The war has been documented on literally millions of feet of film, by combat photographers, by all the fighter pilots and gunners who exposed film every time they pressed their firing buttons, and to some degree by commercial studios.

"The True Glory" according to a Warner Brothers executive, should be distributed to schools all over America to impress the horrors of war upon the minds of the younger generation. The suggestion is of disputable merit, for while "The True Glory" is the definitive, comprehensive record of the invasion of Europe from D-Day to V-E Day--and should be seen by everyone as such--there is evidence that less ambitious films, documentaries on either of two other levels, are more effective as instruments toward attaining the goal sought by the Warner man.

"Memphis Belle," a slightly fictionized account of the experiences of a bomber and its crew, may be used as an example of the "boy around the corner" sort of documentary. On an even more fictionized plane, and with a perhaps greater subjective appeal, take a look at Noel Coward's "In Which We Serve" and its khaki successor, David Nivens' "The Way Ahead."

The statistics behind the production of "The True Glory" are overwhelmingly impressive: its carefully edited 82 minutes represent the pick of a huge crop of pictures. Yet the shots are often ones that everyone has seen before in news-reels and newspapers and picture magazines.

Too often, "The True Glory" is impersonal. It deals with masses of men in a gigantic military operation. In one significant way, the Carol Reed-Garson Kanin film admits and seeks to remedy its weakness: with a magnificently written documentary it lets dozens of the millions of common men soldiers of the Western Front speak for themselves--and the colored boy from Atlanta, the Brooklyn boy, the Canadian from Hamilton, the East-Ender fro London and all the rest are "the boy around the corner" in composite.

But they're still strangers, even if inclusion of their voices represents a great advance in documentary technique. In "The Way Ahead" a small group of British soldiers is introduced as civilians and carried through training into action and into the orbit of the movie audience. In this spectator-actor set-up the war hits home--the man who died is your friend and it's very different from a dozen strange bodies dropping under a fusillade of steel.

Theatre operators, Hollywood's distributors, don't like war pictures these days, and neither "The True Glory" nor "The Way Ahead" is getting the attention it deserves. They're not good box-office, but they should be required movie-going for everyone who can get no closer to war than a seat in a theatre. jgt