I'm obsessed with this series and how it portrays some of the most powerful and intelligent world leaders in our history. How accurate is it? I love the scenes from Hitler cutting his mustache to fit over the gas mask, to the legend of Patton..how real is it? How much is fake?
I don't know the stuff about Hitler and Patton but there were a lot of errors...I remember watching it with the badsubhub crew and just off the top of my dome of stuff I remember and glancing over the old BH thread on it to jog my memory:
In terms of actual stuff:
They make it seem like Germany sent Lenin to the Tsarist regime and then somehow the regime collapsed and Lenin took over and suddenly Communism. In the real world Lenin was still in exile somewhere in Switzerland when the Tsarist regime fell. There was a provisional government which took over and fought the war in 1917 and at that point Lenin would finagle his way back to Russia and destablize that government in a second revolution. This was a process that took months and they make it seem like they marched into the palace and suddenly a-okay.
Okay we're back to equipment but seriously...Napoleonic 12 pounders?
Their treatment of Versailles is just laughable, they're pushing a contrived narrative of "The Allies FORCED WW2 to happen" so hard it's annoying.
Literally verbatim they said "The victors determined the peace of this war" with super dramatic music and following it up with images of beaten German soldiers to evoke sympathy. Like okay but...how is that different from literally any other war? It's followed up with another 10-15 minutes of crap about how "armistice for 20 years" (ignoring the fact Foch said that thinking the treaty wasn't harsh enough) and how the Allies literally were Hitler before Hitler by forcing Germany to pay reparations. All without making any mention of the punitive German treaty of Brest-Litovsk with the Russians, mysteriously. No Rape of Belgium. No 14 Points. It's such a deliberately, contrived, shoehorned "The Allies literally caused WWII by being meanies" narrative it's sick.
A side quip is the bullshit they pulled with Japan too now that I'm remembering. They make it seem like the leaders were a bunch of racist idiots who told the Japanese to sod off because they hated colored people. Now this may be true, to be completely fair, but that's not the reason the Japanese were snubbed. The Japanese were snubbed because they fought like a single battle in 1914 and then spent the remainder of the war trying to posture herself over a member of the eventual Allies against Germany, China.
Then, after the war, they demanded major concessions from China itself as a reward for their contribution. They rightfully got told to sod off. However if you base your opinion on History Channel's word you'd think a bunch of racists told Japan to go play in their little playground so Japan stormed off and started WWII because the Europeans were mean and they wanted to show they could play too.
Little more to say here. This Archduke guy got popped and then suddenly BOOM war. It's not "they got it wrong" but rather "they omitted this so that they could have dramatic shots of Hitler and Patton". They ignored Verdun and the Somme, the actual turning points of the war, to give us like an hour of Patton bravely standing on top of a tank giving the Germans the finger. Okay that last part is exaggerated but you get my point. Not denying the American impact in the war, and this was clearly tailored for Americans, but the tone of the show is little more than stupid Europeans were stupidly running into stupid machine guns until smart ingenuous Americans (who put a machine gun on a jeep!!!) came over and showed those doughboys how to really fight a war, with tanks. Even though tanks had been invented and used by the British for 2 years.
That's all I remember instantly too from just the like first episode.
a few more comments here
The World Wars - featuring /u/jebei
The World Wars - featuring /u/erictotalitarian