The Unknown War

There are many kinds of comfort viewing in this time of quarantine and social distancing and mine has been to revisit The Unknown War, a 1978 documentary series about the Second World War from the Soviet perspective.  

Yes, I know.  How can this be comforting? 

Well, for one thing it is comforting seeing Nazis get destroyed.  Very comforting. 

And it's hosted and narrated by Burt Lancaster. 

Now, I am not an uncritical fan of this series.  It was made with the cooperation of the USSR and like any film made with the cooperation of a state apparatus it means there is some serious "message control" going on.  It's a work of propaganda.  But then, so is Top Gun, which was also made with the cooperation of a state organization, only one without a hammer and sickle.  

The Unknown War is propaganda.  As such it is, on its own a piece of history.  It also contains within it a real story that is worthy of study and also a lot of visual imagery that was only accessible because of this unique work.  

Let me begin with the big caveats.  

This is how the film deals with Soviet repression and the horrors of Stalin:

Yes.  That was a blank space.  

And this is how it approaches the famine in the Ukraine caused by forced collectivization that killed millions of people: 

Yeah, another blank space. 

And in creating both of those blank spaces the series also completely skips over the difficult issue of the many groups that collaborated with the Nazis.  This is not a series that deals well with difficult issues.  It's not trying to.  If you want a point of comparison, you don't have to look far: this is a documentary equivalent of a yellow ribbon bumper sticker.  

Finally, and we will come back to this one later as well, the way the series deals with the massacre of Polish officers in the Katyn Forest is so terrible that it is an object lesson of a different kind.  It is a perfect example of muddying the waters and both-sides-ing that should be familiar to anyone who has to sit through interviews with Iowa Nazis about their "economic anxiety" over their morning tea. 

Nonetheless, this is a series worth looking at, both because it's worth looking at as a historical record of the war and also as a historical record of the reception of the war.  And of course, it's of some comfort to see Nazis being pounded into dust.  Sorry, Nazis.  (Not sorry.)

Oh, and did I mention that it's a 20 part series?  Yeah, this isn't some History Channel digested nonsense.  This is a journey. So, buckle up folks, Uncle Burt is about to take us back to 1941 by way of 1978. 

The Battle of Telethon

Battles B.C. Season 1, Episode 8
Judgment Day at Marathon (2009)
Directed by David Padrusch
Written by David Padrusch

How could you screw up the centerpiece of your series?
Here’s how:
The Battle of Marathon was in 490 BC.
The Battle of Salamis was in 480 BC.
The amount of time in between is ten years.
So, if you're recording an interview and your scholar Richard Gabriel says that Xerxes and the Persians invaded Greece 40 years after the defeat at Marathon, the thing you must do is to take Richard Gabriel out of the studio (with the cameras still rolling) put him over your lap and spank him until he cries.
You don’t let your narrator restate the idiotic statement.
If you do that, then you just created a pile of crap.
This episode is that pile of crap.

Miltiades, an Athenian....Nathan Hedrick
Callimachus, an Athenian...Kevin Moran
Datis, a Persian commander....Andrew Alandy
Persian Governor...Rob Young

Richard A. Gabriel (Distinguished Professor, Royal Military College of Canada)
Mark Schwartz (Department of Anthropology, Grand Valley State University)
Matthew Gonzales (Assistant Professor of Classics, Saint Anselm College)
David George (Director, Institute of Mediterranean Archaeology)

To be fair, the winds were blowing against this episode before we got to the most idiotic statement in the whole series. To begin with, this episode has one of the more egregious cases of starting at the end and working back to the middle and then finally going back to the beginning. You think I’m kidding?
I just don’t understand why a show that spends so much time condescending to the lowest possible level of mental acuity then turns around and puts together a narrative with complex jumps backward and forward in chronological time. Did Billy Pilgrim write this episode? I can understand the notion of starting In Media Res, but we get to almost the end of the episode before we are told about the Ionian Rebellion which was the most immediate cause for the Persian punitive expedition that ended at Marathon. The scholars love throwing in modernisms like describing the Persian Aegean campaign as “island-hopping” like the US in the Pacific during World War II, but they ignore the obvious parallel of the launching of an expedition against Athens after it supported Ionian Greeks in burning a Persian provincial capital with the post 9-11 punitive campaigns in the “war on terror.” And the chief way that this show manages to ignore that parallel is to bury the narrative in such a complex series of time shifts that the audience (which they must presume are a bunch of headless torsos drooling from their necks) so that the simple cause effect of A) The Greeks burn Sardis with help from Athens and others and B) The Persians decide to turn Athens into a pile of ash is impossible to piece together from this episode without a lot of work and a bowl of raisin bran cereal.

I had to admit that despite that I almost liked the time spent on Miltiades, but then Richard Gabriel turns around and says that the next Persian expedition was 40 years later and it’s all over. That’s not even close. If the History Channel had an episode about Hitler and someone said that he invaded Russia 40 years after invading Poland they’d take that guy out of the studio and spank him until he cried. The fact that nobody associated with this show thought to check that out before it ran and maybe do a little editing (this is, after all, an even easier thing to check than Caesar’s alleged lack of military experience) says everything you need to know about the priorities of the people involved here. Suffice it to say there’s a lot more sword wielding and stabbing. There’s all kinds of talk about hoplite tactics even as everything that is shown is completely illogical and counter-intuitive to what is talked about. And another thing, the Immortals didn't come over at Marathon. They were the personal guard of the Persian king. Darius didn't send them out for Marathon. Jeez, why not just let a badger write your material?, you'd have a better chance of being right half the time.

But ultimately, this episode lives and dies by simple math. Normally it takes three strikes to get called out but if you can’t tell the difference between 10 years and 40 years then it’s over. Peter Gabriel would have gotten that right if you’d put him on this show in place of Richard Gabriel.

There’s a part of me that really wishes for another season of Battles B.C. but what I really want is another show done by completely different people who cover this material and I want that show to run for multiple seasons.
Instead, when I got through this last episode of Battles B.C. all I could feel was relief that they hadn’t gotten a chance to screw up even more history. They might as well have ended this by saying that the Battle of Marathon was the inspiration for the modern Olympic sport of water polo on account of the way that the W in Water Polo is like an upside down M for Marathon and because the P in Polo reminds people of horse piss from the Persian cavalry at Marathon.

Chariots of Fir

Battles B.C. Season 1, Episode 7
Ramses: Raging Chariots (2009)
Directed by David Padrusch

Despite the ridiculous title this may be the most tolerable episode of the series. The Battle of Kadesh is a classic example for historians of multiple conflicting sources about an event and for once the Battles B.C. gang manages to address the issue of the source material, make some decent conjectures about the events at Kadesh, include archaeological evidence and deal with ancient technology intelligently, show some decent visual effects and maps and re-enactments and make interesting reasoned statements about the bigger picture and the significance of the battle. This might pass for the beginning of some decent history. If only the chariots weren’t raging. Why do they have to be so angry?

Ramses, a young brash pharaoh....Vincent Lewis
Muwatallis....Ashwin Nair
Kikkuli....Michael Popp
Suppilumiuma....Kristopher Blount
Hittite Prince....Bryan McGowan
Hittite Bad Guy #1....David Hernandez
Bedouin Spies....Ian Stoker-Long
Michael Popp

Richard A. Gabriel (Distinguished Professor, Royal Military College of Canada)
Mark Schwartz (Department of Anthropology, Grand Valley State University)
Steven Weingartner (Chariots Like a Whirlwind)
Matthew Gonzales (Assistant Professor of Classics, Saint Anselm College)
David George (Director, Institute of Mediterranean Archaeology)

Raging Chariots is a dumb title, but this is a good episode of Battles B.C. Of course, if we believe the Death Chase episode in terms of placing this Ramses as the Pharaoh of Exodus, then there are some issues of whether or not he would have run into the Israelites in Sinai on his way up to Syria in his multiple campaigns against the Hittites and their allies, but that’s an issue for another day. As it stands, this episode is one of the more salvageable ones from this series. It doesn’t hurt that it was the one that their chariot expert Steven Weingartner was most useful for. And yes, Richard Gabriel is still a blowhard who says stupid things and the other guys seem so earnest that I might want to take a class with them but still, it’s a good episode.

As for Ramses, I still don’t buy his account of Kadesh completely.