[1] It was produced by Jeremy Isaacs,[2] narrated by Laurence Olivier and included music composed by Carl Davis.

[3] The book, The World at War, published the same year, was written by Mark Arnold-Forster to accompany the TV series.

The series featured interviews with major members of the Allied and Axis campaigns, including witness accounts from civilians, enlisted men, officers and politicians.

The interviewees included Sir Max Aitken, Joseph Lawton Collins, Mark Clark, Jock Colville, Karl Dönitz, James "Jimmy" Doolittle, Lawrence Durrell, Lord Eden of Avon, Mitsuo Fuchida, Adolf Galland, Minoru Genda, W. Averell Harriman, Sir Arthur Harris, Alger Hiss, Brian Horrocks, Traudl Junge, Toshikazu Kase, Curtis LeMay, Vera Lynn, Hasso von Manteuffel, Bill Mauldin, John J. McCloy, Lord Mountbatten of Burma, Sir Richard O'Connor, J.

B. Priestley, Saburo Sakai, Albert Speer, James Stewart, Charles Sweeney, Paul Tibbets, Walter Warlimont, Takeo Yoshikawa and historian Stephen Ambrose.

In the programme The Making of "The World at War", included in the DVD set, Isaacs explains that priority was given to interviews with surviving aides and assistants rather than recognised figures.

[7] Isaacs later expressed satisfaction with the series's content, noting that if it had not been secret, he would have added references to British codebreaking at Bletchley Park.

The same event is referenced again at the end of Episode twenty-six, accompanied by the "Dona nobis pacem" (Latin for "Grant us peace") from the Missa Sancti Nicolai, composed by Joseph Haydn.

[9] WOR in New York aired the series in the mid-1970s, although episodes were edited both for graphic content and to include sufficient commercial breaks.

On its original television broadcast in the UK the twentieth episode "Genocide (1941-1945)", which dealt with Nazi concentration camps and the Holocaust, was shown uninterrupted without a commercial break due to the sensitive nature of its content .

[citation needed] So extensive was the amount of footage both shot and meticulously collected by Isaacs and his team that much went unused in the original 26-episode series.

[15] The programme's producers shot hundreds of hours of interviews, but only a fraction of that recorded material was used for the final version of the series.