While going through the website quicksilverscreen.com with hundreds of online movies (like american equivalent to czech sleduj.cz, but without the search feature, someone deserves a slap for that), among other things i have found was amazing documentary series about Second World War, called World At War (in the list of streams under the name The World At War). Maybe you know it, maybe you don’t, anyway, it was first aired in 1973, it has 26 episodes describing practically all of World War 2.

Unfortunatelly, this website has links only to about half of the episodes on the stream host Megavideo, which limits free viewing to 60 minutes and then 60 minutes of forced break, but it is enough for an episode. However, if you write for me a nice little poem, i will share with you account information for a paid account, offering unlimited viewing  Alternative is watching it on YouTube, but there it is split into a million of parts, or just downloading it somewhere, if you can find it, oh and i almost forgot, buying it on DVD, if you can afford that. Of course its in english, as it was made in Great Britain, but iam sure, somewhere on the net can be found a version dubbed in Czech. If anyone finds it and would be so nice to share the link with me, i will happily add it here.

Quality made in 1973

Every true man with access to suitable media surely knows World War 2 very well, however this particular documentary series has been avoiding attention of many of us, also because it is older by a quite few years than me for example. And i have already read a couple of books about this war already, seen a lot of documentaries, played a lot of games set in this time period, but the time when this documentary was made, provides it with a number of advantages over many much more newer movies.

Many new documentaries for example from the production of some cable television channels are being way too simplified, focused on action, effects and stupid viewer, who doesn’t really want to think that much about history and wants to see mainly big guns and fighting. Something like that wasn’t in style in 1973, thus World At War doesn’t use any of that and the about an hour long episodes are truly filled with valuable information, unique and beautiful video footage from the battlefields (sometimes already in color), strategical and tactical analyses, drafts and interviews with the persons directly involved in the events!

Personalities of the World War 2 in front of camera

Among other persons involved in the war who were interviewed for this documentary are Albert Speer, Karl Dönitz, Walter Warlimont, Jimmy Stewart, Bill Mauldin, Curtis LeMay, Lord Mountbatten of Burma, Alger Hiss, Toshikazu Kase, Mitsuo Fuchida, Minoru Genda, J.B. Priestley, Brian Horrocks, John J. McCloy, Lawrence Durrell, Arthur Harris, Charles Sweeney, Paul Tibbets, Anthony Eden, Traudl Junge, Mark Clark, Adolf Galland and historian Stephen Ambrose. Its very fortunate, that this sort of high quality and modern documentary production has managed to find these and other important participants of the war alive, and willing to share their experiences. It is really something different, when the story is told by officers and generals themselves.

Submarine war is hard to film

For example in the episode about german U-boats we can see the former Nazi Highadmiral Karl Dönitz, who witnessed even the First World War or Otto Kretschmer, one of the best german submarine captains, who was imprisoned after his ship was sunk. Another interesting thing about this espisode is that the authors have to apologize about the lack of video footage from the naval combat, which as they said, is quite hard to find, so they had to do with what they managed to get, or with photographs or drafts of the situations on the sea. The reason for this lack of film material is said to be in the natura of naval combat – ships firing at targets in the distance of up to several miles, almost invisible submarines using almost invisible torpedoes and the fact, that most of this combat happened at night.

I also dare to add, that another little contribution to this lack of material could be, that for the allies the combat against submarines wasn’t anything glorious or celebrated and they probably didn’t pay much attention to having cameramen ready at day and night, to film a torpedo under the water sinking their ship. After all, filming a successfull ground offensive or an aerial bombardment of enemy cities must be much more fun.

Truly one of the best

Wikipedia confirms what i thought – this series really belongs among the best documentary movies of the western culture and is often considered the best documentary about the Second World War. The cost of its production in 2009 equivalent was £11.4 million and of the hardest tasks for the makers was to find and convince Karl Wolff, adjutant of Heinrich Himmler, to give an interview, in which he also admitted to witnessing a large-scale execution in Himmler’s presence.