The documentary “The Unkown War” which came in 1978 covers the entire Soviet participation in WW2. It is available on YouTube. Narrated by Burt Lancaster.
The footage used in the documentary is very valuable, i don’t think the footage was seen by anybody in the west before 1978.
I remember when it first came out, my dad was glued to the TV for the entire series.
Of the the Soviet government said the series must be sympathetic to the Soviet cause in the war, but I don’t think it’s overly biased.
Yes it’s a good partner to The World at War, which tries (and most historians think succeeds) at describing events from all sides in an unbiased way. However, TWAW struggled a little to get enough interviews with Russians, and that was partly why The unknown war was commissioned.
Emphasis is not inaccuracy.
I guess I am, to make a further point, a little confused as to why pop culture is required to be balanced. There is nothing wrong with Americans telling American stories, British telling British stories, and Russians telling Russian stories. I caught a clip[ of a Taiwanese movie awhile back showing Republic of China soldiers as heroes in WWII. Well, of course, that’s as it should be.
It strikes me as just being normal that Seven Spielberg, and American, would make a WWII movie about Americans in Normandy, and that Christopher Nolan, who is English, wopuld make a movie about the British escaping from Dunkirk, and that Wolfgang Peterson, who is German, would make a movie about a German U-boat crew. Those are the stories that are a part of their national heritage and history. As a Canadian, I am disappointed our country has never produced a truly good movie about the Canadian experience in WWII. It is our job to tell those stories.
What do you think they talk about on Russian media?
In addition, there was more reporting coming back to the USA from the Pacific Theater and Western front because that’s where Americans were. Don’t be provincial.
Leningrad and Stalingrad were completely different towns, now called Petrograd and Volgograd. The latter, where the major battle took place, is further south and east (where I learned there is a single Russian word to describe the period in springtime thaw when roads are impassible). The former is a Baltic seaport that has a very different place in the narrative.
I think you mean Saint Petersburg, not Petrograd.
Actually its pretty common, outside of military history circles, to use the term “the bunker” as a metaphor to compare Hitler’s bunker during the Battle of Berlin for political situations where someone has become isolated, besieged by perceived hostile forces, and is deluded and surrounded by sycophants.
Stalingrad is also occasionally referenced, though much less so.
And if CNN, or whoever, are talking about WW2 specifically Stalingrad is absolutely going to be discussed. In any non-expert discussion of WW2 Stalingrad is right up there with Pearl Harbor, and D-Day in the “greatest hits of WW2” reel (in the US at least, in the UK El Alamein, Dunkirk, and the Blitz would also be in there). I’d agree that outside Stalingrad (and Battle for Berlin) none of the other Eastern Front battles get a look in, though.
I just got done reading Poul Anderson’s novel The Boat of a Million Years, in which one chapter (“Steel”) is about the Battle of Stalingrad just before its turning point, from the gritty point of view of a female Russian soldier running a solo covert mission against the Nazis and incidentally rescuing another injured Russian soldier. Its street-level descriptions of Stalingrad topography like Mamaev Hill and various gorges sent me to Wikipedia and Google Maps’ terrain view to learn more.
Also, Al Stewart’s song “Roads to Moscow,” which I linked above in post 33, is practically a seminar on the Soviet front in WWII, which Stewart prepared for by studying a whole shelf of history books. I think the Soviet war experience has a firm toehold in Anglo/American pop culture. Especially when put into a song, which makes learning easier. Avalon Hill had a Stalingrad game I played once.
I’m reminded of a cold-war era joke, in which an elderly Russian woman is asked a series of questions, in one version by Gorbachev:
St. Petersburg
Petrograd
Leningrad
St. Petersburg
Which is in some cases due the Soviets long having not talked about them. For example the failed Soviet offensive ‘Operation Mars’ against the German Rhyzev salient during the time of the Stalingrad battle, but far to the north, was buried by the Soviets, though like any major EF battle huge by any other standard.
The 1978 Soviet documentary was mentioned. Look at the footage, but don’t pay a lot of attention to Lancaster’s narration. IIRC it includes the contemporary Soviet claim the Katyn Massacre against the Polish officer corps was committed by the Nazis, which the post-Soviet Russians admitted was a lie, it was the Soviets.
Basically though this thread is bizarre to the extent it sets out an expectation that eg. pop culture in China is going to emphasize the American experience in WWII. And any other such mismatch is about as ridiculous. And the idea American pop culture, as disproportionate in global influence as it arguably is, has some special obligation to tell the whole world’s story is pretty much as ridiculous.
And it even extends to serious historians. Naturally ones from country X tend to interested more in episodes involving country X. Not exclusively, and they should not include any nationalistic bias or else be bad historians. David Glantz (American historian specializing in the GPW, if you can read him, about as dry as it gets) was mentioned, he’s an exception. Bernard Baeza, from France, is an excellent historian of the Japanese air arms and their operations against the Allies in the Pacific War. But more often than not people don’t get passionately interested, enough to write books, in parts of WWII that have nothing to do with their countries. And Russian historians are surely more inward looking about WWII than Western. There is no Russian David Glantz.
The Cold War played a big role in downplaying and misrepresenting Soviet participation in WW2. The end of WW2 was already an uneasy alliance that pretty much immediately turned into the Cold War. It wasn’t too long after that when the Soviets represented an existential threat to the US, which Nazi Germany never did.
It was a time when we were paranoid about secret Soviet infiltrators every which way. About Soviet propoganda and ideology appealing to the whole world, including people here. And so very little would be said that put the Soviets in a positive light. It might even be considered, by the paranoid standards of the time, seditious.
And hence we were happy to downplay Soviet involvement and especially Soviet battle skill. Myths from that era are still strong to this day, that the Soviets were poor fighters, that they only defeated the German super soldiers through massive numbers - the popular belief in most of the West is a Soviet Union that just threw cannon fodder over and over again against Germans who were superior in every way but were just overcome eventually by the barbarian hordes.
That narrative isn’t entirely made up - the Red Army of 1941 was certainly massively outfought by the Germans. But very few people in the west who haven’t studied the war aren’t aware that the Soviets underwent massive changes in leadership, doctrine, and equipment as the war went on. By 1943, the Red Army was generally better at war fighting than the Wermacht. They didn’t overwhelm the Germans with numbers - the highest manpower advantage they ever had in the war was 1.6:1 - which is substantial, but not at all fitting the barbarian hordes myth.
A lot of Americans who learn more about WW2 than average tend to go through a Wehraboo phase where everything German is mythologized. Super weapons, super soldiers, super tactics - only to heroically come up short against the unending numbers of poorly trained and lead Soviet soldiers. I’m sure the West German soldiers at the time were happy to play into this myth, and certainly the cold war Americans were happy to downplay the threat posed by our new and powerful adversaries.
But it does a disservice. The ostfront was basically 80-90% of the entire war in Europe, with everything else being a sideshow. Americans seem to believe that we basically invaded Normandy and conquered the Germans at full strength after a few years of bombing, when in reality it was closer to a desperate attempt to free Western Europe before the Soviets decided they might just push on through until they reached the Atlantic. The war was already decided at that point.
Which isn’t to say that the American or Commonwealth forces weren’t important - American supplies really were crucial to the improvement to the Red Army’s ability to wage battle even as early as 1942, and defense against the bombing campaign as well as the Battle of the Atlantic consumed important resources that would otherwise be allocated to the eastern front. But in terms of the actual battles fought during the war in europe, nothing even holds a candle to the gargantuan struggle between the Germans and Soviets.
True of course, but there is an important distinction between giving focus to one aspect of a conflict and implying or outright stating / showing that that was the only important part and the rest was background noise and didn’t matter and/or everyone else were simply the bad guys.
A lot of Americans and Brits IME have pretty fundamental misperceptions about WW2 and that’s not a good thing. And I would say the same about any country. Misconceptions about real events is something that should be challenged.
Also, I think the fact that the Germans launched a blatantly aggreesive war with the goal of wiping Slavic people off the face of the earth adds to the sinister nature of the conflict.
They number they are saying is 27 million lives lost, but I think I heard John Keegan, a great British historian once say in excess of 40 million lives lost.
Obviously the number is debatable, its hard to get an accurate number with such a monumental conflict taking place. And historians do find new records.
I seem to recall there is another aspect to this. The Americans also held back from entering the war in hopes that the Germans and the Russians would thoroughly beat each other up, so that the ETO would be an easier campaign against a stressed-out Germany, and so that the USSR would be a weakened concern for the US further down the road. Hence, the Americans are inclined to downplay the Russian contribution to the war effort, because the West was trying to use Germany to soften them up.
It could be that my memory or my understanding of the situation is faulty, though.
I no longer remember who, but I read a comment by a military historian that the war in Europe was won by Soviet blood, British bravery, and American steel. It takes a village to quash a tyrant.
I wish the “leaders” in power today, who are trying to drum up tensions, would watch every episode of “The Unkown War”, from start to finish.
By the end of it I think it will really turn you off to the concept of war. You will have seen so much destruction and death that you will be sick to your stomach. So much misery and death, so many mothers still crying their eyes out years later. An entire country crying.
And no conflict in world history, before or since, has compared to the events in Eastern Europe between 1941 and 1945.
In addition to what’s already been posted… most people, in watching a WWII movie today, would rather not have to choose between rooting for the soldiers of a Nazi dictatorship and those of a Communist dictatorship.
If you spend time in China or Russia, you’ll notice that Omaha Beach, Dunkirk and Iwo Jima, are not central to media coverage of WWII in those parts of the world.
I agree. Pop culture is intended as entertainment not education. It has no obligation to be balanced.