The Colours of War

According to Rahul Johri,senior vice-president and general manager,India of Discovery Networks Asia-Pacific,“It will lend an immediacy to the event,which was the most wide-reaching and devastating war in world history.” The show comprises footage that has never been viewed before and will be supplemented with satellite delivered terrain-mapping and state-of-the art graphics.

It’s important that the event is imbued with a renewed sense of relevance and urgency. “When we first learn about the Second World War,we do so through textbooks,which offer a very clinical view of the event. And when we do watch footage from that era,most of it is in black and white,which in our mind is associated with ancient and outdated things,” says Johri. That is why the channel acquired footage from across the world and painstakingly restored it to viewable quality over a period of a year. “Most of us are not aware that a lot of people did actually shoot the war in colour,” he says,“of course,a lot of it was not very well-preserved and over time,lost quality. Moreover,they were shot in different formats. We spent a year in cleaning,re-colourising and restoring the footage.” Narrated by British actor Robert Powell,the episodes will be aired chronologically,beginning with the question of how the First World War — purported to be ‘the war to end all wars’ — could be followed so shortly by another,bigger conflict. Tracing Hitler and Benito Mussolini’s rise to power,the dilly-dallying of the USA and the European democracies and Japan’s growing militarism,the series will go on to show the battles in full colour,including the significant Battle of Britain,Hitler’s misguided invasion of the Soviet Union,the devastation of Dresden and the arrival of the Allied Forces in Normandy. These videos recreate,in a manner that no movie can,the brutal realities of war. “The episode,Britain at Bay,with the footage of the Battle of Britain is especially hardhitting. It’s inspiring to see the resistance put up by the British when the German Luftwaffe air-bombed Britain’s main centres,” says Johri,“that’s our continued effort — to bring these tales of heroism to younger audiences,to most of whom events like the Second World War are just stories.”