During World War Two, Britain mobilised a huge, now-forgotten, army of African soldiers to fight against the Axis powers in battlefields across Africa, Asia and the Middle East. But when peace came in 1945, the British Empire betrayed these men and subjected them to systematic discrimination.

The Forgotten Heroes of Empire delves into this shameful episode and explores how such colonial-era disregard reverberates to this day. Amazingly, the filmmakers managed to track down some of the last surviving veterans in remote parts of the continent, now aged around 100 years old. Though the passing years have whittled down their numbers, the survivors continue to endure great poverty, hardship and alienation, despite having risked their lives for the Allied war effort.

With a cast of compelling characters, including some extraordinary veterans from Kenya and Zambia, this investigation by filmmakers Jack Losh and Alessandro Pavone finally brings this dreadful injustice to light and raises disturbing questions about the UK’s attitude towards its forgotten African heroes. For the first time, damning evidence of such discrimination is unearthed: policies that based pay on skin colour, secret enforced recruitment by press gangs, and illegal regimes of beatings and public floggings.

Since its release, the film’s testimonies and revelations have prompted senior politicians and a former British Army chief to call on the government to make an official apology, to launch an inquiry and to compensate the last surviving veterans before it is too late.

Film running time: 25 minutes, followed by 1hr panel discussion.

Chair

Christina Lamb is one of Britain’s leading foreign correspondents and a bestselling author.  She has reported from most of the world’s hotspots, including numerous conflicts in Africa. She has won major awards, including five times being named Foreign Correspondent of the Year and Europe’s top war reporting prize, the Prix Bayeux. She was made an OBE by the Queen in 2013 and is an honorary fellow of University College, Oxford. She is the author of The Africa House, the story of an extraordinary, colonial-era country estate built in Northern Rhodesia, which features in the film, The Forgotten Heroes of Empire.

Speakers

Jack Losh is a journalist, photographer and filmmaker with a focus on armed conflict and humanitarian issues. He has reported across the Central African Republic, eastern Ukraine, Iraqi Kurdistan and elsewhere, with work shortlisted at the RTS Television Journalism Awards, the One World Media Awards, Reuters’ Kurt Schork Awards and Frontline Club Awards. Jack has produced documentaries for Al Jazeera and The Guardian, and is regularly published by leading UK and US outlets including The Washington Post, Newsweek, The Telegraph, Granta and The Sunday Times Magazine. In 2018, the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting awarded him a research grant to cover the civil war in CAR.

Italian-born Alessandro Pavone has been working as a freelance director of photography and producer in current affairs and documentary programming for the past fifteen years. Based in Kabul and then Dubai from 2011, Pavone has filmed conflicts and humanitarian crises in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, South Sudan and Somalia. Pavone was also part of the PBS NewsHour team to receive the 2017 Overseas Press Club citation (honourable mention) in the Edward R. Murrow Award for their “The Fight for Iraq” series. Beyond his current collaboration with PBS, Ale works regularly for CNN and BBC, and his work has appeared on Al Jazeera, VICE and The New York Times among others. In 2018 he filmed and produced for the PBS NewsHour a series of news feature stories funded by the Pulitzer Center on the migrants’ abuse and the Islamic State resurgence in Libya.

Hélène Neveu Kringelbach is an award-winning social anthropologist and a Senior Lecturer in African Studies at UCL. She gained an MSc and a DPhil in Anthropology from the University of Oxford and has carried out fieldwork in Senegal, France and the UK. With teaching interests spanning diasporas, popular culture and migration between Africa and Europe, her research has been awarded the Amaury Talbot Prize in African Anthropology, with a special citation in the De la Torre Bueno Prize, and appeared in books and journals including Africa, African Studies Review, Politique Africaine and Identities.

Rishika Yadav is a PhD student at the Department of International History, London School of Economics and Political Science. She is currently re-constructing the war experiences of Coloured, Indian, and Malay soldiers from South Africa in the Second World War. Her research aims to challenge the imperialist trajectory of war memory. She completed her undergraduation at Sri Venkateswara College, University of Delhi, and gained her Masters degree in International History from LSE where she was also awarded the Iris Forester Prize for Academic Excellence. She has previously interned at UNESCO MGIEP and the Ministry of External Affairs (Govt. of India), and has worked at the Delhi-based think tank, Centre for Civil Society, frequently contributing to their digital publication ‘Spontaneous Order’.  

Moseley’s broad and intimate history draws on newly discovered material to offer a comprehensive account both of the war and the abundance of individual stories and overlooked experiences, including those of women and African-American journalists. Reporting War captures the drama as it was lived by reporters on the front lines of history.

Ray Moseley enjoyed a long career as a foreign, diplomatic, and chief European correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, stationed in London, Washington, Berlin, Rome, Cairo, Belgrade, Moscow, and Nairobi. He lives in London.

Martin Woollacott is a former foreign correspondent, foreign editor and commentator on international affairs for the Guardian

On Tuesday 11 November, John G Morris, former picture editor for Life magazine, joined guests at the Frontline Club to share his photographs and experiences in Normandy towards the end World War II. Robert Pledge, co-founder of Contact Press Images and editor of Morris‘s book Quelque Part En France, joined his good friend to give insight into the process of collecting the photographs from 1944 and creating the book, which will hopefully be published in English soon.

Pledge introduced “John Morris, not the picture editor, not the historian . . . but John Morris the photographer”.

John G Morris (left) and Robert Pledge (right) discuss Morris’s experiences and photography in Normandy.

He described Morris as “. . . undoubtably one of the most knowledgeable people in the field. . . . We didn’t know until about a couple of years ago that John not only could speak about photography but he had been a photographer himself for a very short period of time.”

The compelling photographs chosen from the book, illustrated French citizens, troops and the effects of World War II in Normandy. Servicemen were forbidden to disclose where in France they were writing from, hence the title Quelque Part En France, or Somewhere in France.

The 168 photographs that Morris took, were “images that are so very different to those of war photographers . . . who were more concerned about the action”, said Pledge. “John saw things and registered things that most photographers did not.”

The pictures show “little everyday scenes in the French countryside and small towns”. And in his capturing of them he was “a very fine, subtle observer of war in a dramatic environment”, said Pledge.

Robert Pledge shows Quelque part en France to guests.

Despite having his photographs displayed and commended around the world, Morris can not become accustomed to being called a photographer.

He said, “When you have the privilege of working with the greatest photographers of the 20th century . . . you don’t call yourself a photographer. . . . I still don’t think I’m a photographer.”

Morris worked with photographer Robert Capa in France:

“From Capa I learnt to look for the human message. . . . Photographers have to also pay attention to words,” said Morris.

Morris affirmed that his photographs did not influence his editing, and shared why he did not continue taking photographs after that trip:

“My job was being a picture editor,” he said. “My job was either to assist photographers or boss them around, not to compete with them. . . . It was just a camera I happened to borrow, . . . it was obvious I was a tight shooter.” But, he admitted, “The pictures are better than I thought they were.”

An audience member asked about censorship in the media during World War II. Morris said, “Censorship mostly, quite frankly, . . . occurred at the level of shooting. Photographers knew what not to shoot.”

Morris said that his book is a “testament to French people, it’s a love letter to France in a sense. I am very proud of that.”

He said, “Here were the French people subjected to terrible attack . . . and despite that, we were welcomed as liberators. . . . I share the dismay of my generation . . . with the present state, the state of world affairs. I’m a peacemaker from way back.”

“The images of yours have a tremendous impact today,” Pledge said to Morris, adding to the audience, “John never believed this could happen. He never took his images seriously as photographs, he took them as notes. . . . He was not trying to produce photographs.”

“History can be observed on various levels and one of them is just the common level of human reactions to ordinary situations,” Morris said.

You can watch and listen again here:

On Tuesday 16 September, the Frontline Club hosted a preview screening of Night Will Fall, followed by an insightful Q&A with director André Singer and producer Sally Angel. The powerful film interweaves eyewitness testimony and original archive footage in order to chronicle the process of the filming, by American and British and Soviet combat cameramen, of the liberation of Nazi concentration camps in 1945.

Originally commissioned to provide lasting, undeniable evidence of the Nazis’ unspeakable crimes, the film was never completed. Seventy years on, however, the Imperial War Museum has restored the filmic testimony in its intended order and under its original title, German Concentration Camps Factual Survey. Night Will Fall also explores the political context in which the production of this film was suspended.

Angel commented on her initial interest in the project, sparked by a meeting with the Imperial War Museum’s senior curator Dr Toby Haggith, who was, at that time, beginning to digitally remaster and piece together fragments of German Concentration Camps Factual Survey:

“When he started describing the footage and the story behind it, I knew that would be something that I’d want to take further and really explore that moment of liberation and the challenges of bearing witness to atrocity.”

Singer agreed on the importance of the project, and emphasised his desire to create an “experiential” film rather than a reportage dictated by historians and critics, whose detached narrating of events he later labelled “not just superfluous, but intrusive”.

“If there’s one major thing that I feel most strongly about, it’s that the film should respect that the story was something that had to be told by the people who experienced it, not by others. . . . We ended up with the right combination of characters who . . . had the right to interpret what was happening at that time for another audience, 70 years on.”

Singer then touched on the potential re-traumatisation of the film’s central witnesses, all of whom reacted emotionally during their recounting of the events of 1945.

“The trauma that you’re creating is something that preys on your mind as a filmmaker . . . yet I feel the justification is that everybody who participated in the film overwhelmingly insisted that this was an important story to tell . . . and that their own personal angst or trauma . . . contributed to show how important the project was.”

Sally Angel and Andre Singer discuss NIGHT WILL FALL following a packed preview screening @frontlineclub pic.twitter.com/Lj9cQ8SFZK

— Emma Hewitt (@EmzoH) September 16, 2014

An audience member asked whether Singer and Angel intended to produce a film about the atrocities themselves, or about the process of filming the atrocities by Allied cameramen. Singer responded:

“It’s a genuine conundrum about the direction of the film. . . . The starting point of the film was that this was going to be very different in so far as it was going to be a film about the original film, the reconstruction of that film, the importance of that film, the extraordinary role of the cameraman.”

The filmmaker continued by revealing Night Will Fall’s evolution into a wider project:

“I personally . . . got more and more absorbed by the chaos of 1945, that political cauldron that was happening . . . before and then after the end of the war, the Palestine issue, the problems in England and Germany at that time . . . are we telling a narrow story about the film itself or are we trying to paint a broader picture?”

Another audience member commented on the intensely graphic nature of the footage included, not at all habitual in previous combat footage. Singer responded:

“Atrocity footage used out of context is pornography, it has no rational or reason to be used. But put in context and explained, it can carry the message that one needs to carry. . . . Nearly 50% of the footage we were tempted to use, we pulled out of the film because we didn’t want to overwhelm. . . . I hope that we have the balance about right.”

Angel echoed this sentiment, and commented on the radical difference in the extremity of this footage in comparison with previous combat images:

“The cameramen were very aware that they were gathering evidence . . . and part of their filming close-ups was about their anger as well, . . . about making sure that the world knew what was going on.”

Singer closed the discussion with an evaluation of the educational and cautionary elements of the project, recalling the words of Richard Crossman, the future cabinet minister who pinned the emotive script for the original documentary:

“‘Unless the world learns the lesson these pictures teach, night will fall. But, by God’s grace, we who live will learn.’ . . . We see now in everything we’ve seen subsequent to World War II, in 10 or 15 different cases, that of course we haven’t learnt. The tragedy of the film lies in those words.”

Visit the BFI website to find out more information on Night Will Fall and upcoming screenings.

In 1945, a team of top filmmakers came together to make a documentary about the horrific findings in the concentration camps. This film would provide lasting, undeniable evidence of the Nazis’ unspeakable crimes. Led by Sidney Bernstein, founder of Granada TV, the making of the film also involved editor Stewart McAllister, writer and future cabinet minister Richard Crossman, and, as treatment adviser, Alfred Hitchcock. Despite initial support from the British and US governments, the film was never finished. Today, 70 years on, it has been restored and completed by Imperial War Museums.

Using original archive footage and eyewitness testimonies, Night Will Fall tells the extraordinary story of the filming of the camps by British, American and Soviet cameramen. Acclaimed filmmaker André Singer chronicles the untold story of this film’s history and the fate of Bernstein’s project.

Directed by André Singer
Duration: 75′
Year: 2014

Night Will Fall opens in cinemas on 19 September

Free societies crumbled in the decade after World War II, when Stalin took much of Eastern and Central Europe, and in a single-minded fashion, dismantled the existing institutions to build totalitarianism.

This period provides the subject for Pulitzer Prize-winning author Anne Applebaum’s latest book Iron Curtain, which she discussed with journalists and columnist for The Times, Oliver Kamm before a sold-out audience at the Frontline Club on Monday 21 January.

“Why did anybody go along with totalitarianism?” she wondered before starting the book.

“Describe the scene for us,” Kamm began.

“It’s hard,” Applebaum answered. After the war, “the level of physical destruction…you had absolutely flat cities…totally destroyed transportation systems…economies that didn’t function – at all.”

“One of my most interesting interviews…was with a Polish writer… He was a Stalinist [at first], and he described that to me… Everything his parents had told him, and everything his schools had taught him, turned out to be wrong… The army failed. The government failed society collapsed… And that caused a kind of break in his mentality… he said…’you know, maybe the opposite is true. Maybe the communists are right’.”

Applebaum described what followed:

“You had no good choices. You couldn’t just decide to be a freedom fighter and stand up for democracy. I mean, you could, then:  A. You would be arrested. B. Your wife would be arrested. C. Your child would get kicked out of college. D. Your mother would be thrown out of the hospital. Because the State had control over so many aspects of society, people had really very bad and hard decisions to make.”

But not even Stalin, totalitarianism’s maestro, couldn’t pull it off.

“The idea is that everyone will become convinced. They will be re-educated…and there will be no opposition… But somehow, it never works…[Even] at the very height of Stalinism in 1951 or ’52, they never actually made it.”

Yet for four decades, the Soviet bloc lived, and its unraveling still boggles Applebaum.

“It all seems so implausible to me. I mean: how did it happen? How can you explain it? Why did Gorbachev do what he did? Why did he just give up that enormous empire? Nobody was making him do it… Really, it could have gone on a lot longer.”

In much subtler shades, it has – under Vladimir Putin.

“He does care a lot, pretty inexplicably, in fact, about Pussy Riot,” Applebaum said. “There is a direct line from Putin to [Yuri] Andropov,” Soviet Ambassador to Budapest during Hungary’s rebellion 1956, and head of the KGB in the early 1980s.

“Putin came of age in Andropov’s KGB… He remembers ’89. He was taught by Andropov, who remembers ’56… The kind of treatment that dissidents or artists got in the Soviet Union in the first half of the ‘80s when Andropov was in power was almost as severe as in Stalin’s time… What was the conclusion? … all of these little groups who you thought weren’t important…you can let them go, [but] it can all unravel, and you can have an armed rebellion.”

Watch the full discussion here: