Watching the war

SBS has, for a long time, been the place to go to watch documentaries about World War 2, particularly on Friday nights.

As it happens, I don't really care for the current series "Apocalypse - The Second World War" because it's one of those with a hysterical sounding narration*, and a gruesomely high body count that makes it unsuitable to watch with my son. (He really likes history, inspired by the Horrible History series of books, and probably already retains more knowledge about certain periods of British history than I can recall. He is usually happy to watch any documentary about war that's on.)

But the reason for mentioning this is to note that SBS2 has also been showing a lot of WWII documentaries. They are not new, and may well have been on SBS1 years ago, but I've been happy to catch up with them anyway.

This week, there was one that was just about the Japanese surrender at the end of the war, and featured as its most lengthy section footage of MacArthur and the other Allies signing the surrender instrument with the Japanese on the USS Missouri. It was a fascinating minor detail of history to learn about the mistake made by the Canadian representative (who signed on the wrong line, which meant those below him also did.) There was then a bit of a agitated discussion with the Japanese as to whether they would accept the document signed this way. It was amended by hand and initialled. The Wikipedia entry about the document is here.

Another recent SBS2 doco from a few years ago was about the Nazi's attempt to get heavy water to Germany to conduct research into an atomic bomb. It included an expedition to retrieve a barrel from the boat (which had been sunk by the allied operatives) to double check whether the Nazis had actually sent a decoy barrel. (Turns out they didn't.)

Anyhow, this is just a pointer to anyone in Australia looking for interesting stuff on TV. Don't overlook SBS2.


* yes, I know, hysteria may be an appropriate response to certain things that happened then, but it still puts me off in narration. But they do show many scenes of death which are disturbing to say the least. Last week, they dealt briefly with Jews being killed in Russia, and showed some film of this incident:

The most notorious one – perhaps one of the single most infamous events of World War II – was the execution of more than 33,000 Jews from Ukraine’s capital Kiev, at the ravine of Babi Yar on 29-30 November 1941.

Such stuff still has the capacity to make me feel sick.