Discovery provides a relatively dispassionate view of World War II in its new series.
World War II is one of the most exhaustively researched events of the 20th century, not least because it enables historians to ply their craft with invaluable tools: an abundance of contemporary documents, oral histories, radio recordings and film footage. Inevitably, histories and memoirs abound and incremental accounts continue to emerge as more official archives are opened to the public. There is, thus, no shortage of television programming on almost every aspect of the war, notably from media groups owned by the Americans and British, the two principal Allied victors.
So it is no surprise that the 13-part series that Discovery Channel plans to run from January 25 doesn’t bring anything strikingly new to the table, especially in terms of giving “viewers a whole new understanding of what transpired during the war,” as a press release gushes. As narrative histories go, this is pretty much a standard, broad-brush version and some of the footage is familiar. Even so, it would be worth a serious viewer's time to set aside an hour every Tuesday at 8 p m.
For one, the editors have lived up to the marketing promise of “the very latest colourisation techniques” to convert the black and white footage from the 1940s into sharper colour images with a commendable degree of authenticity. Though purists may question this sexing up and the process is not flawless, it certainly makes the content more compelling and view-able — only a devoted aficionado is likely to sit through an hour of the original grainy and shaky images of tank and aerial battles from which the editors must have worked.
Then there is the crisp narration by British actor Robert Powell, familiar to those who have followed other World War II series as is the Wagner-esque background music by De Wulf.
World War II was truly worldwide in nature — from Europe through the West Asia to the Far East and the Pacific. How to distill the disparate strands of six years of global war into an audio-visual history of a little over nine hours? The editors have taken the sensible route of presenting each episode chronologically with graphics to explain the complex geography.
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The first episode, “The Gathering Storm”, brings the viewer up to speed on the interwar years that snowballed into World War II, in which Japan’s China aggression gets a decent amount of coverage. The next three episodes cover Hitler’s Blitzkrieg in Eastern Europe and the fall of France (Lightning War), the Battle of Britain, the storied aerial war that kept him out of the British Isles (Britain at Bay) and what is considered his biggest blunder, the attack on the Soviet Union (Hitler Strikes East). The second episode shows footage of Polish cavalry riding out to counter the German Panzer formations, a poignant reminder of the technological gap between the Wehrmacht and the rest of Europe in the early days of the war.
The fifth and sixth episodes would be of additional interest to Indian viewers. They deal with Japan’s entry into the war, its efforts to create a Greater Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere by invading British and Dutch colonies in south-east Asia with stunning success to bring it to India’s borders, and the Allied campaigns in the Mediterranean, where Indian troops fought with distinction. The episode on Overlord, the Allied landings in Normandy, is outstanding. One of the points worth noting is that Montgomery’s role in Allied victories is treated more evenhandedly than most Allied versions. Indeed, the attraction of the entire series is the relatively dispassionate approach.
If there is a gap, it is the relatively sparse account of the war in the Balkans. And the series would benefit from subtitling. These are minor omissions, however, and they won’t prevent this series from becoming a collector’s item when it is available in DVD format.
