World War II in HD

[TBird1958]

Anybody else here watching this on The History Channel?

I've manage to catch a couple night's worth, lots of unshown footage and I enjoy the participants stories, and Gary Sinise's narration ( tho some fact checking is in order) is pretty good.

If you haven't seen it yet check it out tonight 

[pamlicojack]

I've been watching and thoroughly enjoying it...

[Hornisse]

I don't have (ie: refuse to pay for) cable.....

[Highlander]

HD is pending, as is sat... we have an issue with a large warehouse directly between us and the transmitter, so...

I won't use cable as the local supplier has severe support issues (no names, but it used to be a record lable and is presently an airline with "stratospheric" ambitions...  )

We have a thing called "Freeview" (free digital channels, about 100 TV/radio/text/junk), which has a sat equivalent, and we may go down that road... Sky and BBC offer an HD version too...

I'd love to see that series, but specifically the CBI area...

[Aussie Mark]

No cable here either.  Let me know when the series is finished, and I'll grab it on bit torrent.  I have a HD set hooked up to my Series 3 HD TiVo.

[Barklessdog]

Its intersting but so far not enough tanks plane & ships for me. Lots of personal war stories. There was a guy on the train that would talk non stop about his war stories, where my dad, a D vet never wanted to speak about it.

[Highlander]

My dad spilled the beans about Burma in the last 2 years of his life - now in year ten of my research for his book...

[jmcgliss]

I think my mom has been watching this via Directv, tho not in HD.  She said there were many stories she had not heard before.

[Barklessdog]

What I found shocking, that you forget about was such high causalities being acceptable. 10,000 US dead for one island, considered a victory, 90,000 civilian casualties (Philippine campaign). We just abandoned our men there when we retreated.

[uwe]

I think the comparatively small amount of US casualities in WW II shows that by and large the US was VERY responsible with its soldiers. Your medical treatment of your own wounded was far superior to that of any other army of the time. You lost something like 400,000 men and women in the armed services, everyone of them an individual fate and a loved son, daughter, father, mother, spouse and sibling for sure. But compare to it the Soviet Untion whose military blood toll was between 9 and 11 million, that is between 23 and 27 times as many military casualities! (Germany had about 5.5 million military deaths, all for the wrong cause to jackboot.)

To this day I firmly believe that it was essentially Russia's blood count together with the technical prowess of the unleashed military-industrial giant of the US that conquered Nazi Germany. If all those German divisions fighting at the Eastern front would have dug in at the French and Italian coasts from 1941 onwards, an Allied invasion in 1944 would have cost millions of lives. And I don't believe any democracy could have afforded that human sacrifice. The US would have never let itself be conquered by an outside aggressor, but sacrificing millions of soldiers to liberate Europe from the swastika was another matter. I venture that things would have ended in an armistice then, with the UK becoming a US protectorate and continental Europe forever under ze jackboot. Luckily, things didn't happen that way.

For all the inefficient fighting, sometimes bad leadership, atrocities (very understandable from what Germany had done before) and technical inferiority, the members of the Russian Red Army still have my respect today for that death toll and sacrifice. I even credit Stalin and his ruthlessness with contributing a vital part to the historic demise of Nazism. Uncle Joe was a poison himself, but needed to combat the even greater evil of Hitler.

[TBird1958]

Two points I'm glad they mention : The little known campaign in the aluetian islands, and the story of the Samuel B. Roberts role in the naval action of the Phillipines.

[gweimer]

I just learned about the Aleutians campaign in the past year or so.  Never knew that the Japanese actually landed on American soil.

We just watched another show about British war magician Jasper Maskelyne, whose elite squad turned camouflage into an enormous feat of slight of hand.  The part where they made the harbor of Alexandria "disappear" was amazing.

[Pilgrim]

Uwe, I appreciate reading your thoughts, and they cause me to reflect.  You make a very good argument.

I think the 2001 movie "Enemy at the Gates" made the point about Russia almost literally shoveling men into the conflict.  It gave me a whole new concept of what conditions might have been like, and how differently Russia treated its soldiers.