WWII, as It Was Told, on ‘Battlefield’

T his is London.

That was how Edward R. Murrow began his famous CBS radio broadcasts from the British capital beneath furious dark skies as Germany’s raiding Luftwaffe sought to break the back of the Royal Air Force and the will of the English people in 1940, when the Nazi onslaught in Europe appeared unstoppable.

One night Murrow held his microphone to the pavement so that Americans safe at home could hear the sound of a bomb that hit. Another night he described a nearby aircraft battery:

“They’re working in their shirt-sleeves, laughing and cursing as they slam the shells into their guns. The spotters and detectors swing slowly around in their reclining carriage. The lens of the night glasses look like the eyes of an overgrown owl in the orange-blue light that belches from the muzzle of the gun. They’re working without searchlights tonight. The moon is so bright that the beam of the light is lost a few hundred feet off the ground. Someone should paint the chimney pots and gables of London as they’re silhouetted in the flashing flame of the guns, when the world seems upside down.”

Murrow’s vivid word palettes flash to mind in sharp contrast during “Battlefield,” a six-part military history documentary arriving tonight on PBS (at 8 on KPBS, Channel 15; at 9 on KCET, Channel 28). Actually, the Battle of Britain that Murrow described above occupies the second two-hour program in the World War II series, preceded by tonight’s Battle of France and followed by segments on the critical battles of Midway, Stalingrad, Normandy and Berlin.

Given the tangled moral and political topography of the present era, there’s something almost friendly about a time-distant war that so clearly defines good and evil. Carnage notwithstanding, it’s a Maginot Line you crave seeing again. Thus, no need to be a military, map or statistics maven to enjoy “Battlefield.”

But it helps.

Humanity here is almost an abstraction--the planet through a bombardier’s sight--compared to many other documentary accounts of World War II. In a way, that’s an advantage. Being of such rare vintage enables “Battlefield” to skip a lot of bitter-tasting war cliches that surface in other war documentaries. It also contains no talking heads, only actor Tim Pigott Smith’s flat, meticulous voice-over-newsreels-and-charts narration in a bullet-by-bullet, bolt-by-bolt, strategy-by-strategy dissection of war that at times is fascinating, at times dry.

Such factoids as “No throttle adjustments were needed” and “It was one of the earliest tanks to have a hydraulically designed turret” fit a discussion of armaments, for example, but are relevant to the average viewer only if he’s Mr. Goodwrench.

Nevertheless, much of “The Battle of France” is anything but irrelevant. Its subtopic-by-subtopic survey of Hitler’s blitzkrieging western offensive in 1940, following bloodless annexations of the Austrians and Czechs and swift conquering of Poland and Norway, is clear, concise and tailored to anyone at all interested in military history. No throttle adjustment needed. It defines Hitler’s successful Case Yellow plan and explains why the defensive strategies of Holland, Belgium, England and politically fractious France were doomed to failure.

All of this leads to the near-miraculous mass rescue of the defeated British Expeditionary Force and others from Dunkirk--a favorite of films about World War II--and the crushing of France. Hitler makes French leaders capitulate in the same railway car in which humbled Germany had accepted terms from victorious France at the end of World War I. For the French this time, it was humiliation added to defeat.

Next week brings the contest for air supremacy known as the Battle of Britain, Hitler’s foreplay for a planned invasion across the channel that would never take place. This aerial battering of London and other English cities would be called the Blitz, nearly four wretched months of German bombings and skies ablaze with the Luftwaffe’s Junkers, Heinkels and Messerschmitts and the RAF’s Hurricanes and Spitfires. Air losses on both sides were enormous, but the RAF ultimately won, notes Smith, “by simply continuing to exist.”

Existing on the ground was as perilous. Although beyond the design of “Battlefield,” the human story and personal suffering were exactly what Murrow, and other U.S. broadcasters who followed, reported so effectively.

“There are no words to describe the thing that is happening,” Murrow told his listeners one evening. He found the words anyway: “A row of automobiles, with stretchers racked on the roofs like skis, standing outside of bombed buildings. A man pinned under the wreckage where a broken gas main sears his arms and face . . . the courage of the people; the flash and roar of the guns rolling down the streets . . . the stench of air-raid shelters in the poor districts.”

Today we’d have television pictures of that, just as 1995 has produced unforgettable pictures of massacres in Bosnia, Oklahoma City and other hot spots. But none more searing or penetrating, right to the heart, than the words of Murrow crackling across the Atlantic nearly 55 years ago.

This was London in 1940, when the world seemed upside down.