r/WorldWar2

So I’ve been watching the new Tom Hanks documentary the past few days, and I noticed that at the end of every episode, it says “this content was created using A.I technology”

Does anybody know what is real in that show? Like they show a lot of historical looking photos/videos , so someone’s gotta tell me if it’s all fake or not.

My Dad is a big WW2 history buff. He’s seen Band of Brothers/The Pacific/Monuments Men and some of the bigger more well known ones.

What are some more obscure, or lesser known ones for him to watch? It doesn’t have to be from an American perspective, he just likes things about WW2. Thanks in advance!

I just started watching it a few days ago and finally caught up, I was pretty excited when I saw the trailers for it, but watching the actual thing it’s been very mid, and way to much “murica” hyped up non sense that’s in so many other documentaries.

First, it feels like it skips so fast over certain topics, the whole battle of France was covered in like 5 minutes, they seem to focus heavy on some battles and fast forward over others, of course the operations that have American on the main stage seem to be getting a ton of attention.

Second is the whole hyping America up thing I mentioned. I started episode 5 and had a laugh when Tom hanks did the whole “American has a new weapon it’s ready to unleash on the seas….the aircraft carrier!” At the beginning. Umm sorry what? Carriers had already been around for 20 years prior to ww2 and a few countries had carriers. In fact Japan had way more carriers than American did for the first few years of the pacific, so doing this whole dramatic American is unleashing the beast with the carrier was just hilarious.

The episode then goes on to talks about convoys and how England needed aluminum to build aircraft, Tom hanks proceeds to say “there is only one place England can get its aluminum from….AMERICA!”. Again sorry what? Im Canadian and find such a statement funny and insulting given that Canada supplied up to 90% of the aluminum used by the British commonwealth, yep 90%, with Canada supply 40% of the overall aluminum used by all allied countries.

I don’t know so far it’s been just alright but it’s been a hard watch so far a times.

Jean-Loup Gassend works as a forensic medicine resident in Switzerland, and also has experience in surgery. Since his teenage years, his hobby has been to explore battlefields and interview veterans from the WW2. You can read one of his Archaeology paper

In 2019, he joined a group of volunteering young officer cadets from the Siberian Federal University to find and recover the bodies of missing soldiers who died during the battle of Stalingrad. Millions of German and Soviet soldiers killed during the WW2 are still reported missing in action, and buried in unmarked graves in Russia today. He posted a 30-min digested video in his YT channel CrocodileTear.

In this video, you can see there are still way too many unrecovered bodies after bodies of the soldiers in Volograd (Stalingrad in 1942) that unidentified bones, especially those of Soviet soldiers, are simply packed in gaskets for burial.

There is a German cemetery in Volograd. "Soldatenfriedhof Rossoschka" In this full 7-min video, you can see walls and walls of names keep passing by.

Each skeleton and name still carries stories, and I believe these videos are just as powerful as historic ones.

Please don't think I'm saying we should stop discussing the subject. It seems like there is regularly new documentaries and books or other educational materials being produced about WWII trying to give information or show things from a different perspective. To my understanding, the war is one of the most widely researched and documented events in history, so if that's true, hasn't everything been covered? What's the need for more, and new coverage? Or are there things we're still learning? ​​