User Reviews

This gets a 10 from me. It connects the dots fairly accurately. It was a 31 year time-line that indeed looks like one war with a huge pause between the beginning and the end. More exposition about china/japan/India could've been included. The production values are excellent. I like the fact that the series focused on major personalities that affected the wars. Interesting that fascist Germany set not only Europe but Russia along the collectivist path during this time frame. IMDb's high-school drop-outs are obviously upset and have unfairly attacked this series. Don't listen to them. They all seem to have an IQ below plant-life and it's sad IMDb has embraced a business model that is driven by anti-American politics. Shame on them for rating highly emotional attack reviews as the "best" on IMDb.

This is good enough but it is lacking on several fronts (pun intended). I think it has a definite bias towards the American side. However there is also value and information contained in the series. There is a lot of playacting and what was he thinking involved with the main characters such as Stalin, a major butcher, Churchill, MacArthur, Patton, Hitler in all his gruesome glory, Roosevelt, etc. This series is based on what happened but not all is shown. The bad guys, Tojo in particular, is shown in a very unfavorable light, not that it isn't wrong, but the actual visual presentation of them is very stereotypical in showing them as actual people. Tojo with the big glasses and slanted eyes, not totally unfounded. Hitler as the ego maniacal jackass he was, increasingly slipping into unreality and hubris. Not without basis in actual history but a bit pedantic.

The History channel makes highly questionable documentary type mini-series.This 6 hour 3 parter that ran over the memorial days holiday week is no exception.First the good news.The series endeavors to connect the 2 World Wars as no series have ever done before.Most series center on one war or the other.The actors portray most of the characters rather well according to whats known of these deceased leaders.The bad news is that you can spend years studying these wars as to cause and effect,6 hours is far to brief and the inevitable debates over certain things relevance to the total picture of the war,will be many.Mine was a statement of"3 remaining US Carriers"in the same sentence after the Pearl Harbor attack,giving the impression that carriers were lost in said attack,which they were NOT and thus a key point in the war in the pacific.Also it was painfully obvious the history of Japan between the wars was ignored as were its leaders,in favor of Stalin,Hitler,Churchill,Roosevelt and Mussolini.I don't even want to get into the Generals.That said,its still a useful tool to study the ideas about one thing leading to another or as they say"connect the dots"Watch it ONLY after seeing the BBC's"The Great War"and Thames TV's "World at War".They are the definitive 26 episodes series about both wars.The Great War being WW1 and World at War being WW11

Even though I don't like it, I've had to come to accept the use of "dramatic license" in historically based movies. But, it should not be accepted in a historical documentary, even one containing some dramatizations.

I can understand the omission of major events and persons. This series takes the lives of several major figures of the Second World War, and shows how their experiences in the first war and the period between wars shaped their lives, and through them the second war. Events that didn't concern the chosen figures might be excluded, however major. But, you can't Re-write history just because the truth isn't the story you want to tell. And, that is what the producers of this series have done. And, the mis-information is not just minor details, either. It doesn't help that they added historically inaccurate footage in the background throughout, either.

To catalog all of the distortions and outright falsehoods would require me to torture myself by re-watching this disaster, and I just can't bring myself to do that. However I will point out some of the most glaring.

In the segment on Midway, Japanese Prime Minister Hideki Tojo is given credit for the Japanese plan against Midway, not Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto. And, to watch this show, one would believe that Roosevelt's code-breakers in Washington found out about the attack, reported it to the President, and he ordered that them to warn the Pacific Fleet. In fact, the code-breakers were in Honolulu, reporting to Admiral Nimitz, who reported to Washington. Nimitz made the decisions, and the President's main contribution was to not interfere much with his man on the spot. In addition, the description of the battle was just plain wrong, and included false statements like, "In under six minutes four of the carriers that attacked Pearl Harbor had been destroyed." (Three were badly damaged in under 6 minutes, and after damage control failed were eventually lost. The fourth carrier was damaged hours later, and not lost until the next day.)

In the series, we are told George Patton conquered Sicily, then went on to conquer Italy in six weeks. Then, he slapped a soldier with Battle Fatigue and got sidelined. Patton conquered Italy? Since when? He slapped that soldier in Sicily and was sidelined away from the Italian campaign. German forces in Italy didn't surrender until just a few days before the final German surrender a couple years later.

To hear this bunch tell it, Patton was finally re-instated and given battle command in order to save US forces during the battle of the bulge. In fact, Patton was given a command as soon after the D-Day landings and commanded for months before the Battle of the Bulge.

The Battle of Stalingrad was completely misrepresented as some egotistical conflict between Stalin and Hitler because of the city's name. It was also implied that Hitler diverted troops in the north practically on a whim. In fact, Hitler sent specifically assigned forces towards Stalingrad in order to secure the Caucuses oil fields, not to rob Stalin of his namesake. And, Stalin fought back to prevent that, not because of his ego.

Hitler was stopped during the battle of Stalingrad because of the surprise of the Russian winter? Really? The battle started in the summer AFTER the first Russian winter German troops had to endure.

Does History Channel have no historians working for them? Or, are they simply willing to throw away the facts in order to write what they think is a more entertaining story? ... or to avoid confusing their audience with the more complicated truth? I'll forgive MacArthur wearing five stars when he wasn't a five star general. I'll forgive American aircraft shown as Japanese bombers and American troops shown as Germans invading Poland. I'll even forgive lack of even a mention of incredibly important figures like Yamamoto, Montgomery, Rommel or Eisenhower, or important events like the Battle of the Atlantic. But, how can I forgive supposed EXPERTS simply getting the history itself wrong.

Note: Statements from figures like Dick Cheney and Colin Powell are included in this series. I doubt any of the interview subjects were aware of the context their statements would be placed in. Don't blame them for the misinformation.

The mini-series still gets 3 stars because, despite all of its flaws, it is at least entertaining fiction. If they'd gotten the history correct, it would have been wonderful. But, don't mistake this series as an accurate representation of what happened.

My god, where to begin? I think some 9th grade history students were assigned a project, but got into somebody's expired prescription medication to come up with this mess. I knew we were in trouble when it started with Hitler not being able to seal his gas mask during a gas attack in what was labeled Sep. 1914. Since nobody used poison gas until 1915 and no real working gas mask as shown made available to troops before late 1915-1916, I was still left wondering why Hitler had a 1916 German helmet and his fellow soldiers seemed to be using British Lee Enfield rifles and the British were shooting at the Germans with American M1903 Springfield rifles. President Wilson must have been a time traveler, since he had a 1940's radio in his office in 1916, 4 years before the first radio station. I have no idea why WWII lasted as long as it did, since in one clip the US Navy had a Nimitz Class Carrier with a deck filled with Super Hornets and in another the Russian's had M47 tanks from the 50's, but the German had T-54's, and I still can't figure out why the South Vietnamese Army was fighting in the Philippines in 1941. (Army guys with a palm tree in the ground, yeah stick in there, nobody will notice). A little bit of acting, and lots of random military stock footage from 1914-at least 1990. This is the worst History show in History. Everyone at the History Channel that had any part in this should be fired. I have no clue how this ever could have been approved to air. It's so bad, it's like they did it on propose as some kind of sick joke. It's so bad you can't turn away, you've just got to see the next ridiculous error. World Wars, if Ed Wood did documentaries.

First of all, I will start off by saying that this film had a few redeeming qualities, including good narration and decent production quality. That having been said, the film was filled with historical inaccuracies and over-simplifications. It is, of course, understandable that when one is trying to cram both world wars into only six hours it is impossible to give everything as detailed a treatment as possible, but there were whole theaters or campaigns of WWII that were either glossed over (the Russian front, the Balkan campaigns, and most of the Pacific Theater), or ignored entirely (the North African campaigns). In brief, here are a few other issues (not by any means an exhaustive list): -Italy was not suddenly controlled by the Allies after its surrender. There were German troops on the peninsula who contested every mile of the Allied advance and it took us two years to fight our way up the peninsula.

-The wrong peninsula is highlighted when the Gallipoli campaign is discussed in the series.

-The Bolsheviks did not overthrow the Tsar. They overthrew the provisional government that had overthrown the Tsar a few months previously.

-The Germans did not go through the Maginot Line when they attacked France, and they didn't go after the Low Countries as an afterthought after finishing off France. They attacked France through the Low Countries to begin with. It would not have taken much effort to mention that the attack on France went through the Ardennes Forest of Belgium and that it was easier to go that way as the Maginot Line only protected the French border with Germany, and not with Luxembourg or Belgium.

There are dozens of other errors in the film- far too many to go into all of them in this review. The one positive thing is that it was interesting and might get students interested in learning more. If they do seek to find more they might get the real history if they do their research, as the History Channel failed to do. I think some of the historians who were involved in this should hang their heads in shame. I am almost surprised H.W. Brands was involved (though to be fair he was being interviewed and may not have known how bad it was going to be- on the other hand, he was involved in the writing of the textbook "American Stories" which is a sub-par text).