The thing that gets me is that they have this completely dreaded set of superweaponsin the prequel, things that cause 1.3 million causalties, stuff that everyone agrees was horrific.
And they are hardly ever seen again !. The show almost completely skips out, opting to go instead for a different WMD, when all major parties had access to those previous ones…
And don’t tell me they were banned before WW2 by international treaty, they were supposedly banned even before the prequel, and they still got used.
It’s like building up a superhero, making him almost ridiculously overpowered, and then along comes the next episode and no mention is made of the previous strongest powers, going in a different directon instead.
Why have the Japanese, British and American helmets all be so similar at the start of “World War II”? They needed to be more visually distinct. The audience has to know who it’s looking at.
The worst part for me was the Maginot line. Look, we criticized the freaking Empire for building a death star that had a convenient hole in it that could be used to blow up the whole thiing, and we’re supposed to believe that a great power would build an insurmountable barrier that the enemy could defeat by simply driving around it? That defies belief.
Well in defense of that episode, there was a deleted scene that showed the German army going without sleep or rest for a week on amphetamine, moving faster than anyone thought was humanly possible. But the censors cut it.
Don’t forget the other example of pathos-oriented tokenism. The guy who helps break all the German codes is a closeted gay man. Goes to all the trouble of essentially inventing modern computers and then is essentially written out after the war for his sexuality.
And of course they had to figure out how to get a beautiful starlet into the movie, but come on! We’re supposed to believe that Hedy Lamarr was some kind of communications genius? You might as well cast Denise Rogers as a scientist.
Well they kind of wrote themselves into a corner with the ‘Atomic Bomb’, in the mini-series semi-sequel “The Cold War” they had to come up with another ultimate-weapon, instead of using a little imagination they just went the Death Star route, “Hey lets make it bigger and better!”, so we end up with a Super-A-Bomb, called ‘The Hydrogen Bomb’. There aren’t enough roll-eyes smilies in the world. :rolleyes:
Though admittedly the episode ‘The Cuban Factor’ was pretty tense and watchable, the series big-bad guy backing down in the end was rather convenient and out of character though. I guess they didn’t have the budget to depict a full-on war or something.
The other Allied leaders have pretty fancifully heroic names too. Come on, Churchill, the “Church on the Hill”? Roosevelt, the “Field of Roses”?
Even more implausible is name of the leader of the invasion of France from England, Eisenhower, the “Iron Hewer.” This is especially so in view of the fact that a Norman knight named Taliaferro, which means the same thing, was a hero of the Norman Conquest when the invasion went the other way 900 years earlier. A completely implausible coincidence. Give me a break.
The Bad Guys had names that were obviously intended to be ironic: Adolf, “The Noble Wolf,” Benito, “The Blessed,” Hirohito, “Abundant Benevolence.”
Several decades ago, a fellow named Stewart Robb wrote an analysis of the names in “World War II” (in an essay called “Letter From A Higher Critic”) which made some of the points you make above.
Thanks for reminding me of the name of the story and the author. I think I read that in an anthology decades ago but couldn’t recall the name.
IIRC The point of the story was of historians arguing thousand of years in the future whether or not WWII was a historical event or mythical. One of them contended it was obviously mythical because of all the evidently made-up names.
