The True Glory and the Failure of Anglo-American Film Propaganda in the Second World War

Abstract

In an effort to promote an image of Allied unity on the eve of Operation Overlord, the Allied invasion of Western Europe, a Joint Anglo-American Film Commission was established with the goal of making a series of short documentaries on the liberation of the continent. Unfortunately, despite the prior planning, the plans for a series of joint films fell victim to competing ideologies about how to showcase the allied campaign. In an effort to salvage the situation the American film maker George Stevens was brought in to make a single long documentary, highlighting the campaign from D-Day to VE-Day. The resulting film, The True Glory, won an Oscar for best documentary of 1945, but in fact was the result of a failure of Allied film propaganda policy.