COLORING THE TROOPS

Dear Readers,

I didn't think it was possible to squeeze anymore entertainment juice out of World War Two, but the current WWII In HD series on the Discovery Channel has proved otherwise.

In this instance the said channel is living up to its name, as it has discovered new footage of the war, some taken by soldiers and individuals during the conflict that had been stored and forgotten in private collections. It's hard to believe that so many veterans had kept these films in attics and basements, thinking they were of little value. Maybe they thought there's been so many TV programs, series and re-assessments of WW2 (enough to merit it's own cable channel, at least), every moment of the conflict must have already been captured on celluloid and their contributions would be superfluous. In an age where practically every piece of junk is a 'collectible' to somebody, and nothing seems to be valueless, these newly-found artifacts are invaluable, and take us beyond the familiar and iconic images to give us a little taste of how messy and nasty this 'good war' was for the ordinary citizen who had to do all the dirty work.

During the war, a good amount of censorship was felt necessary to keep the reality of the battlefield from the public, and the most graphic material stayed under wraps - especially if it involved 'our' side. Letting people see what they might be in for if they were sent into battle was not very good for morale, obviously. But having seen the first episode of this series, I was impressed by the amount of footage of the dead and the dying that was aired, and also of field hospitals (an often forgotten ancillary of warfare), and the operations on wounded soldiers that took place within. It reminded me of a sadistic health teacher I had in grade school who showed some similar films (only to the boys) in order to 'toughen us up'. We saw reels and reels of surgery on these battlefield injuries, causing some of us to faint. I hung on, but was haunted by what I saw.

Surprisingly, a lot of the more gruesome stuff was actually filmed in color, and this in an age before digital 'colorizing' (all previous wars were in black-and-white only). So if I have any criticism of WWII In HD, its that quite a lot of the footage they used to tell the stories was obviously colorized. It's a pretty refined technique these days, but I think a lot of the people who do colorizing are techies, not artists. For instance, when there was a shot of an explosion shown, the fireball had all it's oranges and reds, but the dust-and-debris cloud remained a stubborn B&W-film grey (grey has color, too - to an artist). Also, all faces seemed to be the same tint. A minor point, but annoying all the same.

I wonder what the vets - who had put away these films and practically forgotten about them - feel about seeing their 'home' movies messed with. My guess is that, to a combat veteran of World War Two, their memories have always been in vivid, stark and unfading color, and no technology can ever mess with that - unfortunately.