WWII is full of plot holes and is poorly written

[dead0man]

link

Let's start with the bad guys. Battalions of stormtroopers dressed in all black, check. Secret police, check. Determination to brutally kill everyone who doesn't look like them, check. Leader with a tiny villain mustache and a tendency to go into apopleptic rage when he doesn't get his way, check. All this from a country that was ordinary, believable, and dare I say it sometimes even sympathetic in previous seasons.

I wouldn't even mind the lack of originality if they weren't so heavy-handed about it. Apparently we're supposed to believe that in the middle of the war the Germans attacked their allies the Russians, starting an unwinnable conflict on two fronts, just to show how sneaky and untrustworthy they could be? And that they diverted all their resources to use in making ever bigger and scarier death camps, even in the middle of a huge war? Real people just aren't that evil. And that's not even counting the part where as soon as the plot requires it, they instantly forget about all the racism nonsense and become best buddies with the definitely non-Aryan Japanese.

Not that the good guys are much better. Their leader, Churchill, appeared in a grand total of one episode before, where he was a bumbling general who suffered an embarrassing defeat to the Ottomans of all people in the Battle of Gallipoli. Now, all of a sudden, he's not only Prime Minister, he's not only a brilliant military commander, he's not only the greatest orator of the twentieth century who can convince the British to keep going against all odds, he's also a natural wit who is able to pull out hilarious one-liners practically on demand. I know he's supposed to be the hero, but it's not realistic unless you keep the guy at least vaguely human.

So it's pretty standard "shining amazing good guys who can do no wrong" versus "evil legions of darkness bent on torture and genocide" stuff, totally ignoring the nuances and realities of politics. The actual strategy of the war is barely any better. Just to give one example, in the Battle of the Bulge, a vastly larger force of Germans surround a small Allied battalion and demand they surrender or be killed. The Allied general sends back a single-word reply: "Nuts!". The Germans attack, and, miraculously, the tiny Allied force holds them off long enough for reinforcements to arrive and turn the tide of battle. Whoever wrote this episode obviously had never been within a thousand miles of an actual military.

Probably the worst part was the ending. The British/German story arc gets boring, so they tie it up quickly, have the villain kill himself (on Walpurgisnacht of all days, not exactly subtle) and then totally switch gears to a battle between the Americans and the Japanese in the Pacific. Pretty much the same dichotomy - the Japanese kill, torture, perform medical experiments on prisoners, and frickin' play football with the heads of murdered children, and the Americans are led by a kindly old man in a wheelchair.

Anyway, they spend the whole season building up how the Japanese home islands are a fortress, and the Japanese will never surrender, and there's no way to take the Japanese home islands because they're invincible...and then they realize they totally can't have the Americans take the Japanese home islands so they have no way to wrap up the season.

So they invent a completely implausible superweapon that they've never mentioned until now. Apparently the Americans got some scientists together to invent it, only we never heard anything about it because it was "classified". In two years, the scientists manage to invent a weapon a thousand times more powerful than anything anyone's ever seen before - drawing from, of course, ancient mystical texts. Then they use the superweapon, blow up several Japanese cities easily, and the Japanese surrender. Convenient, isn't it?

...and then, in the entire rest of the show, over five or six different big wars, they never use the superweapon again. Seriously. They have this whole thing about a war in Vietnam that lasts decades and kills tens of thousands of people, and they never wonder if maybe they should consider using the frickin' unstoppable mystical superweapon that they won the last war with. At this point, you're starting to wonder if any of the show's writers have even watched the episodes the other writers made.

I'm not even going to get into the whole subplot about breaking a secret code (cleverly named "Enigma", because the writers couldn't spend more than two seconds thinking up a name for an enigmatic code), the giant superintelligent computer called Colossus (despite this being years before the transistor was even invented), the Soviet strongman whose name means "Man of Steel" in Russian (seriously, between calling the strongman "Man of Steel" and the Frenchman "de Gaulle", whoever came up with the names for this thing ought to be shot).

I found that pretty funny.  Hopefully some of you will too.

[realisticidealist]

I'm pretty sure TV Tropes linked to this at some point.

[Californian Tony]

This. Is. Just. Brilliant.

[dead0man]

Feel free to add your own...and they can be about different "episodes" from history.

[Sibboleth]

That reality is profoundly unrealistic is not exactly news.

[CathKhan]

That reality is profoundly unrealistic is not exactly news.

This. But it's still an awesome article.

[Ghyl Tarvoke]

The important thing to note that a lot of basic popular conceptions of "goodness" and - especially - of "evil" come from World War II.

There is a reason why George Lucas put so many Nazi references into the Original Star Wars trilogy. And while Lucas is/was many things, a greatly imaginative aesthete is certainly not one of them....

[asexual trans victimologist]

I have serious problems with the Ichi-no-Tani and Dan-no-ura episodes in the Genpei War story arc. Let's start with how flagrantly ridiculous Yoshitsune's strategy at Ichi-no-Tani is. You can't just send cavalry gallivanting off into the mountains and then have them charge down the slopes at your enemy's position, especially mountains like the ones above the Suma Shore. The whole thing was just entirely too dynamic on the Minamoto's part for what was supposed to be a siege action, and the only reason fans like the episode so much is because it has that scene with Kumagai and Atsumori that keeps getting all of those symbolic callbacks in Japan-centric arcs in later seasons. If they could have taken that scene and somehow incorporated it into one of the better episodes in that arc, like say the Siege of Nara (Shigehira's a really interesting and simultaneously horrifying and tragic character and I wish they wrote more like him), that'd be perfect.

My issue with Dan-no-ura is the way it ended. Most of the battle was fairly good and well-foreshadowed in that the Taira spent like the whole season after Ichi-no-Tani fleeing further and further down the coast and once you get to Shimonoseki there's not a whole hell of a lot of other places to try to go if you don't leave the country entirely. That's not my problem. Even Taguchi betraying the Taira didn't entirely surprise me. That's not my problem either. That guy was a jerk in the first place. My problem is the part where the Emperor dies. It's ridiculously unnecessary and cruel; Emperor Antoku was six years old and had the Three Sacred Treasures with him, for God's sake.

[dead0man]

Carl Sagan talked about parts of that episode in Cosmos, leading up to one of the few parts that is wrong about the show.  From wiki

Heikegani were used by Carl Sagan in his popular science television show Cosmos: A Personal Voyage as an example of unintentional artificial selection,[2] an interpretation published by Julian Huxley in 1952.[3] According to this hypothesis, the crabs with shells resembling Samurai were thrown back to the sea by the fishers on respect to the Heike warriors, while those not resembling Samurai were eaten, giving the former a greater chance of reproducing. Thus, the more closely the crabs resemble a samurai face, the more likely they would be spared and thrown back.[3]
This idea has met with some skepticism, as noted by Joel W. Martin. As humans don't use Heikegani for food, Martin posits that there is no artificial pressure favoring face-like shell patterns, contrary to Sagan's implication.[3] The pattern of ridges on the carapace serves a very functional purpose as sites of muscle attachment. Similar patterns are found on species in many parts of the world, including fossil remains.

[Mikestone8]

Especially when you match it up with that "1066" movie.

There you have an invasion force going from Normandy to England, with a minstrel called Taillefer ("Iron hewer" in French) in the lead. In WW2, you have one going from England to Normandy under some guy called Eisenhower ("iron hewer" in German). Oh yeah?

And those names. Churchill "The Church on the Hill" symbol of Olde England, and "De Gaulle", "Of the Gauls", symbol of France. They're supposed to be real? Oh come off it.

It's as bad as that Abraham Lincoln business. Too good to be true, has his greatest triumph on Palm Sunday, then killed on Good Friday. A plain steal from the Bible, only thing they left out was the Resurrection.

This stuff wouldn't fool a ten year old kid.

[Old Europe]

Yeah, the Nazis were just like sterotypical comic book villains... could it have become any more clichéd?

[J. J.]

The costumes were much better in the first series.  I loved those pointy hats.