History "The World Wars"

Mendozaco said:

I could be wrong, but did the Germans use Endfields in WWI and H man use a P38 for his fairwell?

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dancnr said:

This is what I said about in the thread in the watercooler section,

The last episode was the best in terms of accuracy, but there were still problems. Like Russians fighting during the Battle of the Bulge or Patton taking command of a fleet in Dec. 1944, which was a script error and just dumb. Guns and reenactments are minor things although some of the stuff wasn't that minor, like a missile cruiser, or a cold war T-54, or German B17s. Some of the stuff was archival footage and cost them nothing to get right, but apparently they wanted to use their budget up on rights to splice in scenes from war movies.

All the technical stuff aside, btw I actually sympathize there is a ton of stuff to get wrong that doesn't really take away from the story, the story was very flawed. Patton didn't invent mobile warfare, he wasn't the first person to put an mg on a vehicle, for his famous gunfight in Mexico he used a SAA. He didn't trust a 1911 because he had NDed one. He also learned tank warfare in France on French tanks, but they played to their audience and didn't bring it up. Russia and Germany didn't have a global alliance, Gas wasn't used when they said it was, it showed up two years too early. The Russian revolution was super misleading as well as the exit from the WW1. Japan, didn't go to war because they got snubbed at Versailles, they didn't send troops to the Western Front, which was implied, and more than just Churchill and FDR stood between Hitler and world domination.

The way they worded things in some instances just didn't have to be that way. Which was what bugged me. Alot of what they got wrong is just as dramatic or compelling told the right way and there isn't a good reason to make the mistakes they made. On top of all that their order of events was really off at times. Like I mentioned earlier they didn't say Patton got his command back until after they talked Battle of the Bulge, The Russian Revolution happened and then they cut to events in Italy two years earlier. And people keep saying "Oh it was only 6 hours they didn't have time to fit more in or explain things", but they had time to make us watch Hitler shave his stache and eat some eggs. Its a tough job and I don't envy them, but when so many productions can take the time to get it right its hard to see why they would mess up on things across the board. And its disappointing because this is one of the few chances we actually get things like this anymore in their programming. I think that is why people are upset, because it was billed as this awesome series and everyone was like yay history on the History Channel again and it wasn't that good.

I also take issue with politicians telling History, I can understanding wanting to use well known figures but it leaves alot to be desired.

My personal favorite weapon mistake was a scene where a German was using an MG08 like a bolt action rifle, complete with sound effect dubbed in and assistant gunner to feed the belt.

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