Educational Media Reviews Online

Gladys Arnold was a young Canadian journalist with strong pacifist views and an admiration for the discipline of fascism when she went to be the European correspondent for her newspaper in the 1930s. But by the time she visited Germany for the first time in 1937, she saw the Nazis for what they really were. And after covering the Spanish Civil War, she was no longer a pacifist. With Paris as her base, she came to love the French nation and people, but had to evacuate back to London after the French government abandoned Paris. There she was sent to interview DeGaulle due to her luck of being the only person in the Canadian press office who spoke French. Back in Ottawa, she became a leading advocate for shaping public opinion in behalf of Canada’s aid in liberating France. In 1945 she was finally able to return to Paris to cover the liberation by Allied forces.

This production includes contemporary interviews with Ms. Arnold and her acquaintances as well as newspaper columns and letters to her family from the 1930s and ’40s. Arnold obviously felt passionately about Occupied France and the necessity of defeating Nazi Germany. But that passion fails to be translated in this video with its sonorous narrator.

Eyewitness to War is one of the 5-part series, Women of Courage: Untold Stories of WWII. The other titles are Nurses on the Battlefield, Rescue from Sumatra, Showtime at the Front, and A Time for Courage. The facts of these programs are an important contribution to study of the role of women in the Second World War, but one wishes that the presentation equaled the fascination of the true stories.