John Kettler Posted August 10, 2002 Share Posted August 10, 2002 This program has some great footage, but it is full of technical errors, including gross misidentification of several historically important weapons. Useful in spite of itself. Regards, John Kettler Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
YankeeDog Posted August 10, 2002 Share Posted August 10, 2002 Thanks!! Watching now. If any of the more knowedgable would care to point out some of the more important historical inaccuracies, I would appreciate it. Cheers, YD Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Kettler Posted August 10, 2002 Author Share Posted August 10, 2002 YankeeDog, For starters, they never showed you a single Big Bertha (42cm Gamma Morser) or the spectacular damage done to the Liege forts. They failed to mention that the Paris Gun was made of an 11" naval gun linered down to 8" bore and had shells carefully sized to compensate for bore wear. They went on and on about Iowa class 16" battleships, then proceeded for minutes on end to show you the old 14" battleships like the ones at Pearl Harbor, belatedly throwing in a single clip of an Iowa class. They pratted on about the capabilities of the battleship but never showed a single crater, nor the zillion feet of kamikaze defense footage, nor did they mention the first land use of the proximity fuze was in battling the V-1s attacking England, firing out over the Channel. They showed you a WW I vintage shrapnel shell (shrapnel cannon balls debuted at Waterloo in 1815) and immediately followed it with apparent grape shot, a design which dates back to at least the early 1700s. They claimed that you had to light fuzes on shells during the American Civil War, when in fact double firing, lighting the shell fuze, then the mortar, was eliminated by the early 1600s. They utterly failed to address self-propelled guns until they showed M-40 and M-12 WW II vintage 155mm SPGs during the Korean War. They never discussed massing fires, as opposed to massing tubes. They showed U.S. multiple rocket launchers in action in Korea, except it was Germany during WW II. There was no direct noting of the huge technology transfer from the German artillery to U.S. postwar artillery, especially the 17cm to the 175mm M-107 and the even more blatant transfer of the 28cm K5E (Anzio Annie) to the 280mm Atomic Annie. They claimed the English had bigger guns than the Spanish Armada had. Wrong. The Spanish guns were big bore, poorly toleranced, very slow to reload and very short ranged. The English guns had smaller bore, less projectile windage, were faster to reload and had longer range. They failed to discuss such fundamentals as the differences among a gun, a mortar and a howitzer; the value of variable charge; ammunition flexibility; the development of artillery submunitions; spotting from aircraft, and small matters called the interrupted screw breech and the obturator, design breakthroughs which made modern artillery possible. They somehow missed the transition of artillery from being primarily direct fire to being primarily indirect fire. They gave you the impression that the Mark I was installed on battleships, when in reality it sat on dry land and generated firing tables. Onboard gunfire calculations were handled by an incredibly intricate electromechanical computer. The principal cause of the demise of the disappearing gun in particular and coastal artillery in general was NOT the development of high angle naval mounts but aircraft and later the Bomb, delivered in a variey of ways. Nor is it even remotely correct to say that the disappearing mount upset what had been a historically even contest between ships and coastal forts. During the Napoleonic Wars Martello towers with one or two cannon shot up vessels as large as 74 guns, sometimes whole squadrons, and were never silenced. The British were so impressed they copied them. Many of the computer graphics were not only awful, but wrong, illustrating devices which would've never worked, and things which should've been shown, such as recuperator systems, weren't. While some of the footage was great (firing tests of the proximity fuze and Dora), and a few worthwhile points were made, on balance the show was practically pure dreck. I could've made a better segment on my worst day, working only from memory, and I'm neither a scriptwriter nor a video producer. Put it this way, if I'd produced it and was old line samurai, I'd kill myself. It was that bad, reaching a new low for the History Channel. Regards, John Kettler Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gaylord Focker Posted August 10, 2002 Share Posted August 10, 2002 Why does the history channel have so many historical falasies in it's programs? I mean the whole channel is about history...you'd think they could do a little research before production. I don't get it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Michael Emrys Posted August 10, 2002 Share Posted August 10, 2002 Most tv as well as most movies are made these days by people who only know and care about making tv and movies. They have budgets and schedules and every effort is bent to keep within those two constraints. In many cases, they would rather spend the money on the producer's limousine than on top-notch research. In other words, it's become a business and not an art. It's a different set of principles. "That's en-ter-tain-ment! Tra la..." Michael [ August 10, 2002, 08:53 AM: Message edited by: Michael emrys ] Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
YankeeDog Posted August 10, 2002 Share Posted August 10, 2002 Thanks John. Some of that stuff I picked up myself, but you cetainly pointed out some stuff that I missed or was just plain unaware of. I've kind of learned to watch History Channel documentaries for the footage and ignore what the narrator is saying. Sometimes even that can be misleading though, like when they sneak a piece of Korean War footage into the middle of a WWII documentary. My favorite piece of footage from the Cannons documentary was the little clip of a VT artillery barrage - it you could really see the shrapnel hitting the ground and it underlined just how effective VT could be over open ground. Anyway, thanks for doing correction duty. Cheers, YD Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ParaBellum Posted August 10, 2002 Share Posted August 10, 2002 Originally posted by John Kettler: ... Put it this way, if I'd produced it and was old line samurai, I'd kill myself... LoL! Thx John! Time for a sig change... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ParaBellum Posted August 10, 2002 Share Posted August 10, 2002 And a short test in honour of John-sama. [ August 10, 2002, 10:41 AM: Message edited by: ParaBellum ] Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Michael Emrys Posted August 10, 2002 Share Posted August 10, 2002 Originally posted by YankeeDog: I've kind of learned to watch History Channel documentaries for the footage and ignore what the narrator is saying.That's the best plan by far. While I was in the nursing home last winter I had access to a tv and a lot of time on my hands, so I spent a lot of time watching the HC. Like you, I loved watching the images, which were often arresting. But, lord! what a load of horse**** much of the commentary was! Michael Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Kettler Posted August 11, 2002 Author Share Posted August 11, 2002 Part of the problem is that the History Channel buys shows produced for it. Unfortunately, its production execs seem to be utterly incompetent in assessing historical accuracy, hence don't ride herd on the production companies, some of which are much worse than others. The problem is not so much with narration but with stock footage departments which don't know a Panzer I from a Tiger II. You haven't lived until you've heard the voiceover discuss the Battle of the Bulge and then seen France 1940 Ardennes footage, and that's a mild example of historical megaincompetence. I have written repeatedly to the History Channel about such gaffes as Dauntless dive bombers peeling off, cut to Battleship Row blowing up at Pearl Harbor. I have highly recommended making better use of their often renowned technical and historical experts (Keegan, Hogg, Chandler, Young, Atwater, Polmar, Friedman, to name a few), of using the military modeling and wargaming communities, all abundant on the East Coast. I have suggested buying at least basic visual reference works. And believe me when I say that I've told the executives there that they're cutting their own throats on credibility by claiming to be the source for matters historical while routinely making one fundamental error, repeating one blatant lie, after another, be it old Lusitania documentaries with no crawl or anything to inform the viewer that munitions of war have in fact been recovered from the wreck, that the Germans were legally justified in torpedoing her, for failing to tell the viewers that the vessel was deliberately limped (one engine, ostensibly to save coal) into a known U-boat zone and that the naval escort was ordered away (thanks, Winston!); Me-109s shot down in the Pacific; B-24s described while B-25s are shown, Grants instead of Shermans, or one of my favorites, IS-2s in a T-34 program. Am still trying to decide whether footage of a German armor column with a Su-76 in it was a captured weapon at the Bulge or merely misused Eastern Front footage. Bear in mind that a shot up T-34 was found and photographed outside of Paris by a U.S. sergeant. Some programs, like Mail Call and some of the British produced stuff, are first rate, but to repeat known to historians and military history buffs German propaganda about Polish cavalry charges again Panzers is inexcusable, a lie, and a national insult to the Polish people. I do give History Channel credit for covering all sorts of juicy and controversial topics, such as Japanese biowarfare, German, Japanese and U.S. human experiments, MiG-15 development, the Russian Bomb, the saga of the U-234, "what it was like" historical reconstruction pieces, the upcoming program on the vast underground factory built with the blood of 25,000 slaves, etc., but the bad far outweighs the good, and watching the History Channel triggers a running critique here, with my father and I mercilessly itemizing the seemingly endless mistakes. The level of radar understanding is nearly zero, making the channel look like armor experts by comparison. A WW II German search radar is described, but we're shown a postwar U.S. gunfire control radar. There's a lot of Soviet Bar Lock long range surveillance radar clips, but we are shown Fire Can, which is used to direct 37mm, 57mm and 85mm antiaircraft guns. Another howler is May Day parade footage of short range surface-to-air-missiles, while the announcer talks in grave tones about the terrible Soviet ballistic missile threat. Do tell! About the only progress to date is that the clip of the Dauntlesses bombing Battleship Row has all but disappeared. Regards, John Kettler Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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