redirected from Main.WorldWarTwo
alt title(s): World War Two; Great Patriotic War; W W2; Second World War
Basil: You started it.
German: We did not start it.
Basil: Yes, you did. You invaded Poland!
Disclaimer: What you are about to read consists of a Hollywood History version of WWII. See America Wins The War for some of the problems present here. Viewer discretion advised.
In 1939, the Free World (or
England Britain and France, at least) finally realizes
Nazi Germany, after their
Rise Of Evil puts an end to the
Cabaret of
Weimar Germany, will be satisfied with nothing less than world domination, and the war is on with the German invasion of Poland. They're also imprisoning/killing Jews,
gypsies, Slavs, homosexuals, Communists, Socialists, and handicapped people, and pulling stunts like the
Voyage of the Damned
that revealed how much rest of the world couldn't care less about this tragedy.
Unfortunately, the war goes poorly, with all of mainland Europe falling (except for
neutral Spain and Switzerland), including the Channel Islands, each becoming an
Island At War. Only the miracle of the Dunkirk evacuation allows the British to save most of their troops, and many French ones, to fight another day.
Regardless, Britain finds itself the last stand against Hitler. The Luftwaffe attempts to bomb and terrorize the island into submission. Fortunately, with Prime Minister
Winston Churchill inspiring his people with eloquently defiant vows to never surrender and to face
The Gathering Storm and plucky RAF (Britons plus quite a few other nationalities) pilots giving the Nazis what for in the air, Britain's darkest time becomes its finest hour, giving Germany its first defeat at the
Battle Of Britain and finding reason to have
Hope And Glory, while on the
Home Front, a brave detective fights
Foyles War against German spies and saboteurs even while those villains find themselves outmatched by Britain's secret service, lead by William Stephenson,
The Man Called Intrepid. What's often forgotten in fiction is that the old, underage and otherwise unfit for combat aren't the only ones exempted from military service. Men in certain professions, known as the Reserved Occupations - doctors, farmers, emergency services personnel and so on - who are considered essential to their country are not only excused conscription, they are not
allowed to enlist. Around the country,
Dads Army (the Home Guard, which was made up of the men listed above) prepares to fight in case the Germans come back- as well as manning anti-aircraft guns.
Failing that, Hitler makes the big mistake of invading the Soviet Union, who furiously fight the
Enemy At The Gates (after initially being shocked by the Nazi invasion, as if Hitler hadn't been talking about his desire to destroy Communism and the Soviet Union for the previous 20 years). Meanwhile, America looks on with growing concern, doing everything short of declaring war to help the good guys, such as lending arms to Britain and preparing possible new secret weapons, even as the populace listens to the world events in their
Radio Days.
During this time, the German Luftwaffe is trying to bomb the South of England into the next world, or at least into submission, while the U-Boat fleet is attempting to starve them. Malta manages to hold on despite near-starvation, an act that gets the entire island awarded the George Cross. This is stopped due to the Allies essentially solving
Enigma, the encryption code used for U-Boat communications (as well as the rest of the Wehrmacht), allowing them to continue reading the U-Boats' mail even while they develop effective tactics and weapons against
The Enemy Below to create a special hell of submerged terror and death in
Das Boot. The Allies then proceed to respond by flattening Hamburg and
Dresden, among other cities.
Meanwhile, the
Japanese, already busy with
The Rape Of Nanking and
other parts of China to create their
Empire Of The Sun, decide to fight the USA. This is done over the objections of rational officers like Admiral Yamamato, who know exactly what they would be taking on. However, duty bound to follow his government's impossible task, Yamamato decides the only chance of victory would involve a preemptive strike at the US Navy Pacific Fleet's main base,
Pearl Harbor. His guile (and coincidental American blunders) allow the Japanese to catch the base completely off guard (signalled by the code phrase,
Tora, Tora, Tora), and they deal a massive blow to the Pacific Fleet. However, Admiral Yamamato knows all too well that he has awakened a sleeping giant and filled it with a terrible resolve on a day that would live in infamy. His subordinate Admiral in charge of the mission also misses the biggest targets of all- the US carriers, which are all at sea and the massive fuel tanks at the base whose destruction could have crippled the Pacific Fleet on their own by robbing it of its major refueling station west of California.
Such wisdom escapes Hitler, who then declares war on the USA, clearing the last obstacles for President Roosevelt to have his nation fight all the Axis powers. Americans, and their allies, really start giving the Axis the what-for as their citizens report to the nearest recruitments centers and answer the
Call of Duty. Some of them would go on to earn the
Medal of Honor for exceptional acts of heroism in service to their country.
In North Africa, Gen. Montgomery, with help from Gen.
Patton's
Lust for Glory, manages to beat Rommel,
The Desert Fox and the original
Magnificent Bastard, at his own game at El Alamein. The Allies proceed to attack up the length of Italy, but do not encounter a
Catch-22 situation. Mussolini (who joined the war late and proved to be utterly ineffective) is deposed by his own government and eventually gets his corpse hung upside down in public. Meanwhile, refugees hide in
Casablanca, hoping to catch a flight to Lisbon, and from there, America.
The American military arrive en masse in Britain, where many of the local women decide that these men in nice uniforms are rather more attractive than their own men in not-so-nice uniforms who complain about the Yanks as "Overpaid, Oversexed, Overfed and Over here." The
Memphis Belle and others do their 25 missions, allowing their crews to go home, but many others do not return. The British bomber crews, meanwhile, continue well past 25, though getting regular leaves of absence anyway.
The climactic moment in the European Theater is the invasion of Normandy, the biggest seaborne invasion ever attempted. After
The Longest Day, it's a steady stream of advancing for the
Band Of Brothers' to Germany, if occasionally dealt setbacks like when Gen. Montgomery's reckless Operation Market Garden found itself
A Bridge Too Far. Meanwhile during these hopeful days against an empire built on murderous hate, American minorities get to
Go for Broke!, showing what they can contribute as equal citizens such as the African American
Tuskegee Airmen who destroy all doubts that they are among the supreme warriors of the air. During this period, Hitler launches his V-1 and V-2 rockets at Britain. His earlier plan to make nuclear weapons is stopped by
The Heroes of Telemark, among others.
Meanwhile, thousands of miles away, Hitler goes completely off his rocker. He takes the Wannsee Conference's
Conspiracy suggestions to take the
Holocaust to its twistedly logical end and orders the Final Solution — the wholesale extermination of "undesirables" in his empire even when the military resources used are desperately needed against enemies who really threaten him. At this point, as millions are murdered, a handful of caring people like Raoul Wallenberg, Oskar Schindler (with
Schindler's List), and the heroes of the White Rose decide they must risk their lives to fight this insanity. A considerable number of Jews end up in
The Hiding Place too. Somewhere between six and eleven million people are killed for the "crime" of existing. Meanwhile, a cadre of seniors officers and politicians risk everything in one final grand,desperate and failed attempt to assassinate Hitler using Operation
Valkyrie to overthrow the government
The Red Army proceeds to fight its way across Eastern Europe, lob more Katyusha rockets than you shake a stick at against the Wehrmacht, and liberate Auschwitz. Some of them then rape, pillage and murder their way through Berlin before the senior ranks put a stop to it, just the whole Red Army causes Hitler's
Downfall as he eats a bullet during the Battle of Berlin. The war between the Germans and the Soviets involves far more soldiers, tanks, assorted hardware, and massive civilian deaths than the war in the West, but neither side speaks English so the whole thing is rather uninteresting to many of those who do. In those final days of European victory, the death camps are revealed to all and the free world finally realizes to its horror the true depravity of the enemy they have been fighting; changing the Nazis from merely the enemy to the embodiment of evil itself.
During all of this, the
Secret Army that are the many resistances across Europe give a fatal
Allo Allo to many an Axis soldier in
Defiance of their rule, with the help of many
Female Agents. Some of the Allied POWs attempt
The Great Escape, while some of the others end up in
Colditz and
Stalag 17.
Meanwhile, in the Pacific Theatre, the Americans strike back at least symbolically as the famed Doolittle Raid spends
30 Seconds over Tokyo to spook the Japanese with the fact they can be directly attacked at the height of their power. To prevent a repeat, the Japanese conquer still more of Southeastern Asia and Pacific Islands, dangerously overstretching themselves. Thus they pay the price at
Midway when the US Navy, with the help of extremely adept American codebreakers learning their enemy's every move, deals a devastating blow to the Japanese Navy to turn the tide of the war. Then it's a furious island by island fight with the climax being the invasion of
The Sands of Iwo Jima where Marines, with their communications shielded by
Windtalkers, put up
The Flag of Our Fathers on Mount Suribachi while their doomed Japanese foes send
Letters from Iwo Jima. Meanwhile, the Allies learned to their astonishment just how far the Japanese would go to defend their lands when they resorted to the infamous kamikaze suicide attacks, using barely trained zealots piloting either old bomb laden planes, or the deadly fast Ohka suicide rocket planes..
The Japanese Army is stopped at the gates of India by the British, who push them back into China, where all sides in the decades old civil war gang up on the common foe. Meanwhile, the Japanese blithely ignore something called the Geneva Conventions (seeing as they hadn't ratified at this time, and neither had America...) ever existed and inhumanly enslave Allied POWs to do things like building
The Bridge On The River Kwai. By contrast, Axis prisoners are stunned to discover that the prison camps, which strictly follow the conventions
*cough*, are so much
more comfortable than their own side's barracks. They mostly decide that it's rather stupid to escape such great digs.
During the final defeat of the Third Reich, new American recruits have the
Biloxi Blues training for a near certain death mission to invade Japan itself. As it happens, President Truman, at whom the buck stops, decides to use the results of the top secret Manhattan Project as a trump card and drops the nuclear bombs, codenamed
Fat Man and Little Boy (the former unable to hug the latter with nuclear arms) on Japan. The Japanese very quickly decide they'd better surrender if their enemy is
that determined to turn their island into a radioactive crater. And thus,
Godzilla is born.
About nine months after the end of the war is declared and millions of tired young men return to home life, a lot of babies are born, for some inexplicable reason.
Many of the Nazis then receive their
Judgement at Nuremberg, with the exceptions of Hitler (who ate a bullet), Goebbels (who ate
cyanide), Himmler (who did the same), Goering/Göring (who may have got his cyanide from out of his backside) and Bormann (who was killed while trying to escape Berlin — whether that killing was by his own hand or someone else's is a matter of debate).
Thanks to a secret deal at Yalta, the Red Army gets to occupy
Ruritania on the condition that they hold free elections. They don't, and the
Cold War begins. Germany ends up divided into two, with
West Germany becoming an economic powerhouse and
East Germany becoming a police state.
Meanwhile, Japan finds that US occupation is surprisingly bearable under an enemy more merciful and magnanimous than it ever imagined and they regain both their independence and economic viability within a decade, and shows their appreciation for the west by inventing
Hentai and the
Hadaka Apron.
Montgomery, meanwhile, shan't return.
Note: The Popular
Theme Park Version of
World War II begins appearing in movies made even before the War itself has ended. According to most
Hollywood History,
World War II is:
- Home to Sergeant Rock and his squad of anachronistically integrated dog-soldiers who hail from every corner of America and who somehow manage to get along despite their great differences. Expect at least one member of the group to be really proud of his family at home and pass pictures of them around at every opportunity (expect him to die in the next battle). Also expect one of them to be a total coward who continuously mutters something about "having a bad feeling about the next battle", and who passes notes to his peers with the instructions to send them to his family after he gets killed (expect this guy to be the only surviving member of the group when the war is over).
- Expect most of them to a) really miss their girl and/or b) have a lot of pin-up pictures in their possession.
- If you're not an American or British soldier at this time, you're probably living in Nazi-occupied Europe, where black-clad Gestapo officers lurk around every corner, asking for your papers,
please, and members of the Resistance dart bravely from shadow to shadow. If you live in Continental Europe and you're Jewish, Slavic, Gypsy, gay, or anyone else on The Theme Park Version Nazi Holocaust hit list, you will be Massively Screwed in every way possible. Falling afoul of Stalinism is equally undesirable.
- This also may the single most popular setting for video games, especially First Person Shooters. It's also probably the most recent war most game developers believe people feel comfortable being patriotic about. Of course, this can only be done if you ignore the fact that the democratic nations were effectively on the same side as the Stalinist Soviet Union, albeit to fight against dictatorships popularly agreed at the time to be a greater threat. Although unrelated to the war, there's also to remember America's policies and behavior towards its blacks and other minorities - and the eugenics program that Germany copied from them in the '30s. Of course, it was fighting enemies who took those policies to their monstrous extreme, even if it took decades afterwards to wake up most people (in and out of America) to their wrongness.
- The SS is evil pretty much to a man. Other members of the Wehrmacht vary in their evilness.
- If you're British, the war in Japan isn't happening. British works tend to ignore the Far East, although there are some very notable exceptions.
- Expect little to no mention of Soviet front. After all, with the Cold war going on, it didn't seem like a good idea to glorify your enemies.
Of course, the
Second World War had a massive impact on history (so much so it is subject to
Hitlers Time Travel Exemption Act), leading to the collapse of colonialism and the beginning of the
Cold War. As
Back Story, it appears in a
huge number of works,
Inside Man being a particularly recent example, and
Godzilla being one of the more famous.
Unlike the
First World War, which was a power struggle set on by Imperialism, the Second is seen as a spectacular clash of good and evil, with all the appropriate tropes. Starting with Hitler as
The Dark Lord, it's easy to squeeze all the other pieces into place. Turn the realism down a notch, and we get
Stupid Jetpack Hitler.
Popular tropes for this time period are:
Works set in this time period are:
Film
A complete list can be found
here
A number of the works below cover multiple categories and are grouped according to their main setting.
Quite a few of these film titled were shoehorned into the above paragraph.
The Pacific Front
Most of the works here focus on the American and Japanese part in the Far East, although Commonwealth forces also played a major role.
This war features big naval battles (most famously Midway) and a lot of fighting in jungles.
- Tora! Tora! Tora!
- The Pacific (Currently in production with HBO, Steven Speilberg, and Tom Hanks)
- Pearl Harbor
- Sands Of Iwo Jima
- Midway
- The Thin Red Line, although the title refers originally to a small Scottish force in the Crimean War
- The Bridge On The River Kwai
- Grave Of The Fireflies
- Flag Of Our Fathers
- Empire of the Sun
- Letters From Iwo Jima
- Kokoda, Australian soldiers in Papua (New Guinea)
- Windtalkers
The Eastern Front
The bloodiest theatre of the war (the number of deaths there alone- over 25 million- would make the Eastern Front the worst war in history in its own right). Has been covered in film quite a bit (the Soviet film industry apparently made scores of them), but most of the examples aren't that well known outside of Eastern Europe. In most of the former USSR, this front is referred to as "The
Great Patriotic War".
- That's because WW 2 started in 1939 when first Nazi Germany, and then the Soviet Union, invaded Poland. The Great Patriotic War started in 1941, thus avoiding the whole embarrassing business of the Hitler-Stalin Pact.
It is common to see Germans in comedic works threatened with being sent to the Eastern Front- it was essentially total war. Saw the sieges of Leningrad and Stalingrad, for a start. Also many real-life cases of the
Macross Missile Massacre, the "Katyusha" multiple rocket launcher was designed for this purpose.
- Enemy at the Gates
- Cross of Iron
- Stalingrad
- Downfall
The Finnish Front
A special case of the above, covering the struggles of the Winter War of 1939-40 and the Continuation war of 1941-44. Has been depicted several times on film, but these films are little known outside Finland.
- Kukushka/The Cuckoo, a Russian film.
- Tuntematon Sotilas/The Unknown Soldier, based on a novel by war veteran Vainö Linna. Two versions exist, one from 1955 and another made 30 years later.
- Talvisota, a Finnish film set in the Winter War
The Western Front
The fighting around northern and western Europe, where the Americans play a large role. The British, Canadians and Free French (as well as a considerable number of other nationalities) were involved, but
they tend to be forgotten in US films. The early part of the war, from the invasion of Poland to the fall of France is rarely depicted.
Expecting fighting in trees, French villages and
some very grateful Frenchwomen.
- Saving Private Ryan
- Band of Brothers
- The Longest Day
- A Bridge Too Far
- Atonement has a considerable section covering the evacuation of Dunkirk.
- Eye Of The Needle where a Nazi spy discovers the Allies are pulling a king sized fast one with Operation Fortitude on Germany to hide the true invasion destination for D-Day.
- Kelly's Heroes
North Africa/Italy
Initially, just between the Commonwealth, Italy, and other independent nations. Later, the Germans (led by Rommel) and the Americans also take part.
An area of desert tank warfare, it also saw the creation of the SAS and the work of the Long Range Desert Group.
Famous for the presence of
two very quirky but effective generals, George S. Patton and Bernard "Monty" Montgomery.
Southern Europe
Greece, Yugoslavia etc.
- Captain Corelli's Mandolin
- The Guns of Navarone
Germany, especially the fall of Berlin
- Downfall
- Hitler: The Last Ten Days
- The Bunker
The Air War
In which the two sides of the war try to bomb each other into submission. A far chunk of these are British and a number are based on true stories.
The Blitz, which followed the Battle of Britain, was a German attempt to bomb the UK into surrendering, which didn't really work. The Battle of Britain had been a close run thing, as the British had spent much of the 1930s not investing in their fighter force as they had believed "the bomber will always get through". It took
Winston Churchill to persuade them otherwise- the Spitfire and the Hurricane arriving just in time.
The Blitz largely occurred in 1940-1941 and 1944-1945, the latter mostly using V1 and V2 missiles. There were more minor attacks on the United Kingdom during 1941-1944, but Hitler was focusing on the USSR.
While the actions of the Allied bombing missions in Germany have been subject to quite a bit of historical debate (although the bombing of civilians was actually legal at that time and there were legitimate industrial targets in German cities, it did not have the planned effect of destroying German industry or morale- it made them more resolved), it should be noted that these bombing raids were very dangerous for British airmen. They flew at night, unlike the USAAF (US Army Air Force) who did the day missions. Of every 100 airmen, 55 on average would end up dead. The issue of not awarding separate medals for the British Bomber Command crews (who got the Air Crew Europe star that everyone else who flew over Europe did) is raised from time to time.
With regards to the USAAF missions, there was a policy of "25 and out". Once an airman had done 25 missions, his war was over. The ball turret gunner, despite not having a parachute close to hand and being exposed to ground fire, wasn't actually that dangerous, relatively speaking. Just unpleasant, as they ended up doing somersaults in a cold, tiny metal ball looking at a really long drop. The 25 got upped to 30 and then 35. The average crew got shot down around Mission 20.
Submarines / The Battle of the Atlantic
In which the German U-boats try to starve Britain into submission. Plus stop equipment getting to the Allies. The subs (on both sides) are hot, cramped and nasty. In fact, calling them submarines is slightly inaccurate, considering that most of their time was spent on the surface.
Three-quarters of those who went out in the U-boats did not return.
- Das Boot— a German movie.
- U-571
- Enigma
- We Dive at Dawn — a British movie made in 1942, set on a British submarine.
The Americans did their own sub warfare against Japan, which DID succeed in starving the Japanese.
The early years of the war in the Atlantic also saw some combat between surface ships, in particular the raids of German battleships
Graf Spee and
Bismarck.
- The Battle of the River Plate
- Sink the Bismarck!
- The Sea Chase
La Resistance/ Special Forces
- The Heroes Of Telemark
- Casablanca
- The Dirty Dozen
- Female Agents
- Defiance
- Where Eagles Dare
- The Guns of Navarone
- Force 10 from Navarone
POW Movies
The Germans
generally kept the Geneva Conventions with regards to US, UK and French prisoners, although by the end in the war they were seriously considering throwing the Conventions out of the window, with the Allied bombing raids as the excuse. Geneva had never so much as been in the building when it came to the Slavic peoples- captured Red Army personnel ended up in the death camps and
those who survived often ended up in The Gulag when they returned.
You did not want to fall into the hands of the Japanese. Full stop.
The Holocaust
- Schindlers List
- The Pianist
- La vita č bella
- Amen
- Judgement at Nuremberg (not actually about the actual trial of the key Nazis, it's a fictional tale based on the Judges' Trial and a real life case).
- The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas
Other
Things that don't really fit elsewhere:
- Saboteur (essentially The Thirty-Nine Steps set in America)
- The Brylcreem Boys (combatants from both sides in a POW camp in neutral Ireland)
- Hope and Glory, a rather sunny movie set in London during the Blitzkrieg
- The Chronicles of Narnia, at least at the very beginning
- Settling Accounts (Harry Turtledove Alternate History pitting the USA against the Confederate States of America; CSA president Jake Featherston is pretty much Hitler in all but name. What minority is he wiping out in the death camps? Confederate Negroes).
- Also by Harry Turtledove, the Darkness series, which is WWII set in a fantasy environment, with each side replaced with a Fantasy Counterpart Culture and magic wands and dragons instead of guns and bombers.
- Norman Rockwell was famous for his paintings of young men livin' the good life in the military, presumably to assure parents of soldiers that yes, Johnny will come marching home again.
- The Cobra Days, a fan webcomic prequel to the Metal Gear Solid series. It chronicles the adventures of a very quirky Allied Special Forces Multinational Team, with plenty of Magic Realism and other weirdness that didn't quite make it into the history books.
- The Wing Commander novelizations are explicitly intended as sci-fi remakes of certain key points in WW 2.
- The Others a ghost movie set on the Channel Island, Jersey during the German occupation
Literature
- The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe: The Film Of The Book turns a single sentence mentioning the Pevensie kids being sent to live in the country "because of the air raids" into a dangerous scene that takes place right in the middle of the London Blitz.
- Something of a reality to that- there was a second evacuation of vulnerable Londoners during the Blitz as many had returned after the initial feared raids hadn't materialised.
- The Len Deighton novel City of Gold, set in North Africa. Also Bomber. Also SS-GB which is about what it would be if England was occupied.
- Jack Higgins has written quite a few.
- Catch-22, set in Italy.
- Robert Ludlum has a few too.
- Dean Koontz' Lightning at least, that's Stefan's time period of origin and where various pivotal events take place. Other events range from 1955 to 1988.
- Disney's Bedknobs and Broomsticks, featuring an invasion of England.
- Poul Anderson's alternate history Operation Chaos. In fact, one of the first things the narrator says is, better too much information than too little, and if you already know who won World War II, let me say it anyhow. Turns out you don't even know who fought World War II or where. (The timelines diverged early in the twentieth century.)
- Jane Yolen's fairytale adaption "Briar Rose" is one of these. Definitely falls under True Art Is Angsty, even if it doesn't COMPLETELY manage a Downer Ending.
- Also, Number the Stars
- Anne Frank's diary, coincidentally.
- The English Patient, set mostly in Italy and North Africa, with a bit of Britain, India, and Canada.
- Cryptonomicon.
Live Action TV
Theater
- Imagine This- a musical set in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942.
Video Games
Western Animation
Comic Books
- Captain America punched Hitler in his very first issue. Most Golden Age superheroes, since they were published during the war, fought Nazis at some point.
- This was lampshaded in Watchmen. In an Easter Egg during the course of the novel we learn that The Comedian saw action in his masked identity against the Japanese in the South Pacific in 1942.
- The Desert Peach is a well-researched comic you've probably never heard of based in Africa, about the Desert Fox's fictional gay younger brother.
- Snoopy from Peanuts showed up a few times; Charles Schulz (himself having been in the military in this time) had these show up around 06 June during the later years.
Tabletop Games
- Axis & Allies essentially takes World War II and puts it into a Risk-like form.
- Flames of War - only covering the European and African parts of the war though.
- Weird War is like Deadlands, only during WWII. Werewolves of the SS included.
- In the 1960s through the 1980s, Avalon Hill and SPI thrived on tabletop games about WWII: Third Reich, Afrika Korps, Patton's War, Midway, Battle of the Bulge, and a zillion others
Anime
Real Life
- It actually did happen. Ask your grandparents or great-grandparents, if you have 'em.
