Episode 26 - “Design for Peace”

Summary

Victory's final installment debuted on 3 May 1953. Though Henry Salomon’s earliest series outlines had included a series wrap-up encompassing America’s Cold War and the then-current Korean Conflict, the completed EP26 never strays past 1945–46. It begins with nuclear bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, while its latter half has American troops—spared from invading the Japanese mainland—arriving in US ports to joyous dockside reunions with loved ones. EP26's scenes of liberated Allied prisoners in Japan and the horrors of Germany's concentration camps are exceptions to the episode’s overall upbeat tone, celebrating the Allied victory and America's optimistic return to peacetime.

EP26 functions as might the Exit Music for a Broadway show: one last “plug” of tuneful strains—the Rodgers themes especially—aiming to plant them firmly in the audience's memory. Particularly prominent are the two Rodgers melodies chosen for individual exploitation, MARCH and TANGO. The latter's “No Other Love” repurposing must have prompted Bennett’s vivid selling of the tune here; Victory's closing episode aired only weeks before Perry Como's recording was released and Me and Juliet opened in New York.

EP26 opens to vivid footage of the Manhattan Project's “Trinity” nuclear test: “5:30 a.m.—July 16th, 1945: the desert of New Mexico. From a single gram of matter, man releases the explosive energy of 20,000 tons of T.N.T., dawn of the atomic age.” Here, as throughout EP26, there are no SFX. Bennett chooses not an “ugly music” chord, but one more dazzling [A] than dissonant: jazz musicians would label it C^13#11. The scenes that follow are of the actual wartime bombings’ aftermath, accompanied by the woodwinds’ plaintive J-5a: “8:16 a.m.—August 6th, 1945: Hiroshima, Japan. A city dies as an age is born. Three days later: one more bomb on Nagasaki, and 24,000 more die. Two bombs, and World War II is over.”

At 2:20 the tone brightens with a Mount Fuji sunrise and Allied ships sailing into Tokyo Bay, “the goal toward which they set their course 44 months earlier—after the attack on Pearl Harbor.” Bennett uses MARCH, then VIC-HYMN at 3:05 and J-4 at 3:13, accompanying the Marines’ token, uncontested landing on mainland Japan: “There is no resistance. The empire of Japan surrenders fully, completely.” Salomon and Hanser note the planning estimates for the unnecessary “Operation Downfall” invasion: “The Allies are spared one million casualties.”