the casualties were military personnel fighting on the front line. But little more than three decades later, when mainland Europe was subjected to yet another explosion of state-on-state barbarity, it was innocent civilians, rather than the combatants, who suffered most. Of the estimated 55 million people who died during the Second World War, two thirds were civilians.

The emergence of air power as a dominant force on the battlefield was a key factor in this dramatic shift of power, one that helped to give the 20th century the unwelcome distinction of being the most violent in the history of the planet. At the start of the First World War, aircraft were mainly used for reconnaissance missions. But the introduction by the Germans of the Zeppelin airship to bomb civilian targets in France and Britain changed at a stroke the nature of the conflict.

From this point, the civilian population was regarded as a legitimate target for military operations. By the 1930s, the Nazis were able to provide an awesome demonstration of their powers of aerial destruction during the Spanish civil war, with their bombing raids on the Basque region in support of General Franco's Nationalists; these provided the inspiration for Pablo Picasso's painting Guernica, one of the most compelling images ever produced of the destructive impact of modern conflict.

But while artists, writers and poets have been inspired to produce a succession of masterpieces chronicling the horrors of war, it is only relatively recently that the medium of film has broken through the public consciousness and achieved a similar effect. This is somewhat surprising given that, as The Century of War series graphically reveals, cameras have been recording military conflict since the early part of the 20th century. The collection includes, for example, rare footage from the Russo-Japanese war of 1905, which resulted in Japan's emergence as a major military power in the region.

Yet it was not until Thames Television broadcast its ground-breaking World at War series in the autumn of 1973, with Laurence Olivier's peerless narration and its dramatic score composed by Carl Davis, that British television viewers were confronted with documentary film evidence of the devastation wreaked by modern warfare.

Part of the explanation for this lies in the fact that, until well into the 20th century, most of the film material recorded in the world's main battle zones was strictly controlled for propaganda purposes. The fascists were particularly adept at exploiting the medium to further their ideological goals. Leni Riefenstahl's 1934 Triumph of the Will, her film of the Nuremberg congress of the Nazi party, remains a masterpiece of the genre.

By contrast, the British public relied on grainy Pathe newsreels for their information which, while hardly propaganda on the scale demanded by Joseph Goebbels, nevertheless provided a sympathetic account of the British military, whether it was fighting off the Luftwaffe at the height of the Blitz, or beating the retreat from former colonies.

It was the same with the film industry. For at least 20 years following the end of the Second World War, films about the conflict generally portrayed the British and the Americans in a heroic light. Films such as The Bridge on the River Kwai, The Guns of Navarone and The Longest Day concentrated on the fortitude and bravery of the Allies when confronted with a ruthless and brutal enemy.

But the mould was broken with the more harrowing approach taken in the late 1970s by American film-makers tackling the deeply troubling issue of America's involvement in the Vietnam War. Both The Deer Hunter in 1978 and Apocalypse Now, which appeared the following year, explored the psychological traumas that are suffered by all participants in military conflict, be they friend or foe. The trend continues to this day in films such as The Hurt Locker, about America's involvement in the recent Iraq conflict.

These days, when CNN and the other 24-hour news channels can beam live coverage of a conflict as it unfolds, no one is left in any doubt that war is a brutal and repugnant aspect of the human condition. I remember well, when I was covering the first Gulf War for this newspaper in 1991, the impact a devastating American attack on a retreating Iraqi convoy had on world opinion. The moment images of dead Iraqi soldiers hanging from the smouldering wreckage of their vehicles were broadcast, there was an international outcry for coalition forces to end hostilities.

Had the same technology been available in July 1916, it is hard to believe that the British public would have allowed the Battle of the Somme to rage for another five months, with the further loss of hundreds of thousands of lives.

The first of seven free DVDs that make up 'The Century of Warfare' collection will be inside tomorrow's Daily Telegraph

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