World War II: The Price of Empire

Thirteen episode series on WW2, of course not the first time it's been done. The World at War (1973) is still pre-eminent, with sheer volume (26 episodes) and with more participants still being with us.

As it's such a familiar story I tend to judge the telling of it on whether lazy simplification and myth is avoided: 1 Hitler was elected, 2 Britain stood alone in 1940, 3 the Luftwaffe's switch from British airfields to cities was a simple whim of Hitler or Goering, 4 area bombing of Germany didn't achieve anything. Also, not least for family reasons, I'm keen that General Slim and the "forgotten" Fourteenth Army are not forgotten. In all except 2 it passes with flying colours. Episode 4 Alone would have been more accurately, if less dramatically, titled Alone in Europe, though it redeemed itself by saying (36.40) that opposition to Hitler "was not a small island nation off the coast of the European mainland, it was an Empire". As for point 4 (a particular bugbear) episode 7 explained (45.26) "anti-aircraft defence tied up one million German service personnel", which bears repeating.

A glaring fault, at least where I recently watched the series, is that there are no subtitles or translation of non English speakers, affecting some parts more than others. Barbarossa was one of the best TWaW episodes, in this it's the worst, with numerous periods of untranslated Russian.

One might argue that the simplicity of the narrative is almost communist by nature. All allies are portrayed as heroic liberators - even the Russian Red Army. There is no mentioning of the crimes against humanity that everyone in the political elite even back then knew The Red Army was committing - from state sanctioned and enforced sexual abuse to systematic murdering campaigns carried out on the "liberated" nations. Finland is mentioned to be a puppet of Germany - nothing could be further from the truth.

The authors have not burdened themselves with the complexity of the topic - I can only call this a simplistic propaganda aiming to please an uneducated viewer.