Retrospective: Call of Duty: World at War
“You seem to relish in the slaughter.”
Apologies (again) for the long delay. Some more serious pieces are on the way. In the meantime, with age 27 rapidly approaching, I have decided to embrace my quarter-life crisis by reminiscing about an old video game. As a middle schooler in the 2000s, the video game market was saturated — no, overwhelmed — with World War II. Flight sims, strategy games, first-person shooters — nothing could compete with good, clean, Nazi-killing fun after school. But Call of Duty: World at War was one of the only mainstream video games to break the myth of the “good fight.” As a ten-year-old, I was equally enthralled and confused by the carnage on offer — blood and guts were cool, but I’d never seen it in a World War II game. We were supposed to be the good guys, and they were the bad guys, right? But seeing a Japanese soldier screaming his head off, clutching the bleeding stumps of his legs, while fellow Americans cheered and screamed obscenities — we weren’t that brutal, were we? We were the heroes — I thought.
World at War was an unsparing treatment of the Second World War. It had (for its time) an advanced system of dismemberment and death animations. Grenades, artillery, and heavy machine guns would blast limbs from bodies with geysers of blood spraying; burning corpses would char, with clothing melting into the victims’ flesh. And soldiers didn’t just die — they would bat themselves with their own arms attempting to put out the fires engulfing them, or claw at what was left of their limbs, or sputter and choke on their own blood. Whether fast or slow, death was a brutal spectacle in World at War. But gore has been in video games for as long as the graphics have been able to render them. What makes World at War different is how it contextualizes the violence; not for the spectacle, but to demonstrate the business end of a conflict between groups that really, really hate each other.
The Pacific: Brutality through Game Mechanics
Until World at War, all Call of Duty campaigns opened with a brief tutorial section; basic movement and shooting mechanics, grenades, perhaps a brief test to determine which difficulty setting the player should use. World at War dispenses with the foreplay and puts the player in medias res of a war crime, the beginning of a cycle of violence which continues unabated until the credits roll. Private Miller, the silent protagonist of the U.S. campaign, begins his story in Japanese captivity on the tiny island of Makin Atoll. “You think because you say nothing, you are strong?” The Japanese officer interrogating you scowls, face full of contempt. Your fellow prisoner, Pvt. Pyle, meets a ghastly end, having his eye put out by the Japanese officer’s lit cigarette before a Japanese soldier slits his throat. The soldier is about to repeat the process with you, before your comrade, Cpl. Roebuck, stabs him in the back. Rescue complete; mission start. Sgt. Sullivan, the squad leader, hands you your helmet and the Japanese officer’s sidearm. “Grab your rifle. We’re gonna tear this place apart.”
Japan was notorious for its abuse of prisoners during the war. The intro to World at War acts as a stand-in for several notorious cases of Japanese brutality. The Japanese Bushido code of honor, dating back to the medieval samurai, stated that warriors who willingly gave themselves up forfeited their honor and were therefore devoid of respect. Allied prisoners of war were beaten, tortured, worked, and starved to death wherever they were taken; the Bataan Death March of 1942, the construction of the Burmese railway system, and numerous labor camps in Japan and occupied territories saw the deaths of 25% of the 140,000 Western Allied POWs taken by the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy throughout the war. This is to say nothing of the tens of thousands of men who were captured and executed on the spot, per Pvt. Pyle’s in-game fate. It is this brutal treatment of prisoners — and the fact that the Japanese themselves rarely, if ever, surrendered — that fuels the Americans’ wrath and retaliation as the game progresses.
The second mission, “Little Resistance,” opens with a bait-and-switch. As Miller’s squad’s AMTRAC amphibious transport launches from the landing ship bound for the island of Peleliu, a swell of dramatic, Band of Brothers — esque orchestral score starts. F4U Corsairs fly overhead and battleship cannons boom as the Americans make their way towards the beach — only to be met with withering return fire. The AMTRAC bogs on a coral reef; the man who reports this, leaning over the side, gets shot in the head, exposing his smashed brains with a spray of blood and bone fragments. A Japanese coastal gun blows up and flips the AMTRAC, dumping Miller into an ocean slick with blood, burning oil, and the floating corpses of our fellow Marines. This unholy baptism is our introduction to Peleliu, the island of nightmares, and the U.S. campaign’s main focus.
The Pacific theater is where World at War’s mechanics shine. The Japanese use a variety of unconventional tactics, most notably the banzai charge. Enemy soldiers will announce their presence with a declaration of “Tennoheika banzai!” and charge heedlessly at the player and allies. If the charge connects, a quick-time event will occur. If the player passes the event, they stab the charger in the neck; failure results in the charger bayoneting the player, who gets to watch the enemy twist the bayonet into their chest cavity as the screen fades out. Enemies climb trees to snipe at you from above, and hide in tall grass, bushes, and tunnel networks. Dying Japanese soldiers will prime grenades with their last breaths, hoping to take one last American with them. Miller and his fellow Marines counter with grenades, automatic weapons, and — most notably — flamethrowers. The Japanese have trenches, tunnels, and pillboxes in a network that interlaces the entire island, a deadly spiderweb of booby traps, holdout positions, and artillery. The only way off the island is through it — and the only way through the defenses is burning them out. World at War spared no expense with its flamethrowers — they scorch the landscape and the flesh of enemies, with appropriately gut-wrenching animations and screaming. The Japanese fight with sneak attacks and suicidal charges; the Americans counter with overwhelming firepower.
The Eastern Front: Brutality through Narrative
Concurrent to the American campaign, the Soviet story offers a radically different gameplay and narrative experience to explore the same themes. The Soviet campaign leans more into telling than showing; the gameplay loop for the Eastern Front is standard Call Of Duty shooting gallery fare. Cover to cover, dodging grenades and machine gun fire, popping up for shots; both the Soviets and Germans make heavy use of automatic weapons, tanks, and artillery. What sets it apart from the rest of the franchise, and the genre as a whole, is the characters. Viktor Reznov (voiced by Gary Oldman in an incredible performance), our primary companion, is motivated by a hatred for Nazi Germany which eclipses all doubt and pity. We first meet him in a fountain in Stalingrad, hidden amidst the corpses of Soviet soldiers massacred by the rampaging Wehrmacht. If our player character, Pvt. Petrenko, grieves for his fallen comrades, it matters little to Reznov. He offers no comfort other than the prospect of retribution, declaring that “one day… we will take the fight to their land. To their people. To their blood.”
The first mission of the Soviet campaign, “Vendetta,” opens with an indiscriminate massacre and ends with an assassination. It centers on Reznov’s hunt for a German general, the fictional Heinrich Amsel. According to Reznov, Amsel is responsible for a staggering list of atrocities across the Eastern Front, and though Reznov has tracked him for days, his injured hand makes him incapable of sniping. After a duel with an enemy sniper, a la Enemy at the Gates, and a brief firefight in an apartment complex, Petrenko lands the kill shot on Amsel. The mission establishes Petrenko’s character brilliantly: you are given Reznov’s rifle. You go where Reznov leads you, and whoever he marks for death, you put down. Petrenko, and the player, are instruments for Reznov and the Red Army’s will, nothing more.
A brief aside: neither Pvt. Miller nor Pvt. Petrenko speak a single word during the campaign. Other soldiers talk to them, or have dialogue around them, but the player characters never speak back. At the time of World at War’s release, silent protagonists were industry standard, and while unrealistic, it lends tremendously to the atmosphere and theme of the game. The player characters’ thoughts and feelings on the carnage and tragedy surrounding them is irrelevant to both their comrades and the game’s narrative. The player cannot engage in conversation, choose mission objectives, or even cross barriers such as doors and gates by themselves; they must wait for their AI squadmates to lead the way. The only player agency in the game are the weapons in your characters’ hands. The player cannot speak or traverse the game world — the only meaningful interaction with both non-player characters and the environment is through shooting, stabbing, incinerating, and blowing up anyone that gets between you and the end credits. In the universe of World at War, Miller and Petrenko are little more than a pair of bruised, bleeding hands with guns, grenades, and knives in hand— and that’s all they have to be.
As the Soviet campaign progresses, we meet our foil to Sgt. Reznov in Pvt. Chernov. While Reznov puts Pvt. Petrenko on a pedestal, Chernov is — except for one brief moment near the end of the game — a sink for Reznov’s scorn, disdain, and mockery. He appears to be the only man in the Red Army not consumed with bloodlust, often expressing horror and shock at his comrades’ excesses. As Soviet soldiers burn Germans with Molotovs and execute those unfortunate or foolish enough to surrender, Chernov remarks to Reznov, “you seem to relish in the slaughter.” In an otherwise straight-faced war story, this could be interpreted as a fourth-wall break, questioning why you, the player, are shooting, burning, and butchering along with everyone else; are you having fun yet? Chernov serves as the only judge of the player’s morality during the game. Depending on whether or not Petrenko chooses to join Reznov and the other Soviet soldiers in massacring prisoners, Chernov will condemn you as a brute, praise you as a merciful hero, or ruminate on a man who chooses mercy or carnage on a whim. His words, however impactful to the player, have no effect on the narrative or mission structure — as the Red Army fights through the ruins of Berlin to the Reichstag, it is clear that there is only one way the story will end.
Endgame: 1945
Both campaigns start with a single mission set in 1942 (Makin for the Americans, Stalingrad for the Soviets) and then see massive jumps in time frame. The bulk of the American campaign is split between Peleliu (Sep-Nov 1944) and Okinawa (Apr-Jun 1945). The Soviet campaign jumps from September 1942, as the Wehrmacht holds Stalingrad, all the way to the Battle of Berlin, Apr-May 1945. The game also portrays events out of chronological order; the U.S. Marines’ victory in Okinawa is depicted before the Battle of Berlin, even though Berlin fell a month before the Americans took Shuri Castle in Okinawa. In any case, much of World at War’s narrative occurs late in the war, by which point the Allies’ victory was a foregone conclusion, yet the Axis fought on to the bitterest of ends.
With the exception of “Vendetta,” the Soviet campaign focuses exclusively on the Battle of Berlin. In-game, it only spans ten days, and the outcome is never in question. The Red Army is an unstoppable tide of steel, carving its way through the shattered remnants of the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS. At this point, Nazi resistance is offered out of a combination of deluded fanaticism and a very real understanding of what will happen to them should they fall into Soviet captivity. German soldiers attempt to surrender at multiple points in the Soviet campaign, but none are taken alive. Sgt. Reznov declares, “No mercy was shown at Stalingrad. No mercy will be shown here!” Faced with certain death either way, the remaining Germans make the Soviets pay for every inch of ground in blood; Pvt. Petrenko and the Red Army pay it back with interest, slaughtering the remaining German troops all the way up to the roof of the Reichstag, where Petrenko rushes to plant the Soviet flag — imitating one of the most famous photos of World War II — only to be shot by a lone SS soldier, quite possibly the last Nazi in all of Berlin. Reznov butchers the German with a machete before cutting down a swastika-adorned Blutfahne as the Soviet anthem swells in the background, and Pvt. Petrenko staggers up and plants the Red Banner of the Soviet union in its place.
The American campaign ends in Shuri Castle, Okinawa. Okinawa is the smallest and most remote of the Japanese Home Islands, and was also the bloodiest battle in the Pacific Theater. Around 12,500 Allied and 100,000 Japanese soldiers, sailors, and airmen died fighting over an island 66 miles long and 7 miles wide, along with 150,000 Okinawan civilians. The Japanese military told the civilians told that the American soldiers would murder, rape, even cannibalize them if they surrendered; the Japanese also used Okinawans, a people they viewed as inferior, as human shields for their counterattacks. The American soldiers and Marines on the island, battle-weary and paranoid, made no consideration for collateral damage, shooting and shelling indiscriminately. World at War does not depict these atrocities, or any others committed by WWII armed forces against civilians. Even for this slaughterhouse of a game, slaughtering defenseless innocents was a bridge too far — until Modern Warfare 2, of course, but that is a story for another time.
At the conclusion of the American campaign, a group of Japanese soldiers surrender to the Americans — but this is a ruse. One soldier attempts to detonate a grenade while pinning Sgt. Roebuck to the ground; either the grenade detonates and kills them both, or you kill the Japanese soldier and he drops the grenade — which then rolls over Pvt. Polonsky, killing him instead. It is impossible to save them both. After a last firefight against a desperate counterattack, U.S. Navy aircraft show up and reduce Shuri Castle to rubble around you. Whoever survived the fake surrender will collect the dog tags of the fallen and hand it to you. The music swells, but there is no triumph to be had, just one more pile of rocks secured at an inhuman cost. Neither American nor Soviet campaign is won; it is survived.
Fin: Dies Irae
“One death is a tragedy. A million is a statistic.” World at War is an overload of individual tragedies, inflicted by friend and foe alike, nonstop, in every mission. Extrapolating Miller and Petrenko’s experiences across fronts thousands of kilometers long, on multiple continents, and the picture of 60 million dead in six years becomes sickeningly clear. While World at War offers some examples of heroism and spectacle, they are mostly window dressing for tales of carnage, hatred, and terror in 1945. The game is still for sale at the now-exorbitant price of $20 on Steam, but can be found for steep discounts during holiday and summer sales; at a discount, I highly recommend it. It is a must-have for anyone with interest in World War II. It provides an interactive take on some of the worst battles of the war, and takes a much more mature approach to the setting than some of the franchise’s later offerings.
Just try not to have too much fun.
Works Cited
Call of Duty: World at War. Activision, Treyarch, 2008. PC/PS3/Xbox 360 game.
Collins, E. M. (2016, December 9). Under the enemy’s yoke: The POW experience in Japan. www.army.mil. https://www.army.mil/article/179395/under_the_enemys_yoke_the_pow_experience_in_japan
Kay, A. J., & Stahel, D. (2020, May 5). Crimes of the Wehrmacht: A re-evaluation. Journal of Perpetrator Research. https://jpr.winchesteruniversitypress.org/articles/10.21039/jpr.3.1.29#abstract
Sledge, E. B. (2010). With the old breed at Peleliu and Okinawa. Presidio Press.
Tanaka, T. (1998). Hidden horrors: Japanese War Crimes in World War II. Westview Press.
