The first two years of "Battlefield" -- Seasons One and Two, I think they're called -- were superb documentaries covering each subject in just enough detail. They were well written, backed up by maps, and they filled in the political and strategical backgrounds of the battles neatly. Above all, they were logically organized, broken into sections with labels like "The Leaders," "The Commanders," "The Eve of Battle," "The Battle, Phase One," and so forth.
The later entries never quite lived up to the standards set by the first two years. The footage tends to be repetitive and sometimes drawn from events elsewhere. Here, when an Italian battleship is blown up, I swear we see the USS Arizona exploding during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Of course that doesn't damage our understanding of what's going on. But the jumpiness of the time line does. The film takes us up to operation Torch -- the invasion of Northern Africa by a combined Allied Force -- and then back to Taranto, which occurred long before the United States entered the war. That's enough to invite you to wonder whether you've gone a little too far in the chemical alteration of the brain business.
This episode has two virtues, however. One is that it outlines a battle -- or rather a series of battles -- that is usually neglected in most histories of the war, at least in the US. If most Americans think about Greece, for instance, beyond what they've learned from "The Guns of Navarone", they know only that it was German occupied. They don't realize its overall importance to the momentum of the war. It delayed (and perhaps doomed) Hitler's war in Russia by forcing him to divert resources to the Balkans to help the Italians again. And it signalled the end of what had been a successful UK advance in North Africa against the Italians for the similar reasons. Materiel and resources had to be diverted in order to help the Greek army (who didn't want the help). The result was a defeat for the British and Greeks that, in the end, turned out to be a disaster for combatants on both sides.
The second virtue of this episode is its candor. It's pretty objective, not at all a self-justifying flag waver. The battle for Crete was going well for the British and Commonwealth forces until one New Zealand commander lost his nerve, which subsequently led to abject defeat. At the same time, of course, Hitler should have been invading Malta, as his generals urged, not Crete.
The worst episodes in this second series deal with the Pacific Theater -- the battles for Guadalcanal and Okinawa. They're repetitive, relatively poorly written, and sloppily organized and executed. We can understand the narrator's inability to get the name of "Leyte Gulf" correct. Nobody else knows how to pronounce it properly either. But "Kwajalein" looks more intimidating than it is, and somebody higher up the food chain should have corrected the narrator's pronunciation. That's a minor thing but I mean it to be symptomatic of the whole.
As far as I can tell, though, this episode, along with "Kursk", is a superior entry in the rather carelessly done second series.
The later entries never quite lived up to the standards set by the first two years. The footage tends to be repetitive and sometimes drawn from events elsewhere. Here, when an Italian battleship is blown up, I swear we see the USS Arizona exploding during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Of course that doesn't damage our understanding of what's going on. But the jumpiness of the time line does. The film takes us up to operation Torch -- the invasion of Northern Africa by a combined Allied Force -- and then back to Taranto, which occurred long before the United States entered the war. That's enough to invite you to wonder whether you've gone a little too far in the chemical alteration of the brain business.
This episode has two virtues, however. One is that it outlines a battle -- or rather a series of battles -- that is usually neglected in most histories of the war, at least in the US. If most Americans think about Greece, for instance, beyond what they've learned from "The Guns of Navarone", they know only that it was German occupied. They don't realize its overall importance to the momentum of the war. It delayed (and perhaps doomed) Hitler's war in Russia by forcing him to divert resources to the Balkans to help the Italians again. And it signalled the end of what had been a successful UK advance in North Africa against the Italians for the similar reasons. Materiel and resources had to be diverted in order to help the Greek army (who didn't want the help). The result was a defeat for the British and Greeks that, in the end, turned out to be a disaster for combatants on both sides.
The second virtue of this episode is its candor. It's pretty objective, not at all a self-justifying flag waver. The battle for Crete was going well for the British and Commonwealth forces until one New Zealand commander lost his nerve, which subsequently led to abject defeat. At the same time, of course, Hitler should have been invading Malta, as his generals urged, not Crete.
The worst episodes in this second series deal with the Pacific Theater -- the battles for Guadalcanal and Okinawa. They're repetitive, relatively poorly written, and sloppily organized and executed. We can understand the narrator's inability to get the name of "Leyte Gulf" correct. Nobody else knows how to pronounce it properly either. But "Kwajalein" looks more intimidating than it is, and somebody higher up the food chain should have corrected the narrator's pronunciation. That's a minor thing but I mean it to be symptomatic of the whole.
As far as I can tell, though, this episode, along with "Kursk", is a superior entry in the rather carelessly done second series.
