I caught the first half or so. I like history but not a "buff" in the least. I learned some things I never knew about. It's better than some of the other things on TV these days. It will have to take a backseat to tonight's game however.
I liked how it starts by following some non-discreet German soldier whose mustache got in the way of properly sealing a gas mask, and said soldier responded by cutting off much of the stache, and boom, he's Adolf Hitler. Was that actually the reason for his mustache being the way it is?
One question I have, if someone can help with the answer. How do they know that Brit soldier had Hitler,of all people, in his cross hairs? How can they be sure?
One question I have, if someone can help with the answer. How do they know that Brit soldier had Hitler,of all people, in his cross hairs? How can they be sure?
Doesn't seem to be any concrete evidence one way or the other about its validity. The alleged soldier was Henry Tandey, but it's impossible to know if it did happen, if Tandey was the guy.
And, boy, did they leave a lot of stuff out. For example, how do you cover St. Mihiel without once mentioning Billy Mitchell? Way too much whitewash in four hours for my taste, and honestly, I would have preferred to hear a lot more from H.W. Brands and a lot less from John McCain and Leon Panetta.
Reminiscent of the History Channel's "Men Who Built America" series. Probably the same production company.
A few inaccuracies, though. Patton never rode on a tank in WWI like the one portrayed on the show. It looked like an M2 variant, which wasn't developed until the 1930's. The American tank corps used French Renault tanks (also shown) at St. Mihiel and elsewhere. Also, during some scenes of the London Blitz and the Battle of Britain, the producers should have been more discriminating with their use of stock footage. The Nazis never developed a four-engine bomber (one of their more egregious military mistakes), and in some shots the airplanes show are clearly American B-17s.
Just watched the episodes from Tuesday..1 question
aside from being a psychopath, why did Hitler decide to invade the Soviet Union? Seems like any idiot could have seen that was going to be a horrible decision.
Against us, nobody knows why and he wasn't obligated to do so. He invaded Russia because he knew he could catch them off guard, they had signed the non agression pact and the Russians believed him. If he was eventually going to conquer Europe, he had to get Russia eventually, might as well do it when they least expected it. The more interesting question was why Stalin remained in denial leading up to the invasion and shortly after it. That I never learned.
unfortunately. No mention was made of the battles in Yugoslavia, or the fighting between the Greeks and the Italians, or the fighting between the Finns and Russians.
And once again, the West has gotten most of the attention during the series, while the East has gotten little save Stalingrad.
RE: Just watched the episodes from Tuesday..1 question
aside from being a psychopath, why did Hitler decide to invade the Soviet Union? Seems like any idiot could have seen that was going to be a horrible decision.
This was OK ww2 from space was much better. In that they explain we had taken out their oil plants with bomber and he needed their oil fields which is why they took that right turn
They got facts wrong they never should (e.g. all 4 Japanese carriers hit within 6 minutes at Midway when only 3 were). They show film purportedly of the Battle of Britain that consisted of the belly turret of a B17, the tail gun of a B24 and a Mustang firing it's guns. They got the lead into Stalingrad just plain wrong because it tied into their looking at key figures. I've said before I don't care for re-enactments and this did nothing to change my mind.
I'm a history buff so maybe I'm more demanding than most, but they could have done a much better job. My question is how Brands, Brinkley and Bechloss got roped into this. They must have taped their comments before they saw the actual show.
the Germans were destroying Russia and were on the doorstep of Moscow. For unknow reasons (a sociopathic Hitler?), the Germans turned their million-man Army away from Moscow and marched to Stalingrad. While it was stupid to invade Russia, Hitler might have pulled it off if he didn't make the decision to shift forces to Stalingrad.
I was surprised and glad to see how much emphasis was placed on Neville Chamberlin's role. I have long believed that the rise of the German 3d Reich was accelerated greatly by Chamberlin's policy of appeasment. Hitler was going to expand his 'Empire' well after Chamberlin turned his back on the Sudetenland (Czechoslovakia), but the capitulation expedited the invasion of Poland and precipitated the alliance between Hitler and Stalin.
There has always been a lot of emphasis on the idea of the Germans taking Moscow as being essentially the end of the Soviet Union, but I don't buy that. Now, don't get me wrong - the constant shifting of strategic goals in the East was extremely foolish and contributed to German defeat, but let's say Germany DID take Moscow. What then? The Soviets had already planned for this contingency. They had been moving heavy industry east of the Urals for some time, and had it come to the point that Moscow could no longer be defended, the government would have followed. Germany's supply lines would just get ever longer and longer in hostile territory.
In all the study I've done, the only possible path to victory in the East for the Germans would have necessitated laying aside their racial policies towards "untermensch" Slavs and making allies of Ukranians and Belorussians against Soviet oppression. Of course, the Nazis simply couldn't do that.
Can you provide a brief suggested revision re: Stalingrad.
I'd start by changing the map they had showing the German offensive with an arrow pointing straight at Stalingrad as the path for ALL the German forces. There was more than one objective for the advance to the south (e.g. oil fields) and I can't even state that (at least at the beginning) that Stalingrad was the prime objective.
On another point, their insinuation that Patton was brought back only after the Germans launched the Ardennes offensive was patently absurd.
I'm twenty minutes into the third episode, and I'm already pulling my hair out. They make the "Final Solution" out to be some kind of idea that just popped into Hitler's head one day. No mention of Kristallnacht or the Nuremburg Laws...how sloppy can you get?
And how do you cover the attack on Pearl Harbor and leave out the fact that the Japanese failed to destroy the American aircraft carriers, which were out at sea at the time? That has to be one of the biggest blunders of the whole damned war in the Pacific!
But what really burns me up is that they show MacArthur flying out of the Philippines in a freaking B-24! Anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of WWII history should know that he fled to Australia via PT Boat! Sheesh! I can't wait to see F-14s at the Battle of Midway.
the carriers at Pearl Harbor, but they were not in port. Lucky for us, unlucky for them. Yamamoto had hoped to destroy the carriers along the the battleships at Pearl.
The biggest mistake was not bombing the fuel and repair facilities.
Many successful Japanese attacks and battles fell short even though they had the advantage. At Pearl Adm Nagumo failed to send the 3rd wave to destroy the dry docks and repair facilities perhaps fearing the US Carriers would appear at any moment and catch the Japanese fleet - missed opportunity.
At Leyte Gulf, the Japanese fleet of battleships and cruisers ran from a squadron of destroyers and jeep carriers when they had the clear advantage. Had they pressed home the attack they would have destroyed the landing force left vulnerable when Holsey took off chasing the fainting force that the Japanese had sent to pull the US Fleet away from the landing area.
No mention of the Doolittle Raid? Or the Battle of the Coral Sea? Or the Japanese invasion of Singapore? No mention of Guadalcanal, or Tarawa, or Tinian, or Saipan, or Iwo Jima, or Okinawa? The invasion of Okinawa was a larger operation than D-Day, fer cryin' out loud.
Thirty seconds on the Italian campaign? Nothing about North Africa? Nothing about Kursk? D-Day to the Battle of the Bulge between commercial breaks?
And how in hell do you tell the story of WWII and leave out Generals Marshall, Eisenhower, Bradley, and Arnold? No mention of Montgomery or Zhukov? No mention of Nimitz, Halsey, or Yammamoto?
Epic fail hardly cuts it. This was a complete and total embarrassment on the part of the History Channel.
klaatu - Actually, I believe MacArthur was transported by PT boats to Mindinao and then flown to Australia. Of course, one of the many mistakes in the show was the insinuation that MacArthur had only arrived in the Philippines in July 1941. He had actually been there since 1935/6 acting as a Field Marshall in the Philippine Army. FDR had him rejoin the US Army in 1941, but only after 5-6 years in the islands. From start to finish this show has been sloppy with the facts if not downright wrong.
gfb - Probably inevitable, but a declaration of war against Germany might not have happened right away. It might have delayed the "Europe First" decision that FDR and Marshall made.
You could be right about MacArthur. My memory isn't what it once was.
You know, I could forgive the occasional screw-up, like showing M-60 tanks, or what looked to me like an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, if they didn't play so fast and loose with other things. Not only what they put in, but also what they left out.
people who talk about invading Russia as a mistake
don't realize that it was the biggest part of the Nazi's raison d'etre and all conflicts with Western Europe and America were foist upon them (in their eyes) and not necessarily wanted.
I love bringing the history to life via reenactments
Certain aspects of Nazi ideology made war in the East likely (lebensraum, Nazi racial theories, antibolshevism) but I wouldn't say war with the Soviets was their reason for being. Racialism was the ultimate core of Nazi beliefs, and it was that racialism that made the war in the East almost impossible for them to win. They turned populations that welcomed them as liberators into bitter enemies based on their racial quackery. If they had even been able to suspend their racial policies in the interest of winning the war, and turned their fight exclusively into a fight against Bolshevism, things might have turned out quite differently.
but was turned off by the overall vibe. example: Stalin, according to this show, was supposedly caught off guard by Hitler turning on him. Ummmm, yeah, NO. I've never read anything that remotely suggests this. Timing, yes. conflict, no. Stalin was preparing his own invasion of Germany when the time was right. Hitler simply beat him to the punch.
The show seemed to whitewash a lot of stuff, and it's a shame that novices would form any sort of opinion based on this presentation.
from the conflation with communism (Goebbels and co worked very hard to make Jewish and Bolshevik synonyms - probably the best if overly simple explanation of how mass numbers of people bought in) and subsequent expansionary plans. The plan for a manifest destiny of their own eastward was about territory - territory devoid of non-Germans.
in hindsight, invading Russia when they did was a mistake. but, if you look at it objectively:
France was shot. Italy on their side. Britain had no land forces. US not in the war and not ideologically aligned with Soviet Union. Germany was at top military strength. Soviet Union is likely to be a clash sooner or later, and they appeared to be at a weak juncture with the purges. you do the math.
I happen to agree that Hitler was looking east with his conquests. The west decided that after he finished going east , he was going to turn back to the west, and figured they couldn't wait for that to happen.
well, yes - if you really want to get into the weeds....
Bolshevism was supposedly a corruption of socialism perpetrated by cosmopolitan Jews. The Nazis were still the National Socialist party, claiming that National Socialism was the true socialism, though the actual belief in socialism among Nazi leaders varied widely. The more committed socialist faction, led by Gregor Strasser, was largely killed off in the '30s. It's interesting that you cite Goebbels as he was once in that faction and criticized Hitler in the '20s as being "petit bourgeois".
in hindsight, invading Russia when they did was a mistake. but, if you look at it objectively:
France was shot. Italy on their side. Britain had no land forces. US not in the war and not ideologically aligned with Soviet Union. Germany was at top military strength. Soviet Union is likely to be a clash sooner or later, and they appeared to be at a weak juncture with the purges. you do the math.
I happen to agree that Hitler was looking east with his conquests. The west decided that after he finished going east , he was going to turn back to the west, and figured they couldn't wait for that to happen.
The interesting "what if" question regarding the Russian invasion is what would have happened if Hitler had been able to launch the invasion 3 or 4 weeks earlier as originally planned. Greece and the Balkans delayed things by that amount of time.
For the reasons I described earlier. Losing Moscow probably would not have meant the fall of the Soviet Union. I supposed you can speculate about the possibility of a coup against Stalin at that point, but I don't see any reason to believe that such a coup a)would have been successful b)would have resulted in an end to the war. Even if the Soviets had wanted peace, they weren't going to get it from the Germans anyway. It was going to be a war of annihilation for one side or the other.
Still had the full mustache.
Doesn't seem to be any concrete evidence one way or the other about its validity. The alleged soldier was Henry Tandey, but it's impossible to know if it did happen, if Tandey was the guy.
A few inaccuracies, though. Patton never rode on a tank in WWI like the one portrayed on the show. It looked like an M2 variant, which wasn't developed until the 1930's. The American tank corps used French Renault tanks (also shown) at St. Mihiel and elsewhere. Also, during some scenes of the London Blitz and the Battle of Britain, the producers should have been more discriminating with their use of stock footage. The Nazis never developed a four-engine bomber (one of their more egregious military mistakes), and in some shots the airplanes show are clearly American B-17s.
And once again, the West has gotten most of the attention during the series, while the East has gotten little save Stalingrad.
This was OK ww2 from space was much better. In that they explain we had taken out their oil plants with bomber and he needed their oil fields which is why they took that right turn
I'm a history buff so maybe I'm more demanding than most, but they could have done a much better job. My question is how Brands, Brinkley and Bechloss got roped into this. They must have taped their comments before they saw the actual show.
And the message attempting to get Mexico to attack the US. Pretty interesting.
I was surprised and glad to see how much emphasis was placed on Neville Chamberlin's role. I have long believed that the rise of the German 3d Reich was accelerated greatly by Chamberlin's policy of appeasment. Hitler was going to expand his 'Empire' well after Chamberlin turned his back on the Sudetenland (Czechoslovakia), but the capitulation expedited the invasion of Poland and precipitated the alliance between Hitler and Stalin.
In all the study I've done, the only possible path to victory in the East for the Germans would have necessitated laying aside their racial policies towards "untermensch" Slavs and making allies of Ukranians and Belorussians against Soviet oppression. Of course, the Nazis simply couldn't do that.
I'd start by changing the map they had showing the German offensive with an arrow pointing straight at Stalingrad as the path for ALL the German forces. There was more than one objective for the advance to the south (e.g. oil fields) and I can't even state that (at least at the beginning) that Stalingrad was the prime objective.
On another point, their insinuation that Patton was brought back only after the Germans launched the Ardennes offensive was patently absurd.
And how do you cover the attack on Pearl Harbor and leave out the fact that the Japanese failed to destroy the American aircraft carriers, which were out at sea at the time? That has to be one of the biggest blunders of the whole damned war in the Pacific!
But what really burns me up is that they show MacArthur flying out of the Philippines in a freaking B-24! Anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of WWII history should know that he fled to Australia via PT Boat! Sheesh! I can't wait to see F-14s at the Battle of Midway.
The biggest mistake was not bombing the fuel and repair facilities.
Many successful Japanese attacks and battles fell short even though they had the advantage. At Pearl Adm Nagumo failed to send the 3rd wave to destroy the dry docks and repair facilities perhaps fearing the US Carriers would appear at any moment and catch the Japanese fleet - missed opportunity.
At Leyte Gulf, the Japanese fleet of battleships and cruisers ran from a squadron of destroyers and jeep carriers when they had the clear advantage. Had they pressed home the attack they would have destroyed the landing force left vulnerable when Holsey took off chasing the fainting force that the Japanese had sent to pull the US Fleet away from the landing area.
and supplying Allies with armament
we were pretty much already at war with Germany by Dec 1941
so if Germany doesn't declare War on US
I am sure something would have happen to make US get into Europe War
Thirty seconds on the Italian campaign? Nothing about North Africa? Nothing about Kursk? D-Day to the Battle of the Bulge between commercial breaks?
And how in hell do you tell the story of WWII and leave out Generals Marshall, Eisenhower, Bradley, and Arnold? No mention of Montgomery or Zhukov? No mention of Nimitz, Halsey, or Yammamoto?
Epic fail hardly cuts it. This was a complete and total embarrassment on the part of the History Channel.
gfb - Probably inevitable, but a declaration of war against Germany might not have happened right away. It might have delayed the "Europe First" decision that FDR and Marshall made.
You know, I could forgive the occasional screw-up, like showing M-60 tanks, or what looked to me like an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, if they didn't play so fast and loose with other things. Not only what they put in, but also what they left out.
The show seemed to whitewash a lot of stuff, and it's a shame that novices would form any sort of opinion based on this presentation.
France was shot. Italy on their side. Britain had no land forces. US not in the war and not ideologically aligned with Soviet Union. Germany was at top military strength. Soviet Union is likely to be a clash sooner or later, and they appeared to be at a weak juncture with the purges. you do the math.
I happen to agree that Hitler was looking east with his conquests. The west decided that after he finished going east , he was going to turn back to the west, and figured they couldn't wait for that to happen.
France was shot. Italy on their side. Britain had no land forces. US not in the war and not ideologically aligned with Soviet Union. Germany was at top military strength. Soviet Union is likely to be a clash sooner or later, and they appeared to be at a weak juncture with the purges. you do the math.
I happen to agree that Hitler was looking east with his conquests. The west decided that after he finished going east , he was going to turn back to the west, and figured they couldn't wait for that to happen.
The interesting "what if" question regarding the Russian invasion is what would have happened if Hitler had been able to launch the invasion 3 or 4 weeks earlier as originally planned. Greece and the Balkans delayed things by that amount of time.