Documentaries about the battle front came under the aegis of the forces film units. In charge of the Army Film and Photographic Unit (AF PU) was David Macdonald, a director of bad-to-middling features and a 25-minute documentary, Men of the Lightship (1940), which arguably owed its artistic success to its editor Stewart McAllister. At the AF PU, Macdonald set in motion a series of feature-length compilation documentaries : Desert Victory (1943), Tunisian Victory (1944), and Burma Victory (1945). Alwyn wrote the score for Desert Victory, “co-wrote” with Dmitri Tiomkin for Tunisian Victory, and scored a similar AF PU compilation feature The True Glory for Carol Reed in 1945.

Of the three, the first was the greatest box-office success, and it still stands as a model of documentary and propagandist filmmaking. Desert Victory tells the story of the Eighth Army's advance across Libya and is edited from combat footage, stock footage, newsreels, interviews, animated graphics, and reconstructions filmed at Pinewood and in the desert. The combat material was filmed by some twenty army cameramen, of whom three were killed and two seriously injured.

It was generally released on 15 March 1943, shortly before Fires Were Started, and it similarly betrayed the “documentary” mood pervading the media of the period: journalism, photography, social commentary, and cinema. That mood was encouraged by the propaganda machine, which fostered the notion of a “people's war”. But it could not have taken hold without the willing participation of “the people”, who were flattered by their own participation in the message.

Annette Kuhn makes a distinction, well-known to filmmakers, between two types of factual films: the “observational” where the image is pre-eminent and offers itself as evidence of the “reality” of what has happened, and the “voiceover” in which the commentary dominates and the pictures serve as illustration. The second type, she rightly suggests, “tends to limit the range of readings available from the image ; it directs, in other words, the reading of the film”.

“At first sight,” she continues, “Desert Victory seems to be exemplary of this classic documentary form. Nonetheless, there are moments of the film when the fixity of the image/voice-over relationship is somewhat shifted.” A National Film Theatre programme note elucidates Kuhn's observation : “this shifting relationship is to move the spectator from being simply witness to the events on North Africa to being a participant”.