Okay, so I was surfing round the teevy tonight and went to the History Channel, like you do, where I found a 'documentary' on the Sherman tank.
Settled in with a large tub of popcorn and a cold one for a dose of history...

What a waste of time.

Even I, as a card carrying Sherman non-expert could spot the outright hooey being spouted by the so called 'experts'.

I never knew that there was a variant of the 'Sherman' called the T14 which became known as the 'Sherman Jumbo' and led tank attacks in Normandy. Allegedly some 250 T14/'Jumbos' made it to Normandy....
And there I was under the impression that the Jumbo post dated the Normandy campaign and was in servioce by August 1944 and intended to breach the Siegfreid Line; also that the T14 was a protoype only...

The 'documentary' talked about the DD tank, illustrated by a pic of a Sherman in US designed boat-like floatation devices which were trialled - not a DD tank, but hey, it's tank inna water, what do the viewing public care...

Apparently the Firefly existed in one version only, powered by a petrol V8 engine and had armour with a maximum thickness of 89mm, despite the 'experts' talking about the first versions of the Sherman serving in the Western Desert having armour of 100mm.

Pics of an HVSS 76mm Sherman on screen when talking about the Firefly...

'Wet Stowage' was when Sherman crews put water around their ammunition bins.

According to the film evidence, the invasion of Sicily looked a lot like the invasion of Normandy - same film of the same landing craft we've seen before, but hey, it's war footage, what do the viewing public care...

M5 Stuarts shown burning while the experts talked about the vulnerability of the Sherman to fire.

Film showing a mismatch of material from different theatres, tanks misidentified constantly, by jingo, they even managed to sneak in some Russian Front footage I'm sure...

Why do we put up with this bollocks?
Surely the film makers must know better (maybe they don't), probably they just don't care...

We're more aware now - or are certainly instructed that we should be - of the sacrifices made by former generations, but the lackadaisacal and frankly slipshod approach to presenting the 'facts' in this particular 'documentary' will do no-one any favours.

If we are to remember the past and learn from it, then we should demand a higher standard of excellence from those who seek to instruct us about it.

I could have made a better job of this show with my limited knowledge, given the resources they obviously had available - but that's 45 minutes gone from my life I'm not getting back.

Yep, I couldn't watch the whole hour...

My head hurts...

acav out

Gday acav
(What if all we have learnt until now is just 'spin', and they have finally tapped into the real archival stuff?) Glad I didn't see it... 'Mock you' mentary more like it :-) Sounds like they alllllmost got the wet stowage right...
Honestly, what did they use as research? As you say, bollocks indeed...
Cheers
Brad

Geez it's enough to make you weep

It does make you think though, if this much mis-information is being put forward in this doco just how much fertilizer are we being feed in other "documentaries" which we have no specific or expert knowledge. Makes you think doesn't it?

Cheers

To me it seem to have been not much more than a big load of mince.....
Documentaries should be entertaining, learning and hold you in a hard grip and not let you go even for a cold beer....
NOT take the piss out.......lol! Glad that I didn't watch it.

I've seen the same type of stuff on the History channel but with aircraft. I remember a show on the P-51 and talking about how it was a good match for the zero while showing gun camera footage of a ME-109 being shot down! You could even see the crosses on the wings plain as day! Anymore I watch the History channel for "entertainment" and not as much for "education". It really is a sad state of affairs.

What I can never understand is why, with all the film that was taken during WWII that they can never find any that matches what they are actually talking about. The one that kills me is that when they will be talking about something later in the war (ie. Battle of the Bulge) and they show that clip of early war Germans in a vehicle pulling an artillery piece and it jumps and bounces through a ditch (I know you guys know the one I am talking about). You can tell just from the uniforms they are wearing that it is early in the war. With all the historians they have on their shows you would think they would at least ask them if what they are showing is even CLOSE.

One of my favorites is when they show the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor......what kind of planes do they show that attack do you think???

Grumman Avenger and Douglas Dauntless!!!



Or the other one that they usually show from the Battle of the Bulge....A tank, a Stug I think with quite a few soldiers riding on passing bye in one direction......a few minutes later in the same program show the same tank but they have turned the film around so it goes in the other direction now instead....
What do you have to say to that??

I know. My wife is a "non-airplane/war geek" and she knows what Dauntlesses are now because every time I see either the Dauntlesses dive bomb the Arizona or that P-40 that strafes the flight line I scream!!!!

I once read that a large percentage of film or maybe it was color film taken right after D-Day sank on its way back home. A mine I think. I watch THC for the pictures not the narration.

The reversed image was of a retreat! :-) :-) :-) :-) :-)

Most of the documentaries are like that. Sorry to say, but usually BBC-made ones are much better.
It's like they have a databank of footage, and everybody uses it. On a documentary in History Channel about the Blitzkrieg you could see the same soldiers shooting at a tank as Polish soldiers agains german tanks, as Russian soldiers during Barbarossa, and as Russian soldiers in Germany.
All this 15 minutes apart. Or the famous P-47 as it destroys an ammunition-carrying train - you can see it in color, in black-and-white, and in 10 different "shows" as P-47, P-51... As it there was no other gun-camera avaliable.
I guess it's easier to make yet another WWII documentary using the ones avaliable. I guess, this is the reason for the reinforced "knowledge" about tanks crashing into each other at Kurks by the thousands. You can see better footage on Youtube. (Like a Sturmtiger fireing.)