Apocalypse: The Second World War
| Apocalypse: The Second World War | |
|---|---|
| Created by |
Daniel Costelle Isabelle Clarke Jean-Louis Guillaud Henri de Turenne |
| Country of origin | France |
| No. of episodes | 6 |
| Production | |
| Producer(s) |
CC&C ECPAD |
| Running time | 5 hours 20 minutes |
| Broadcast | |
| Original channel | France 2, RTBF, TSR |
| Original run | 20 August 2009 – 22 September 2009 |
Apocalypse: The Second World War (French: Apocalypse, la 2e Guerre mondiale) (2009) is a six-part French documentary by Daniel Costelle and Isabelle Clarke about the Second World War. The music of the documentary was composed by Kenji Kawai.
The documentary is composed exclusively of actual footage of the war as filmed by war correspondents, soldiers, resistance fighters and private citizens. The series is shown in color, with the black-and-white footage being fully colorized, save for some original color footage. The only exception to the treatment are most Holocaust scenes, which are presented in the original black and white.
It was first aired from August 20 and 27 and September 3 on the French-speaking Belgian RTBF then on August 23 and 30 and September 6 on the French-speaking Swiss TSR and finally on September 8, 2009, to September 22, 2009, on France 2 channel. It was narrated in French by actor/director Mathieu Kassovitz. The documentary was shown on the Smithsonian Channel in the United States, where it was narrated by actor Martin Sheen,[1] on the National Geographic Channel and Channel 4 in the United Kingdom, Canada, the Netherlands, Poland, Australia,Romania[2] and Asia,[3] on YLE Teema in Finland,[4] on Rete 4 in Italy, on IBA, the national public channel in Israel,[5] on RTP2, the national public channel in Portugal, and on La 2, the national public channel in Spain.
Episodes
- Aggression (1933–1939): rise of Nazism and campaign of Poland, Phoney war
- Crushing Defeat (1939–1940): fall of Dunkirk and Campaign of France, Battle of Britain
- Shock (1940–1941): the Desert War, Invasion of Yugoslavia, Battle of Greece and Battle of Crete, Operation Barbarossa, Battle of Smolensk and Battle of Moscow
- World Ablaze (1941–1942): Pearl Harbor, Midway and Guadalcanal, Operation Fall Blau
- The Great Landings/The Noose (1942–1943): first failures of the Axis, Battle of Stalingrad, El Alamein, Operation Torch, Tunisia, Kursk and Italian campaign
- Inferno (1944–1945): liberation of France, invasion of Germany, surrender of Germany, atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and surrender of Japan
Depictions
The documentary includes a series of portraits of the main leaders of World War II.
Germans
- Adolf Hitler
- Hermann Göring
- Konstantin von Neurath
- Joachim von Ribbentrop
- Rudolf Hess
- Joseph Goebbels
- Martin Bormann
- Heinrich Himmler
- Reinhard Heydrich
- Albert Speer
- Eva Braun
- Magda Goebbels
- Karl Dönitz
- Wilhelm Keitel
- Fedor von Bock
- Heinz Guderian
- Friedrich Paulus
- Erwin Rommel
- Erich von Manstein
- Walther von Brauchitsch
French
- Charles de Gaulle
- Philippe Leclerc de Hauteclocque
- Philippe Pétain
- Paul Reynaud
- Maurice Gamelin
- Maxime Weygand
- Henri Giraud
- Albert Lebrun
- Jean de Lattre de Tassigny
- Charles Huntziger
- Émile Muselier
British
- Neville Chamberlain
- Winston Churchill
- Bernard Montgomery
- Arthur Harris
Americans
- Franklin D. Roosevelt
- Dwight Eisenhower
- Douglas MacArthur
- Chester Nimitz
- George Patton
- Charles A. Lindbergh
- Henry Ford
- Joseph P. Kennedy
- John F. Kennedy
Soviets
- Joseph Stalin
- Vyacheslav Molotov
- Georgy Zhukov
- Lavrentiy Beria
- Semyon Timoshenko
- Nikita Khrushchev
- Andrey Vlasov
Italians
Japanese
- Hirohito
- Hideki Tōjō
- Tomoyuki Yamashita
- Isoroku Yamamoto
Chinese
Some of the people documented in the series:
- Rose Gowlland – A British child who was a year old when the war broke out.
- Gaston Sirec – A French truck driver who was imprisoned in a stalag when the Germans defeated France.
- Lt. August Graf Kageneck – A German Tank commander who personifies a typical Wehrmacht soldier as he writes in his journal or to his mother.
See also
References
- ↑ Apocalypse Press Release (PDF). smithsonianchannel.com, 2009-10-07, Web. Retrieved 2010-11-06.
- ↑ http://natgeotv.com.au/Programmes/apocalypse-the-second-world-war
- ↑ http://www.ngcasia.com/programmes/apocalypse-the-second-world-war
- ↑ http://teema.yle.fi/ohjelmat/juttuarkisto/maailmansodan-kurimuksessa
- ↑ http://www.iba.org.il/spokesman/index.aspx?classto=DoverInnerYedia&entity_code=659154