Second War Diary -- good World War II docuseries

On Amazon Prime I'm watching a docuseries called "Second War Diary", in particular watching the June 1944 episode (episode 58). It's fascinating to see what all was going on in the war practically simultaneously with the Normandy invasion 78 years ago.

It's a great series. It doesn't have a bunch of wasted time with interviews from "scholars" or blah blah. Each episode is an hour long narrative with video clips (and some Hollywood movie clips) while a narrator tells what happened on June 1, 1944, then a minute later what happened on June 2, etc. It's basically factoid after factoid in chronological order of all battlefronts simultaneously.

Now it's a bad documentary if you like a lot of detail about one operation that takes a long time to implement. For example, the June 1944 episode doesn't take any time to detail the planning that began over a year prior for Operation Overlord (Normandy invasion), nor Hollywood building mockups months before, etc. Each of those factoids are mentioned as they happened chronologically in prior episodes and sometimes with the narrator spending a few seconds saying how it impacts Operation Overlord later in June 1944, before it quickly moves to completely unrelated things that happened in North Africa, then other things in the Pacific.

It's kind of like reading the Bible in chronological order. In some ways you gain context (i.e. the book Romans means a little more if you know roughly when it was written and what was going on in the overall church as detailed up to that point in the book of Acts). But in some ways you lose context (i.e. you read Acts for a few verses, then switch to the entire book of Romans when we think it was written, then come back to the book of Acts to pick up where you left off).

Hm.

You describe sounds very much like I saw something on Amazon just the other night.

I watched a video titled “Naples ‘44”, and having spent a huge amount of time in Naples, Italy (as many Navy personnel did in the Seventies when budgets were tight) I tended to look on it as one of the filithest, dirtiest industrialized cities I had ever seen. The raft of floating debris all pushed into Fleet Landing, dead animals, packaging of all kinds, just general garbage, forced the liberty launch to plow through it like an icebreaker.

Okay...that is an exaggeration, but-not by much.

Being chased in Naples on Shore Patrol by a crazed knife-weilding transfestite. Being kicked out of the “Jolly” hotel in Naples by being pulled bodily from under the beds where we hid when the hotel management came knocking (because they rightly suspected some of us were trying to avoid paying). Humpty Dumpty, an infamous Neapolitan prostitute near “The Castle”. Being confined to the ship on New Years Eve anchored off Naples, because it was considered too dangerous to let personnel go ashore due to things being thrown from windows as some kind of custom on that holiday. And so on.

And the city stank as bad as any big industrial city.

So, all these years, I have viewed Naples, Italy with a degree of dislike and contempt. I have always viewed it as “The Armpit of Europe” and believed it.

Watching this, I realized just how tough those people had it there. Never gave a thought to the history, didn’t know it. There was so much I didn’t know, about how one panicked day, in a matter of hours, they evacuated 1.2 million people from the city after a bomb went off killing scores of people, and an intelligence source said there were many more around the city that were set with delayed fuses to go off.

No water. Even rumors of cannibalism. Women selling themselves for pocket change.

All this made me feel a bit ashamed, because I had never even considered the history, but damn, Naples was a dirty, smelly place.

And the documentary had video I had never seen, and very good video too. But that mixing in of scenes from other movies bugged me. In this one, they had scenes from a bunch of different movies, particularly “Catch-22”. I just felt like they didn’t need to do that.

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