One World, Big Screen: Hollywood, the Allies, and World War II

Conclusion

 Together, Hollywood and Washington projected an image of the United Nations as a family of nations . A term of endearment, the analogy normalized the otherwise unnatural alliance, personalized each of the UN’s Great Powers, and emotionalized the linkages among them. It had the added advantage of making easy sense to moviegoers, enabling filmmakers to reinterpret the UN’s constituent diplomatic partnerships as international romances or household dramas. A linguistic big tent that accommodated the Allies’ obvious differences, the comparison also implied trust and permanence, suggesting (in vain, it turned out) that the unbreakable bonds of kindred nations would remain intact after the war’s last shots had been fired. Testaments to international familiarity accumulated as victory neared, and they bespoke the extent to which the language of kinship resonated . They came from Yalta, site of the penultimate Allied summit in February 1945, whose prime, valedictory image of the war’s conquering heroes—Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin— bookended Tehran and reaffirmed the final communiqu é’s optimistic words to the effect that the same multilateralism that had won the war would secure the peace as well. FDR put a positive spin on Yalta’s intense internal “atmosphere” by likening it to that which often prevailed within “a family,” thus confirming author Basil Mathews’s observation that the Allies’ evident disagreements were to be expected among kin.1 Theycame from the Elbe River, where divisions of the U.S. Army and Red Army met in April on    their respective paths toward Berlin. It was hardly accidental that newsreel cameramen and photographers were present to record the symbolic event. Sensing a photo op, Soviet and American propagandists arranged events beforehand and directed the action, instructing their soldiersubjects to pose for the cameras to make the most of the made-for-media moment. One staged shot featured a couple of ordinary Joes, one American , the other Soviet, locked in fraternal embrace, mugging for the camera to their buddies’ amusement.The True Glory, the documentary about the Normandy landings that premiered in September, replayed that and other images of Allied brotherhood, narrated by the off-screen voices of enlisted people. A GI recalled the moment when his unit arrived at the Elbe and was warmly greeted as comrades by the “Rooskies.” “We did okay, but I’d hate to think where we’d have been without those guys,” he added. They came, as well, from the victory celebrations that erupted in Moscow , London, New York, and elsewhere following Germany’s surrender on 8 May. While revelers commemorated national triumphs, they also paid homage to the United Nations alliance, whose endurance defied expectations and made success possible. London’s celebrations were the most cosmopolitan, since so many foreign dignitaries and soldiers were stationed there. Britons sought out the some four hundred thousand U.S. servicemen and -women who remained in the United Kingdom on V-E day to bask in the glory of their shared accomplishment. The Union Jack, Stars and Stripes, and Hammer and Sickle flew alongside one another in Piccadilly Circus, where “American sailors and laughing girls formed a conga line,” wrote English novelist Mollie Panter-Downes. Amid the chaos, a jubilant American GI hugged an English matron, another moment of transatlantic kinship captured by an official photographer . Similar scenes took place around the country. Recuperating soldier Christen T. Jonassen and a friend were strolling the streets of Sherborne, Dorset, when pubgoers invited the Yanks inside for a celebratory round of drinks. After several toasts, more drinks, and choruses of British and American songs, the revelers poured into the streets, where GIs, Britons, and assorted UN service people “all marched and sang, linked tightly together.” Jonassen recalled the “infectious” feeling of losing one’s individual identity amid the festivities and becoming part of a multinational crowd: he lost “consciousness of the ‘I’ and became one with the other, and like one joyous, free being [we] went sweeping through the streets of old Sherborne.”2 The fact and fiction of globalism also sprang from the United Nations   Conference on International Organization held in San Francisco. It was there that the seed of the ad hoc UN alliance finally blossomed into a world association, the family of nations long envisioned by all manner of wartime political talk. Sponsored by the four Allied powers, the conference welcomed delegations representing forty-six other countries that subscribed to the principles embodied in the Declaration of the United...