Goes beyond the standard shabby propaganda
This review pertains to the 26 episode European PAL release by Fremantle.
These 26 engaging episodes (of perhaps 31 in the complete series?) focuses mainly on military intelligence and goes beyond the usual leaden re-hash of the average war documentary. They are knowledgeably written, intelligently produced, and narrated with great poise (Charlton Heston). It is not surprising (so rumour has it) that the series was withdrawn for a while (and trimmed?) out of security considerations....
Greatly contributing to the overall authority and credibility of each episode are the many rostrum inserts from acknowledged experts and authors - all nicely interlaced with excellent archival footage.
The transfer quality is top grade for std DVD, and nicely uniform over the varying archival material.
Some of the episodes could have been made more objective without the continual(sometimes not so subtle) and unnecessary demonizing of the enemy - but one...
some problems
This series is generally good, but it white washes blunders made by British and American intelligence. One example is that the German generals wanted to know if the Allies would stop the war if they killed Hitler and stopped the war from their side. This series fails to report this information and says that the Allies ignoring the advances of the generals was no loss because there was no armed resistance units in Germany. This is illogical. It was the generals that would stop the war, not armed groups fighting against a government that was continuing the war.
Another problem is that they do not give credit to assistance they got from other countries. Polish intelligence obtained an enigma machine and set their engineers and mathematicians to analyze it several years before the war. They gave the machine and the analysis results to the British. This series gives all of the code breaking credit to the British.
Yet another thing is that A. J. P. Taylor, the famous war...
Click to Editorial Reviews
No comments:
Post a Comment