Why We Fight: Prelude to War

When America entered the war, the millions being drafted did not know why they were fighting. The army treated this as a training problem and commissioned a series of films from Frank Capra. Prelude to War is the first of them, and it frames the war as an opposition between two worlds: the free world and the slave world. The narrative shows the rise of the regimes in Germany, Italy and Japan and combines them into a single threat. The film was assembled almost entirely from existing material: newsreels, enemy propaganda, animated maps. This meant beating propaganda with propaganda, and the method proved influential. Walter Huston narrates, William Hornbeck edited, Dmitri Tiomkin wrote the music. Capra won the Academy Award for the best documentary of 1942 for it. Because metal was being conserved for the war, the award was given as a plaque rather than a statuette. More than eighty-five per cent of troops saw the series, which was later released to civilian audiences. Who it's for: Anyone interested in the history of propaganda cinema, Second World War documentary, and editing used as persuasion. Who it's not for: The film is not impartial and makes no claim to be. Its passages on Japan use the racist language of the period directly.