Battlefield (TV Series) Airwar Over Germany (2000) User Reviews

Ridiculously long-winded

[grantss · 4/10 · 11 May 2023]

The Allied bombing campaign of Germany in World War 2. We see the key commanders involved, main weapons, key units, strategy and tactics, the development and history of key factors (e.g. Aircraft) to that point and the history of the campaign.

Absurdly long-winded. This episode really only had about 30 minutes (max) of material on the Allied bombing campaign yet I guess the producers felt the general running time of each episode is 90 minutes so they had better fill it. Each aspect of the campaign has its history traced back to WW1, every commander gets a several-minute bio (and there's heaps of commanders), tangential history is discussed. So much filler.

It also doesn't help that I already have a very good knowledge of the subject, making the padding even more unnecessary and boring. Even for less knowledgeable people this format is not great as you keep wondering when they are going to get to the relevant stuff.

A Casual Look At The Topic.

[rmax304823 · 24 July 2011]

It's not easy to avoid being repetitious when you're trying to describe a television series because they usually exhibit such consistency. One is much like another in its structure and technique. But I must say there's a great difference between the first two seasons of "Battlefield" and the remaining three. The first two years are superb. The remaining episodes very a great deal in their quality.

This is one of the lesser episodes from the second series. The newsreel footage is a little repetitive but that can't really be gotten past. The points covered in this episode are of minor importance and, in my opinion, mostly common knowledge. The structure is wanton.

The Battle of Britain is skipped over in a few minutes. That's okay. It was covered thoroughly in the earlier series. And the British finally took to bombing German cities at night while the Americans persisted in what they called daylight precision bombing, which, while done by day, we now know was certainly not very precise. The monumental first raid on Ploesti is mentioned twice in passing, or maybe three times, but I guess Rumania isn't in Germany.

The airplanes and their evolution are well-enough described too. However, there's hardly a word about the radar that made night-time navigation possible or the countermeasures developed by the Germans. An awful lot depended on this not-very-sexy development.

The narration makes clear that, until the introduction of long-range escort fighters, Allied bombing was far too costly for the results achieved. Both the British and the Americans were forced to suspend their campaigns. Another point made is that bombs are very good at tearing up cities but very bad at breaking the will of their victims. "Our walls may break but never our hearts," read the posters put up on what remained of their city walls amid the ruins of Berlin. It didn't work when the Germans blitzed England either.

"Bomber" Harris -- called "Butcher" by his crews -- was responsible for the carpet bombing of German cities. He was ruthless, and so were the Americans when called on to be so. That feckless disregard for humanitarian consequences are necessary in total war, but the narration is honest in holding Harris largely responsible for the day-and-night destruction of the ancient city of Dresden -- of no strategic or military importance, but packed with refugees from the Soviet advance in the east. Upwards of one hundred and fifty thousand civilian deaths during the bombing and subsequent firestorm. They certainly "reaped the whirlwind," as Harris put it, though not all of the dead -- many of them melted in their air raid shelters -- had sown the wind.

Anyway, let me get off my antiquated anti-war soap box. This episode is about average for the second series, which is to say, not so hot, in my opinion. Not that all episodes in the second series were no more than routine. I thought "The West Wall" and "Scandinavia" were quite good, for instance.