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Rating: The War in Color is a brutal title, but it well explains what this documentary shows. Because it is in the sharpness of the images, in the accurate visual detail, all (or almost all) the expressive power of these ten terrifying episodes lies. Scenes that really make you understand what it was, even if it's the hundredth time you've heard that a million Russians died in the siege of Stalingrad, including many women. The winter, the frozen feet, and the broken shoes. You know it, but now you see it. And seeing it so well, with this clarity, it's as if you know it better. It's like you truly understand it only now.
You realize that between the declaration of war and the death of millions of people, there's a turmoil that's not just six years long, it's also convoluted, complex, rich with either trivially logistical or finely strategic issues. Political. You see how war unfolds through well-reasoned maneuvers and others that are entirely reckless, and soldiers simply fall among the various costs, like gasoline, bullets, food supplies. You see the agony and upheaval of dying en masse.
It's not a documentary that opens your eyes to the overarching themes of the conflict, it doesn't shed a different light on how such brutality was reached. For these aspects, I strongly recommend the podcasts or videos of Alessandro Barbero. Here, instead, we can touch with (horrified) hands the functioning of war, its minute and sometimes mocking, damnably concrete organization. Killing is a dirty job, tiring, exhausting. So much so that for their blitzkrieg in France, the German soldiers practically took methamphetamines to run faster, even at night. You truly hear the cacophony of cannons knowing no peace, see gigantic carts firing ruinous shells and recoiling violently. And you see the man who struggles with great care to build piles of death.
There are explanations of some passages I didn't have well in mind, but I know I will never forget. Like the American bombers in the Battle of Midway found the Japanese ships purely by luck, noticing a strange glimmer on the horizon, while they were getting lost in the indistinct ocean. Some images (perhaps mental, only narrated) renew the horror even beyond the well-known horror of the concentration camps. Because the risk is that horror becomes institutional, reabsorbed.
During the bombing of Dresden, a thousand people who found refuge in the bunker were later found liquefied the next day, a brown slime everywhere, due to the extremely high temperatures reached with the bomb frenzy on the upper floor. Large bombs that uncovered the buildings and then others, incendiary, that burned everything inside. The wood, the artwork, and the human flesh.
I suffer thinking about those human beings who started to melt because of the heat, all crammed into an air-raid shelter. I can't picture in my mind the moment those people turned into muddy water.
It's impressive the amount of recorded images, the lack of modesty in capturing floating skulls and bodies, and it's ironic that the least present are those related to the Hiroshima bombing, which America made disappear. Tragic characters are encountered, like General Paulus, who surrounded by the Russians at Stalingrad suffered Hitler's decisions to leave about 300,000 Germans to the massacre. The motto: never surrender. Rather die of hunger, of cold. In the end, about 100,000 were captured, but only 5,000 returned home.
One of Hitler's many arrogant suicides, like the Ardennes offensive, when now doomed, he sent other Germans to death in a desperate attempt to regain the port of Antwerp, exploiting a few days of bad weather when the Allied aviation could not bomb. On D-Day, he woke up at 9, two hours after the start of operations, because no one dared disturb him. Rommel was celebrating his wife's birthday. The distance of hierarchs from the cold death of millions left me with a profound sense of sadness and human failure. If the masses are so prone to serve the insane orders of a drug addict (he used cocaine and heroin, and was exhilarated), then humanity has failed. I believe that here history has essentially ended. In 1945, we stroked the flames of hell. It's a shame that many of those hierarchs were essentially pardoned in the following years because the Soviet enemy was too pressing. As if to say, the world following that catabasis is not another world; it's the same, prettified.
If the German dictator's ferocity appears beyond every measure of the possible, insensitive to the collective tragedy while lounging in his salons in the Alps, at the Eagle's Nest, or in the final bunker in Berlin where he refused every surrender, that of the Allies appears problematic but no less serious in effects. The difference in war is basically this, that on one side the Nazi leader’s word is sacred (and often suicidal), while that of democracies is debated, the result of painful and problematic choices. But in the bestial dimension of the conflict, even the choices of democracies result in inhuman outcomes such as Dresden, Hiroshima, and other absurd bombings like that of Tokyo.
The documentary in its broad dimensions (ten 50-minute episodes) says many things without a precise thread, but at least tries to maintain an objective point of view by interviewing specialists from different nationalities and scholars of specific historical events, to give details and problematic aspects to all episodes. In some cases, there are even first-person testimonies, such as in the case of D-Day or the atomic bomb.
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