American vs British WW2 documentaries

Dida

YHWH
Joined
Sep 11, 2003
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Which country makes better WW2 documentaries? Which films did you enjoy?
 
I agree with WindFish. From what I remember of the World at War series it was a very mature look at the Second World War. No sappy reverence for "our" heroes versus the "evil" bad guys. Just a documentary about a world gone insane.
 
I guess, but I struggle with the modern interpretation that the Second World War started with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria- it just doesn't seem global enough an event

EDIT: Apparently, World at War covers that in Episode 6
 
I think he was referring to 1942 instead of 1939.
 
I guess, but I struggle with the modern interpretation that the Second World War started with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria- it just doesn't seem global enough an event

How does that compare with the assassination of an archduke ?
 
I'm not sure, probably the difference in timing and inevitability. It took a matter of months to tie in the assassination of Franz Ferdinand with all of the Great Powers of Europe being at war thanks to all the treaty obligations and such while it took 4 years, a trade embargo and a surprise attack to fully tie the war in Europe and the War in the Pacific into one greater conflict.

Maybe it is just my Eurocentrism, but for the huge toll of the Sino-Japanese conflict, it only covered, admittedly a large region, of Asia, where as once Russia, France and Britain got involved in World War One, the Theater of War covered Europe, Africa and Asia.
 
It seems logically untenable to begin the Second World War with the formal invasion of Manchuria. This is partially because the invasion was, in significant part, less a revolutionary step than evolutionary, extending Japanese control in the south from informal-legal-backed by bayonets to formal-legal-backed by bayonets. For another thing, the Mukden incident did not inaugurate a state of war between Japan and the Guomindang government; neither did the 28 January amphibious assault on Shanghai, or even the crisis in Rehe. That did not happen until the Japanese attack at Lugou Bridge on 7 July 1937.

To single out the invasion of Manchuria in 1931 as the outbreak of the Second World War would be like referring to the 1908-09 turmoil centered around III Corps/the "Action Army" in the Ottoman Empire as the outbreak of the First World War. It doesn't even match up with the most widely used extended chronology (1911-1923 for the First World War, 1937-1945 for the Second World War).
 
I think you are attacking a straw man here. Few people actually think WW2 started in 1931 with the invasion of Manchuria. By the Chinese account, Sino-Japanese War lasted from 1937 - 1945, starting from the Marco Polo bridge incident.

WW2 could well have had 2 separate starts, one in Asia and one in Europe. And btw, I don't think WW1 truly qualified as a "world" war. Scale of either theaters of WW2 easily dwarfed the entire WW1.
 
WW2 could well have had 2 separate starts, one in Asia and one in Europe. And btw, I don't think WW1 truly qualified as a "world" war. Scale of either theaters of WW2 easily dwarfed the entire WW1.

How are you defining a world war?
 
If I picked up anything from Hew Strachan's mini-WWI book, its that WWI was pretty global in nature.
 
World at War is the best all around documentary.

Battlefield deserves an honourable mention for going very in-depth for each battle.
 
I tend to prefer British documentaries in general because I find the voice of the narrator less grating.
 
That certainly seems like an objective and quantifiable reason to me.
 
I tend to prefer British documentaries in general because I find the voice of the narrator less grating.

That, and rampant ADHD editing seems less prevalent. Last time I tried watching an American documentary I also had to stop because I got too annoyed at the way they had to recap everything every fifteen minutes.
 
Making the distinction between US and UK documentaries doesn't seem right, now I think about it. It's more about documentaries then and now.

The World at War was part of a Golden Age of documentaries British television had in the 1970s along with Ascent of Man and Civilisation where the programmes were fascinating, but you had to pay attention because they didn't bend over backwards trying to keep the viewer entertained

While I don't know of many US documentaries of that era I do know that in much the same way Carl Sagan's Cosmos is excellent, but kind of hard going, while today's British offering of Brian Cox's Wonders of the Solar System/Universe seem very much second rate, if easier on the attention span, by comparison.
 
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