Salute Your Shorts: Why We Fight

Salute Your Shorts is a weekly column that looks at short films, music videos, commercials or any other short form visual media that generally gets ignored.

Perhaps it's no surprise that the greatest patriotic films ever made about the United States were also made by the United States…and I’m not talking about how Michael Bay somehow convinces the army to help him make movies time and time again. During World War II, and also slightly before we actually entered the war, a number of Hollywood directors entered various branches of the military to make films supporting the war effort. The list of patriotic luminaries included such famed directors as John Ford, John Huston, William Wyler, Darryl Zanuck and, most importantly, Frank Capra.

Despite never touching a documentary before he enlisted, Capra proved to be the ablest of all the enlistees when it came to the form. After joining up, Capra went on to direct many oddly- and often hilariously-titled army shorts, such as Two Down and One to Go!, Here is Germany, The Negro Soldier and, most importantly, the seven-part series Why We Fight. And when it comes to patriotic films, at least we didn’t pick John Ford’s classic Sex Hygiene or The Autobiography of a “Jeep”—good army movies were the exception not the rule, though we do recommend checking out Sex Hygiene if you happen to be a GI interested in contracting syphilis. Turns out, it’s bad.



Why We Fight was America’s answer to Leni Riefenstahl’s more famous wartime documentary Triumph of the Will. In fact, it was directly inspired by Riefenstahl’s film, which had a profound effect on Capra. “The film was the ominous prelude to Hitler’s holocaust of hate,” he wrote in his autobiography. “Satan himself couldn’t have devised a more blood-chilling super-spectacle.” Thomas Doherty characterizes the filmic war efforts as centered on this conflict in Projections of War, writing that “Matters of tactics and policy...were reflected in a contest of creative will and personal vision—Jack Warner versus Joseph Goebbels, Frank Capra versus Leni Riefenstahl.”  

Capra set himself to the task of taking apart Riefenstahl’s work, which he admired from a craft standpoint and despised on a human one. Because of this the chief source for the Why We Fight series is, oddly enough, the German film he most loathed. This is especially true in the first few films of the series, where Capra takes Riefenstahl’s beautiful and powerful images and re-imagines them through voiceover and editing into pictures of cold, lifeless storm troopers. There’s a sort of poetic justice in his reuse, and though the series isn’t the only instance of such a re-edit for propaganda, it’s the most bold and extensive occurrence.  

Each of Why We Fight‘s seven parts is somewhere between 40 and 82 minutes. Within this time they all have a central purpose: to show the differences between what made the United States great and the Axis powers (though strangely less so Italy) terrible. This is set up in a central dialectic between the “free” and “slave” nations, a somewhat problematic point of view considering that all allies, regardless of politics, are “free.” Nonetheless, it’s a powerful message, if for nothing but its simplicity. Aside from free vs. slave, there’s religion vs. secularism, thinking vs. automation, views on children, historic traditions, our respective leaders and countless other aspects. If there was a way we could be different, according to Why We Fight, we most definitely were. Simplification, yes, but effective simplification nonetheless.  

From a contemporary point of view, the tactics used are one of the less interesting parts of the movie. Nevertheless, Why We Fight offers a fascinating view of the war from a historical point of view.  Part of this is learning about history itself. (Since I attended public schools most of what I know about WWII has been pieced together from a combination of action movies, first person shooters and The Onion’s Our Dumb Century.) While not very good at offering historical context on the many complex social and economic factors that eventually resulted in WWII, the films give an exhaustive account of each country’s every move when the war does start. There’s a wealth of information on specifics of the time during an age where the whole war tended to be glossed over. That’s without even considering the series’ role as an artifact itself, representing what our country wanted its citizens to think of its actions.  

But the films aren’t just a historical document; the series is in fact a landmark work of documentary cinema. The Why We Fight series is made up mostly of found footage. Capra and his coworkers took footage stolen from foreign countries (and some shot in the States), as mentioned above with a certain predilection for Triumph of the Will, and molded it into cohesive wholes. The difficulty of editing something like this has more or less prevented anyone from accomplishing something similar before or since, creating one of the finest works of montage ever made. Vsevolod Pudovkin, a Russian director who was one of the founders and chief theorists of montage theory, in fact sent Capra a letter of appreciation for the level of craftsmanship and artistry in what is ultimately propaganda. Capra did, unsurprisingly, destroy this letter (he didn’t trust him no Ruskies), but the fact still remains that the Why We Fight films comprise of many of the best edited movies ever made.



Other stylistic elements also brought the series above the average war documentary.  Animation in the films was done by Disney, and while this is true of a great many other propaganda films of the era, it’s particularly fluid here. Voiceover in the films took a surprisingly even-handed tone with material, despite the jingoism it was espousing.  Combined with the footage, it makes for surprisingly slick documentaries that are, gasp, sometimes even entertaining. Capra’s oversight gives the films, at least the better non-ally specific ones, a Hollywood level of pacing and spectacle. It’s kind of like watching Schindler’s List without all the Jews. More on that in a moment.

The films were controversial during their time due to using footage from old films in order to portray events the army had no access too, such as anything that occurred before moving pictures were invented. These would oftentimes be staged by Capra, and soldiers reportedly were annoyed by them, though from my point of view they weren’t actually that jarring. More obnoxious from a geeky cinephile point of view is the reuse of film footage, which is understandably necessary but doesn’t lessen the surreal nature of seeing actual war footage cutting to scenes from Alexander Nevsky. Simply put, Capra and company used any source of film they could get their hands on, staged or not, which given the state of documentary cinema at the time makes sense but is understandably disappointing.  

An issue I personally had watching the movies is their stress on the majority of populations and how this is what’s truly important. The plight of Jews and other minorities is ignored and almost completely missing from the entire series. In fact, the rhetoric of the films isn’t about defending the disenfranchised but rather about the differences between our majority and our enemies’ majority, using the same language to refer to “inferior races” as Nazi propaganda does. Many stomped on by the Nazis have their nations described as living in mud huts, and there’s a sort of implicit racism throughout the movies. Even the “slave nations” dialectic is used to refer to the long hours of normal workers, not those within concentration camps. It’s this humongous oversight that ends up the most disappointing aspect of Why We Fight, a letdown that somewhat overshadows many of its more forward-thinking aspects.

The series, despite these frustrations, is still pretty amazing and does what it does extremely well. The films carry more complexity than the Hollywood works that made Capra's name. Both for content and form, Why We Fight is a series that can make you proud to be an American. You know, sort of.