Re-Creating history by- documentaries

Take a look at Bills war. His widow created a story of his time with the 39th FA in WW2. Find it at
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In the previous post I promised to go over some of the tricks History Channel uses to fool you. I have listed the time on the DVD where you can see the scene I am referring to.  The time  notes the hour, minute and second where you can find the scene.   I don 't know about you but I don't like to be lied to.  Whey they do is insert a scene which is not from the battle being described.  Someone paid 25 bucks for the DVD represented as being from WW2.  That is about as closes as it comes. 
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 New Britain and Tarawa. Go to the time I have mentioned to locate the incident I am talking about.  To get to the exact scene you may need to go back a little once you get there.  But most scenes are very short so they should be very close to what I have noted. This assumes our  DVD's are identical. If you get it from History Channel it should be the same.  Actually you could just order a DVD of the most violent scenes of battle and it would be as close as the battle scenes on the DVD from the History Channel as far as getting an honest history of the war. 


1:59:31 the fight is in the jungle but the next scene they are out of the jungle and in  a fairly clear area obviously not a jungle.   This scene may be in the film on New Britain and not Tarawa.  Which was a small atoll in the Pacific.  The first battle the Marines had with very heavy casualties.  Consider the fact that a cameraman cant jump around like the scenes in the DVD so they either have to edit what he has shot or take a scene from another battle or even another cameraman in another place..  But as the Army or Marines will not have two cameramen in one place it is obvious what you see has been edited into the film. That then makes it a lie what you are seeing. 
1:57:13   Tarawa.  A big building is shown in the back.  This was an atoll.
1:57:33  another building.  This is an atoll with no buildings.
2:00:04   The soldier narrates a battle but there were no cameras at this battle so the History Channel inserted film from other battles.
2:03:08   Tarawa.  Tank on beach but in the distance is a wooded shoreline on a hill.  Tarawa was only a few feet above sea level
Central Pacific war with only palm trees.
2:23:31.  Cameraman  is first on the beach.    Film shows the landing soldiers go charging off the landing craft but on the horizon there are no other craft. 
2:23:39  Now the scene shifts to the the nice clean beach with several craft landing.   One after another in a row on the beach.
2:32:41  What a landing really looks like.
In my blog Bill s War I show a landing at Southern France of a couple 105 howitzers.  Take a look. 
2:32:31. Again our intrepid cameraman lands ahead of the landing craft and films them rushing off the boat. 
BTW I don't see any advantage of paying 25 bucks for a supposed Blue Ray disk of old 16 mm film.  Some of it very old and all scratched up it had been played so many times. 


Here is a funny thing in the England section. 2:39:54 the camera looks down through the open bomb bay doors on a large city.  Next the bomb's are seen going down but landing in open fields and orchards.  I have seen this several times.  Either it is a bad aim or it is two scenes spliced together.  But I have seen it several times with differing descriptions.  Of course the Air Force aim was pretty bad at times missing by miles.  The British were worse as they bombed by night.  But as they were aiming for an entire city where they hit didn't make much difference. Except for the civilians being blown to hell. 


One last example.  The film show German fighters attacking bombers turning from a raid on Germany. 2:51:34  But there is an ocean in the background. 


This was obviously cut in particularly as these bombers didn't take the picture. Another trick not in this DVD but when you look into the cockpit of a fighter taken by a camera on the wing this is really hilarious The pilot is scowling and gritting his teeth as he pushes the trigger. This is mostly in Hollywood movies but occasionally an over-zealous director will get carried away. 


All producers have the same problem so all documentaries will be fake too.  But for the fun of it I think I will dig up some older documentaries like  Victory at Sea or Crusade in Europe and see how they handled this problem. 

War Documentaries are a scam

War Documentaries are a fraud

Without exception War documentaries are a fraud. It is impossible to film a war and then reassemble it as it happened. The reason is that it is impossible to have a camera where the action is as it happens.

Take this as an example. Lets say that this particular Division has a half dozen cameramen in the division to film the war. I don't know how many the table of operation calls for but I will use 6 just as an example So the battle begins but the problem immediately arises. Where is the action? Almost invariably it is not where the camera is. What you see in documentaries is purely by accident violent action caught by the camera. A documentary by the History Channel stated that only one time were Japanese and American soldiers caught in the same frame of a film. One or the other but not both at one time. This shows the difficulty of filming a war.

What producers do to make a documentary of a war is to cobble together battle scenes from many sources to make the war film they want you to see.

I have listed several ways to look at a film to see fake film

Dub sound in when it was shot with a hand held silent camera as all cameras were in WW2.

Next time a battleship, three or four miles away, shoots and it is instantly recorded you know this is impossible with the silent camera and besides sound travels about 1100 FPS so it would take a while to get to the recorder.

A favorite made in Hollywood  scene is have the camerman supposedly sitting on the wing of a plane going 300mph looking into the cockpit  of a fighter plane.

The camera is looking down on a scene when everybody else is hugging the bottom of a foxhole. This will be fake. The cameraman will also be in the bottom of his foxhole.

Another favorite fake shot is to have the camerman beat the first wave of an assault with a shot of a landing craft coming ashore. Other than beating the assault wave there are no other craft on the horizon. That one seems to be a favorite. Also the soldiers are nice and clean. Not all wrinkled up from sitting in the bottom of a ship for days or weeks.

Almost all of movie scenes of the December 7 attack on Pearl Harbor was made in Hollywood.

Next post will dissect the History Channels WW2 DVD in HD illustrating some of the above examples.



Take a look at Bills war. His widow created a story of his service with the 39th FA in WW2. Find it at http://billswar.blogspot.com
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