Westbrook Van Voorhis

Louis De Rochemont

Roy E. Larsen

Robert L. Richards

Documentary

Africa, Prelude to Victory

CinemaSerf

Now I’d hate to be pedantic, but during this entire piece of wartime propaganda, the word “British” isn’t used once. Despite the fact that they had been fighting Rommel’s formidable Afrika Korps for months and forced him, disheveled, from the crucial Suez Canal, this rather jingoistically American feature completely ignores those efforts. Instead it focuses on some grandstanding of American might against the treacherous and duplicitous Vichy forces whilst deriding the “doddery old Petain” or local chieftains in Algeria and Tunisia whom it clearly suggests are only in it for themselves. How dare these beys conclude that since they didn’t actually invite anyone to invade their shores in the first place, they might as well live with the ones they are currently saddled with and avoid even more bloodshed. The logistics and planning come from Washington so don’t go looking for Montgomery, indeed don’t go looking for any signs of the grimness of that theatre of desert warfare at all because there isn’t any. This is all about the espionage and scheming, about diplomats and generals in air-conditioned offices at tables with maps. It’s frequent reference to a “United Nations” might have made sense were it not for equally frequent references to the “United States”. Either they were all united or they weren’t? The Italians are portrayed as little better than a collection of hapless clowns ripe for the picking - and that does no justice to their fortitude nor to that of those about to invade Sicily and beyond. The archive is all fairly standard newsreel stuff that is as likely to feature in a North African travelogue as a documentary about conflict, and I’m afraid I found this simplistic and disrespectful to those who’d been fighting for their freedom for years in this part of the world before Uncle Sam decided to get involved.