Eleven - Victory's Predecessors and Successors

Summary

Victory wasn't American TV's first WWII documentary series, but it was the most successful and enduring by several measures. The pioneering effort was ABC's 1949 Crusade in Europe, an adaptation of General Eisenhower's wartime memoir published in 1948 when “Ike” was already being courted for the presidency. 20th Century-Fox bought the TV-film rights and then contracted production from newsreel house March of Time—a subsidiary of Time, Inc.

Europe's twenty-six episodes are fully in the newsreel mode from which Victory would distinctively depart. Westbrook Van Voorhis's stentorian narration is interspersed with passages from Eisenhower's book, read by a sound-alike. Compared to Victory, narration is fairly continuous, SFX plentiful, and music minimal. ABC, said to have invested half a million dollars, naturally sought a commercial sponsor. It was Time, Inc. itself, however—under the banner of its LIFE and TIME magazines—that subsidized Europe's initial May–October 1949 run. This was expected in the emerging TV industry: “No producer has yet found a profitable way to produce films for TV… . Perhaps as more stations go on the air and set circulation increases, the problem of making money out of producing films for TV will no longer exist.” Crusade did, nonetheless, benefit from a Thursday evening scheduling—what if Victory had gotten prime time in 1952?—and reviews were positive. Recognition included Peabody and Emmy awards.

ABC and March of Time touted the millions of feet of film that Europe drew upon, including German and Italian sources. Their Axis partner Japan, obviously, was not a factor. Though Salomon's Victory team would later decide that storytelling must be bound by available film, March of Time sometimes created what it needed, including use of a BBC studio “to re-create the day when Neville Chamberlain informed the Empire that war had broken out.”

A filmed series for TV was a novelty in 1949, with prospects of syndication being new territory. When Europe's first-run sponsor Time, Inc. dropped its option to underwrite a second national showing, ABC was still in debt; it charged its affiliates with finding local sponsors for 1950's second run. In the end, Europe did become modestly profitable for ABC, with syndication continuing for several years in gradually fewer and smaller markets.

Crusade in Europe's initial success prompted Time, Inc. to quickly announced a follow-up series on the Pacific war.