Posted on 11/10/2013 8:10:19 AM PST by virgil283
"... two videos taken from the German side during WWII. The imagery, having been colorized, is remarkable."....(This author seems to have revisionist tendencies, so this is posted for the videos only.) about 2 min. each.
(Excerpt) Read more at kennsvideos.blogspot.com ...
I like your point that it’s “film.” From all I’ve seen, both sides shot photographic film and there’s no indication that either used any video tape, practical video tape being an invention that was to come in the 1950s. Indeed, all of the color pictures of Kennedy and his assassination that I’ve seen are film, not video tape. Really good color video that can compete with film is only a fairly recent invention.
Turning to colorization, some of these films look like they were colorized. However, pre WWII Germany had the world’s finest photographic industry, an industry that developed and produced a great deal of practical color film before any other country’s. If you’re as fascinated by pre WWII pictures of Germany and Hitler as i am, you will come across many good movies and stills in color. Thus, I suspect that many of the really good looking clips from these two films were genuine color and not colorized.
Well, the poster may call it video but it is pretty obvious film footage. Some of it even looks handcranked. And some looks like old Sven Hassel footage.
Transfered to video.
The British considered joining the Finnish in their Winter war against Russia.
People mixing the terms video and film drives me crazy.
I’ve worked with 60s era 2 inch quadarplex machines and to get a playback with good tape stock took about 30 minutes or so including scraping the tapes, usually twice. That doesn’t count the 24 hour warmup period I did which helped immensely.
The quad needed compressed air so the air bearing that the heads were on would spin. Air was the only way that a video head system would turn fast enough.
Leon DeGralle and his group...dont know if spelling correct but.
What they did was unreal.
In spades. What always gets me is his decision to declare war on the US. I'm hearing that he did so in the "hope" that Japan would, in turn, attack Russia, not realizing their aims were to the south.
My own feeling, being a kid and listening to the adults at that time, was that America was SO pist at the Japs, that, had Hitler held off, there would have been a tremendous pressure on Roosevelt to take care of Japan first and to Hell with Europe.
What sticks in my mind was an incident in England where Gen. DeGaulle was giving a speech, when someone burst into the room, breathlessly exclaiming that Hitler had declared war on the US. Not missing a beat, DeGaulle said, "Then we have won the war." Mind you, these were in pretty grim backs-to-the-wall days, and the audience was stunned at the apparent lunacy of that statement. DeGaulle expanded, and said that the flood of productive capacity of America would drown the Germans.
[off topic] When I was a kid, a veteran told me he was talking with a Russian officer as overflights of aircraft were blotting out the sky, and he mentioned that they were doing the same to the Japs. The Russian was wide-eyed in wonderment of a country that could field that much equipment on two fronts.
At about 2:37 on the first reel it looks like that Kraut is shooting a Tommy Gun, probably a captured model.
Thanks for giving your experience. I’m a retired lawyer who graduated from law school in 1967, which puts me straddling both sides of the massive technological revolution that moved us from film to video and mechanical word processing and data manipulation to electronic. You clearly were far more into the actual technological side than I was. My comments were more as an observer and lay user than someone who was actually into the daily developments. Looks like my informed layman’s observations were fairly well on target.
“However, pre WWII Germany had the world’s finest photographic industry,”
They were on the cutting edge of audio recording as well. They pioneered magnetic tape.
The thing that surprised me about Leni Reifenstahl’s two epic movies, “Triumph of the Will” and “Olympia,” is that, even though she had Hitler’s total, enthusiastic support, she didn’t make them in color. IMHO color just makes all the difference and comes a lot closer to showing how things were.
ping
My dad was in France during the war and he always said they should have left the Germans in France at the end of the war because they would clean it up!
Hitler brought on the war, but in a sense he was our biggest asset. What a maroon!
The US public wasn’t “down” with the Germany-first policy articulated after the first meetings of FDR and Churchill, as Japan had been the aggressor. FDR’s attempt to entangle us by German sinkings of convoy ships didn’t catch hold of the American public. The Russians shifted 70 divisions out of the Far East to hurl against Operation Barbarrossa and figuratively speaking didn’t fire a shot against the Japanese until 1945.
The British laid track and set aside training areas for an eventual cross-channel invasion of France, but fought against it right up until at least May of 1944, insisting that the invasion of southern France (which did take place, after D-Day) be cancelled, D-Day further delayed, and more effort put into the Italian campaign, with a view toward an invasion of the Balkans, Greece, and the Aegean.
Throughout the wartime conferences, Marshall pointed out the US public political support for the Pacific war and the fact that the US was fighting it alone to keep up the scare on the British, letting them know that if the US forces were not being used for a cross-channel invasion (and most remained in training on US soil until early 1944) they’d be deployed against Japan. By the end of the war in Europe, only 27 percent of US forces were in the Pacific theater, but the amount of real estate was fairly small, mostly flyspeck islands, so troop density was fairly high in some of these.
After a little defense plant stint, in 1942 my uncle went to enlist, and had been tipped by friends who had already gone in that those who tried to enlist in the Navy were assigned to the Army, and vice versa. It worked, he went into the Navy by asking for Army.
The Germans also tried to transfer a V2 to Japan, via U-boat, with a view to having them use it with their (turns out, unsuccessful) A-bomb. The port the Germans were going to use fell to the Allies while they were en route, and they were captured when they surfaced.
As Vaquero pointed out, when Hitler lost his nerve during the doomed British counterattack — it was made to buy time for the evacuation — he lost the opportunity to bag most of the British army in France. The British Navy would have been available, but the blow to morale, and the probable inability to defend the homeland from any German invasion, would have been a disaster for British morale. Churchill only remained as PM because literally no one else wanted the job — he was out on his ass ten weeks after victory in Europe.
And instead of the invasion of the USSR, Germany’s finishing up in North Africa would have cut off British access to Middle East oil — a blow to maintaining both the oil-burning British Navy as well as basic homefront needs — and destroyed most of what was left of the British army. That would have meant, no staging areas for an Allied return to Europe, and for the Germans, plenty of time to prepare for perhaps an eventual Barbarossa campaign.
The consequences for the Japanese would have been grim — had they gone ahead with their attacks on 12/7/41, they would have received our undivided attention, and cleaned out of the outlying islands including Okinawa perhaps two years earlier (tough to say, since US mobilization grew exponentially as it went on); invasion of the home island would have taken place, since there was no nuclear option until mid-1945.
I still think if Hitler had made it easy for the Russians to surrender, they win in a walk....All they had to do was treat Russia as they did France, and most Russians would have welcomed the Germans as liberators from Stalin.
The turning point in the Battle of Britain, was when in response to the Allied bombing of Berlin, Hitler turned to terror bombing of civilians, instead of strategic bombing of military targets....had he stayed the course, the Brits ability to defend from invasion probably would have been eliminated, while it was tragic in terms of the civilian toll, it gave the military some breathing space to repair their infrastructure.
>>The Russian was wide-eyed in wonderment of a country that could field that much equipment on two fronts.
While the Soviets built a lot of armor and fielded immense armies, the amount of equipment, raw materials, and food we sent them was staggering, especially since we were also supplying our own forces and considerable parts of the Free World.
Lend Lease to Russia
From Major Jordan’ Diaries
(NY: Harcourt, Brace, 1952)
http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/pearl/www.geocities.com/Pentagon/6315/lend.html
Sam, you might want to check a map. The Russians were coming from the east, the US and British were coming from the west.
Yeah, Jordan had a TON of stuff on how we helped create the USSR’s power.
I remember one article in which he said he witnessed US currency printing plates that were shipped to them in Germany, I believe. Said the Russians were printing bucks by the cartload and using them to pay their soldiers. The Reds would put inch-thick stacks of $10 and $1 dollar bills on the table and the soldiers would walk by and pick up a stack. When Jordan remarked about the 10s and singles, the Russian officer said that some soldiers could read American words and always went for the $10 stack.
This is so off-the-wall I can hardly believe it because of the ink and paper problems, but I have read of other similar rip-offs.
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