World War II: The Price of Empire

Thirteen episode series on WW2, of course not the first time it's been done. The World at War (1973) is still pre-eminent, with sheer volume (26 episodes) and with more participants still being with us.

As it's such a familiar story I tend to judge the telling of it on whether lazy simplification and myth is avoided: 1 Hitler was elected, 2 Britain stood alone in 1940, 3 the Luftwaffe's switch from British airfields to cities was a simple whim of Hitler or Goering, 4 area bombing of Germany didn't achieve anything. Also, not least for family reasons, I'm keen that General Slim and the "forgotten" Fourteenth Army are not forgotten. In all except 2 it passes with flying colours. Episode 4 Alone would have been more accurately, if less dramatically, titled Alone in Europe, though it redeemed itself by saying (36.40) that opposition to Hitler "was not a small island nation off the coast of the European mainland, it was an Empire". As for point 4 (a particular bugbear) episode 7 explained (45.26) "anti-aircraft defence tied up one million German service personnel", which bears repeating.

A glaring fault, at least where I recently watched the series, is that there are no subtitles or translation of non English speakers, affecting some parts more than others. Barbarossa was one of the best TWaW episodes, in this it's the worst, with numerous periods of untranslated Russian.