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alt title(s): World War Two; Great Patriotic War; W W2; Second World War
Carl: I don't get it. What's so "great" about this depression?
Lenny: I like how everything's in sepia tone. Makes me all nostalgic.
Abe: I didn't think it would come to this when I fought in the
First World War.
Lenny: "First World War"? Why do you keep calling it that?
Abe: Oh, you'll see!
—
The Simpsons, Treehouse of Horror XVII: "The Day The Earth Looked Stupid"
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 1918,
World War I ends, and everyone breathes a sigh of relief that "The War To End All Wars" is over and we can all go back to peacetime. The sigh of relief is justified: more than 38
million soldiers were killed or wounded over the course of the four-year war: in other words, more soldiers died than quite a few countries had
people. Oh, and that's not counting
any civilian deaths. The reason so many people died is because military tactics had by and large not kept up with technological advances, particularly trench warfare and
machine guns. This resulted in battles which were won primarily by
throwing 10,000 soldiers at a machine gun and hoping some of them would live through the transit. On occasion, some actually would. The Allied Powers, thankful that they didn't have to do stuff like this anymore, set up some humiliating rules and laws, particularly in Germany where many German towns, filled with German people who wanted to
stay German, are annexed into other nations. However, the Allied rulers figure this should be enough, and go home.
They are wrong. Germany, at the very least, has no intention of allowing itself to remain so emasculated. Under the guidance of a new political organization, the Nazi party, and its charismatic leader
Adolf Hitler, they re-arm and re-organize (in direct violation of the Treaty of Versailles), and eventually roll in hot, determined to relieve the shame of their humiliation. Yes,
WW 1 led
directly into
WW 2 in some ways.
By 1939, the Free World (or
England Britain and France, at least) finally realizes
Nazi Germany, after their decade-long
Rise Of Evil puts an end to the
Cabaret of
Weimar Germany, will be satisfied with nothing less than
World Domination, as evidenced by the German invasion of Poland. They've also begun killing all Jews,
gypsies, Slavs, homosexuals 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. Hitler also tries getting his hands on the Ark of the Covenant, the Holy Grail, the lost city of Atlantis and the Black Pearl of China, but is each time thwarted by
Indiana Jones.
Unfortunately, the war goes poorly, despite the efforts of Canadian superspy
The Red Panda, with all of mainland Europe being conquered (except for Portugal,
Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland, who remained neutral; Finland, which had its own beef with the
Soviet Union and allied itself loosely with Germany despite being very much democratic; and Italy and the Balkans, whose fascist regimes allied with Nazi Germany), 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.
As Europe is subjugated, Britain finds itself the last stand against Hitler. The Luftwaffe attempts to carpet bomb and terrorize the island into submission. Fortunately, with Prime Minister
Winston Churchill inspiring his people with eloquently defiant vows to
never give up, never surrender and to face
The Gathering Storm and plucky RAF pilots, Britons as well as quite a few other nationalities giving the Nazis a living hell 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. On the
Home Front, brave detectives fight
Foyles War against German spies and saboteurs even while those villains find themselves outmatched by Britain's secret service, led 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.
Millions Like Us, mostly women, work in factories providing planes, tanks, weapons and other supplies for the troops.
Failing to bring Britain down, 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). This genocidal and destructive war lays waste to most of the Soviet Union west of Moscow, and the Russian male population still hasn't fully recovered today. 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 the Soviet Union, 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. This forces the four Pevensie children to head to the countryside to embark on
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. However, British boffins figure out what makes the German night bombing raids so effective, and manage to bend the German Knickebein (" Crooked Leg") guidance radio beams a little more, so that while the Germans are thinking they're repeating their Coventry effort, they're actually mostly bombing farmland. 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
read 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 also respond by flattening Hamburg, and later on
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 (and goes on to become
Tom Waits' birthday). Yamamoto's 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. Those who get captured are imprisoned in
Slaughterhouse Five with
Hogans Heroes, unless they make
The Great Escape.
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 (
He read his BOOK). The Allies, given an advantage by
The Man Who Never Was, 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 once
The D-Day Dodgers start moving up the boot. Meanwhile, refugees hide in
Casablanca, and wait and wait and wait and wait, 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 Canadians show up, too, and that's how
Eric Clapton was born. 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, the Germans launch their V-1 and V-2 rockets at Britain and the liberated parts of Belgium. Hitler's earlier plan to make nuclear weapons is stopped by
The Heroes of Telemark, among others.
It is then, thousands of miles away, that Hitler goes completely off his rocker. He takes the Wannsee Conference's
Conspiracy suggestions to take the
Holocaust to its extreme end and orders the Endlösung, the Final Solution — the wholesale imprisonment and extermination of "undesirables" at complexes such as
SS Experiment Camp and
SS Hell Camp in his empire even when the military resources used are desperately needed against enemies who really threaten him. Even worse, if you are selected by those complexes' doctors like Josef Mengele, aka "The Angel of Death," or
Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS, you will be
begging for the gas chambers. The
Gestapo's Last Orgy is another thing you wouldn't want to be a part of. Bruno befriends
The Boy In The Striped Pajamas, and is
subsequently accidentally gassed.
The Pianist only narrowly escapes. Amidst it all, the RSHA and SS attempt to destabilize the British economy with fake bank notes forged by
The Counterfeiters, as they have been tricked into doing by
Private Schulz. 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 (particularly Sophie Scholl and her brother, both of whom probably qualify as saints) decide they must risk their lives to fight this genocidal 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. Alas, they fail, but the
Inglourious Basterds don't. The brave pigeon
Valiant, meanwhile, seeks to become a member of Britain's Royal Homing Pigeon Service.
The Red Army proceeds to defeat the Germans and fight its way across Eastern Europe, raining Katyusha rockets on the Wehrmacht and liberating Auschwitz. They pillage, rape and slaughter their way through Germany, all the way to Berlin. Especially sexual violence was used as a weapon against civilians. Four fascist libertines, sensing that their power is soon to wane, order the abduction of eighteen teenagers and subject them to
120 Days of Sodom. The invading Red Army causes Hitler's
Downfall, and he commits suicide during the final days of the Battle of Berlin. The war between the Germans and the Russians involves far more soldiers, tanks and civilian deaths than every other war in human history put together, but neither side speaks English so the whole thing is rather uninteresting to many of those who do. In the 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 start to strike back. Symbolically at first 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 take 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.
The Japanese Army is stopped at the gates of India by the British, who push them back into China,
where all sides in the decade-old civil war unite against the common enemy. Meanwhile, the Japanese 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. Canadian soldiers in Japanese POW camps don't have it so easy.
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 final weapon and drops the nuclear bombs, codenamed
Fat Man and Little Boy (the former unable to hug the latter with nuclear arms) on Japan. The shocked Japanese quickly decide to surrender if their enemy will bomb their island into a radioactive crater. And as a result of the radiation,
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 Nazi leaders then receive their
Judgment at Nuremberg, with the exceptions of Adolf Hitler (who ate a bullet), Josef Goebbels (who made his kids
eat cyanide before shooting his wife and then himself), Himmler (who ate cyanide), Hermann Göring (who ate the cyanide he stored in his rectum) and Martin Bormann (who was shot while escaping Berlin —
or was he?). Eichmann escaped to Argentina but was tracked down by Israeli agents and tried about 20 years later.
Thanks to a secret deal at Yalta, the Red Army gets to occupy
Ruritania on the condition that they hold free elections. They refuse, imposing military dictatorships instead, and so the
Cold War gradually begins, with Russia as the first major Communist power. Germany ends up divided into two, with
West Germany becoming an economic powerhouse and
East Germany becoming a Soviet-controlled police state. Poland, whose pilots flew alongside the British and Americans and whose soldiers fought as part of the Allied forces, finds itself moving from being under Nazi occupation to under Soviet occupation - whilst the Americans and British shuffle their feet and make apologetic sounds...
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. In China, the Communists and Nationalists start fighting again, until the Communists later win, making China the second major Communist power.
Montgomery, meanwhile, shan't return.
Note: The Popular
Theme Park Version of WWII begins appearing in movies made even before the War itself has ended. According to most
Hollywood History, WWII 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 FirstPersonShooters. 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 Waffen SS is evil pretty much to a man. Other members of the Wehrmacht vary in their evilness. How is the Waffen SS being ruthless and evil inaccurate?
- 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 — The Bridge on the River Kwai and King Rat (both, by the way, written by people who experienced that part of the War firsthand) spring to mind...
- Expect little to no mention of the 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
Hitler's Time Travel Exemption Act), leading to the collapse of colonialism and the beginning of the Cold War.
It killed about 50 million people, about 2% of the world's population at that time. Poland lost a seventh of its population and the USSR lost 26 million citizens. The Commonwealth, however, actually had less deaths than in
World War One.
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 paragraphs.
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 (primarily the ANZAC forces, for obvious reasons).
This war features big naval battles (most famously Midway) and a lot of fighting in jungles.
- Tora! Tora! Tora!
- The Pacific (Currently in post-production with HBO, Steven Spielberg, and Tom Hanks. Scheduled to air in March 2010 on HBO. Described as "Band Of Brothers, except with Marines and in the Pacific Theater.")
- 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 - a rare western view from the Japanese perspective
- Kokoda, Australian soldiers in Papua (New Guinea)
- Windtalkers
- South Pacific
- They Were Expendable
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, as 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.
Christopher Lee volunteered to fight here, but never actually saw any combat on it.
- Kukushka/The Cuckoo, a Russian film.
- Tuntematon Sotilas/The Unknown Soldier, based on a novel by war veteran Väinö 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, primarily because much of it involved people sitting around in Western Europe.
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 fair 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.
This campaign started pretty much on day one- a German U-boat mistook a passenger liner for an armed merchant ship due to the fact its running lights were off...
You get the idea.
Three-quarters of those who went out in the U-boats did not return.
- Das Boot— a German movie.
- U-571—an American movie, based on a British sub crew.
- Enigma
- We Dive at Dawn — a British movie made in 1942, set on a British submarine.
- Lifeboat — an Alfred Hitchcock movie made in 1943, involving the survivors of a sunk merchant ship.
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
Most people tend to focus on the French Resistance, but the Greeks and Poles did a very good job too. The Yugoslav partisans were actually so good at their job, they actually effectively liberated their country themselves, before the Red Army could get there.
- The Heroes Of Telemark
- Casablanca
- The Dirty Dozen
- Female Agents
- Defiance
- Where Eagles Dare
- The Guns of Navarone
- Force 10 from Navarone
- Inglourious Basterds
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.
The Holocaust
- Schindler's List
- The Pianist
- La vita è 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 Pajamas
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 fictional 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
- Snow Treasure by Marie Mcswigan is based on a true story about a bunch of Norwegian kids that snuck their country's gold past Nazis in the winter of 1939-1940 and adults who got it to America.
- Anne Frank's diary, coincidentally.
- The English Patient, set mostly in Italy and North Africa, with a bit of Britain, India, and Canada.
- Cryptonomicon.
- The Barrett Tillman novel Dauntless set during Midway. One character killed during the story is the father of Bud Callaway, President in his earlier novel The Sixth Battle.
- Atonement, or about two-thirds of the story - set in Dunkirk and the English homefront.
Live Action TV
Theater
- Imagine This- a musical set in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942.
Video Games
- Battlefield 1942
- Wolfenstein 3D
- Medal Of Honor
- Call Of Duty (Call of Duty 4 and Modern Warfare 2 fast-forward to Twenty Minutes Into The Future)
- Company of Heroes
- Hearts of Iron
- Silent Hunter (I through IV) - Not that Silent Hunter...
- Ace Combat Zero starts out as a metaphor for World War II, until things take a twist for the weird toward the end.
- Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin is set in 1944, mentions World War II, and the cutscene preceeding the boss battle with Medusa shows a petrified troop (don't ask how they got in Dracula's castle, let alone in one of Brauner's portraits), though other than that, WWII has little relevance to the plot.
- Valkyria Chronicles is blatantly based heavily off of WWII, comeplte with the attempted genocide of religious people.
- Battlestations Midway and the sequel Battlestations Pacific both cover aerial and naval warfare with the Japanese.
- Battlestations Pacific features a new What If scenario for the Japanese; what if they'd won the battle at Midway and proceeded on to attack the United States?
- Operation Darkness (World War II WITH WEREWOLVES AND VAMPIRE NAZIS!)
- Sierra Online's "Aces" line, consisting of Aces of the Pacific (Pacific air war), Aces Over Europe (European air war), and Aces of the Deep (Battle of the Atlantic, from a U-boat viewpoint).
- A bunch of Microprose games covered various aspects of World War II, from the submarine and air campaigns in both oceans, to the land war in Europe and northern Africa.
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
