Tunisian Victory (1944)

Directors:

Frank Capra
Hugh Stewart

Writers:

Release Date:

1 April 1944 (USA)

Genre:

Documentary | War

Plot Keywords:

WWII In Africa

Cast

Leo Genn	...	Narrator (voice)
rest of cast listed alphabetically:
Harold Alexander	...	(archive footage)
Kenneth Anderson	...	(archive footage)
Omar N. Bradley	...	(archive footage)
Alan Brooke	...	(archive footage)
Winston Churchill	...	(archive footage)
Mark W. Clark	...	(archive footage)
Alan Cunningham	...	(archive footage)
Andrew Cunningham	...	(archive footage)
François Darlan	...	(archive footage)
Charles de Gaulle	...	(archive footage)
James Doolittle	...	(archive footage)
Jacques Duchesne	...	Narrator (French version) / Récitant (voice)
Dwight D. Eisenhower	...	(archive footage)
Henri Giraud	...	(archive footage)
Albert Kesselring	...	(archive footage)
Ernest J. King	...	(archive footage)
William D. Leahy	...	(archive footage)
George C. Marshall	...	(archive footage)
Burgess Meredith	...	American soldier (voice)
Bernard Miles	...	British soldier (voice)
Bernard L. Montgomery	...	(archive footage)
Louis Mountbatten	...	(archive footage)
George S. Patton	...	(archive footage)
Philippe Pétain	...	(archive footage)
Charles Portal	...	(archive footage)
Erwin Rommel	...	(archive footage)
Franklin Delano Roosevelt	...	Himself (archive footage)
Walter Bedell Smith	...	(archive footage)
Carl Spaatz	...	(archive footage)
Arthur Tedder	...	(archive footage)

Also Known As:

An Official Record (USA) (subtitle)

Runtime:

UK:75 min

Country:

USA | UK

Language:

English

Color:

Black and White

Aspect Ratio:

1.37 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono

Certification:

UK:U | Finland:S | Sweden:15

Company:

British Service Units

Trivia:

'Huston, John' directed replacement scenes when some footage was lost.

Movie Connections:

References Toonerville Trolley (1936)

Desert Victory

Director Frank Capra's war-time documentary of the first allied-UK US & Free French-air sea and land assault on Nazi occupied territory being the Vichy French controlled areas of Nortrh Africa.

With the Nazis and their Japanese allies staging a coordinated nut cracker-like military operation in order to split the allies-US UK & USSR-in two and take over the oil rich reserves of the Middle & Near-East it was decided by the allied high command that the only way to stop it from happening is by knocking out the vaunted German Afrika Korps under Field Marshall Erwin Rommel. The first part of the operation was to stop Rommel from capturing Egypt and the Suez Canal in the ferocious and see-saw battle of El Alamein which took place some two weeks before the allied invasion.

With Rommel's battered Panzer units now in full retreat in Libya the US-UK-Free French plan is to cut him off in neighboring Tunisia and keep Rommel and his troops and armor from escaping by sea from the country's northern ports. Rommel did in fact make it out of the country but the majority of his famed Afrika Corps, some 250,000 German & Ialian troops, didn't ending up for the most part POWS; Prisoners of War.

Most of the action in the documentary takes place on the rocky slopes and hill country of Central and Southern Tunisia with the Afrika Corps fighting for its life against overwhelming allied land sea and air power. It was Rommell in not being able to get the much needed fuel that he desperately needed for his Panzers that was one of the major reason for his ultimated defeat. The one chance Rommell had to put the allied forces to flight-the battle of the Kesselrine Pass-came to a screeching halt not because of any allied counter-attacks but the fact he ran out of fuel for his tanks and planes! At the time the Afrika Corps was on the verge of both splitting and annihilating the allied forces whom it badly mauled in the battle but because of fuel shortages was forced to stop short in its tracks before it could finish the job.

With Hitler pouring tens of thousands of troops into Tunisia to reinforce Rommel's Panzer and Mechanized Divisions the Afrika Corps, in a number of skillful and dogged holding actions, was only able to hold out a bit longer but still be able to inflict well over 70,000 casualties on the attacking allied troops. But in the end the fresh and battle hardened German troops were all lost to Hitler in any future combat in Western Europe Sicily and Italy where they well could have turned the tide against the allies. By late April 1943 with the US Army finally capturing bloody Hill 609 and pouring, together with Free French & British troops, into densely populated Northern Tunisia all the avenues of escape, Tunisian port cities, were captured by the Anglo American and French forces. That all made a Dunkirk-like escape by sea virtually impossible by the hard pressed and exhausted Axis troops. This left the Afrika Korps with only two choices: death or surrender. Wisely enough they took the latter and lived to see, not die or fight, another day!