Shooting the War, BBC Four

It started ten years ago with The Second World War in Colour, continued with The First World War in Colour and Britain at War in Colour. You didn’t half get the picture. In series after absorbing series, the foreign country that is the monochrome past came closer. Colour footage flushed some pink into its cheeks. Grey flowered into khaki. Now here comes another war effort. Shooting the War tells the story of 1939-1945 from the bottom up. In part one, entitled “Men”, Tommy and Jerry laid down their weapons to wield cine cameras at the elbow of history.

While it’s never a good idea to buy entirely into a documentary’s extravagant claims for itself, the footage shot by ordinary soldiers and gathered here sheds fresh light on familiar narratives. Most of what we know of the war visually, in colour or black and white, has come down to us via news cameramen, film units and official photographers embedded, as we would now say, with the military. But when war broke out, amateur cameramen on both sides were also given leave to pursue their hobby. To anyone whose palate has been jaded by too many nights in front of the History Channel - better known as the Hitler Channel - the results were succulent indeed.

Initially it was Germany, where amateur filming was a more popular phenomenon, that yielded the more arresting footage. It helped that they had some fine sights to capture: windmills in Holland, Parisian boulevards teeming with grinning women. The invasion of France among the rank and file looked like a camping trip, with river-paddling and party-throwing and mucking about with animals. The only long faces belonged to the captured Moroccan troops of the French army. The Wehrmacht were tourists. In Poland one cameraman pointed his lens in genuine curiosity at two extravagantly bearded Jews in the street.

Meanwhile, back in Blighty, they set up the Army Film and Photographic Unit. Rather than send cameramen into battle, soldiers were equipped with cameras and given instructions to shoot on sight. The odd brigadier objected that they hadn’t been given bayonets instead, but mostly they were accepted. At first the phoney war yielded nothing for them to film but chaps in huts with crooked teeth and glasses glinting vulnerably in the autumn sun. Then came the Blitz, and cameramen on both sides went into action. One German, whose job with the Luftwaffe was to load ordnance onto planes, filmed a colleague jauntily painting cartoon sharks' jaws onto bombs.

The turning point for the war, and for the British Army’s cameramen, was El Alamein. The footage brought back was turned into Desert Victory, the war’s first feature-length documentary. In the East, meanwhile, the German invasion of the Soviet Union initially produced optimism. Then the snows came, the scenes of devastation and loss were recorded, and cameramen working their equipment felt the sharp nip of frostbite about their extremities. One scene jumped out of the screen: a family travelling by cart past a German column of vehicles, two small blond boys with floppy-eared hats staring into the invader’s lens. “At some point this has to end,” wrote cameraman Paul Kellermann to his mother from the Russian drifts of early 1943. Sure enough, he was shot by partisans before he could send another letter.

As the war turned in the Allies’ favour, British cameramen were there to witness it. Lesley Fowler in the first wave of the Normandy landings filmed a column of men wading to Utah beach from a mile out. When the wounded came back, he shot them in tightly hemmed rows on deck, little knowing that on the way home their ship would hit a mine and go down with all hands.

Elsewhere the countless bodies were recorded. A local amateur was on hand to film the inferno of Hamburg, charred corpses strewn across streets, Halloween orange flames flaring and billowing in anger. The only known footage of executions of Jews was captured by a German sailor in Latvia in August 41 - the victims leaping at gunpoint into their own communal grave, then promptly mown down.

Inevitably there came the moral void of Bergen-Belsen, the lifeless clumps of jutting ribs and jumbled limbs shot by cameramen enlisted as history’s witnesses for the prosecution. As the bulldozer went about its grim task of shovelling death, a woman with a thick head of black hair wept on the disembodied hand on a liberating soldier. But the most haunting footage was taken by Harry Oakes, who when interviewed could still recall the faces of ghostly children he filmed in close-up. They had somehow survived the camp, though not necessarily for long. From this distance it seemed his stock was so unfocussed, their dark eyes swimming blurrily in the lens, out of instinctive compassion. Episode two of Shooting the War will proceed to the impact of the conflict on children.

Watch Shooting the War on BBC iPlayer