I've read Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich which is itself a staggering experience; like the majority of American baby boomers, my immediate family background is WW2, the cataclysmic event that made most of my parents' life decisions for them. The World at War puts all the best film clips into order and the facts into line with a decidedly English flair for dramatic understatement. The reigning American counterpart to this miniseries is the 1953 Victory at Sea, a stirring but emotionally driven series remembered mostly for its music score and its vindictive, almost ferocious narration.

The World at War was made by an Allied nation that risked and lost much in the war, yet maintains a balanced view of events. Viewers are encouraged to become emotionally involved and to choose sides in the American show, made only a few years after the armistice. Listening to Laurence Olivier's sometimes ironic but compellingly rational voice, the overwhelming effect of The World at War is the catastrophic loss on all sides. The German Nazis and the Japanese imperialists were the villains, yes, but in this newer miniseries the suffering of their people and soldiers is not something to gloat over.

Only Americans insistent that their forces be always acknowledged first and America be enthroned as the saviors of the world will find fault here; The World at War tells stories about theaters of war that are never mentioned in American glory docus. There were major defeats in Norway and Finland I had forgotten about. The powers of Europe dawdled in political mires while Hitler gobbled up the middle of the continent, and America waited for two years before becoming involved in the struggle to save the world. It took the dramatic attack at Pearl Harbor to finally get things going, while politicians stuck to WW1-era isolationist policies.

The World at War uses several 50-minute shows just to do beautiful historical backgrounds on the major combatant nations, carefully choosing excellent film and newsreel materials to illustrate their points. There's a better understanding of German politics (Hitler consolidating power by using one secret police organization to liquidate another) and Japanese politics ("government by assassination") than I've ever seen on film. Made just short of thirty years after the events depicted, the docu was able to compile hundreds of excellent interviews from the real participants. It's an eye-opening experience, for example, to hear the story of Japanese air power right from the two famous leaders of the Pearl Harbor raid. There are no self-appointed after-the-fact "experts" here; it's almost all prime source testimony.

The best aspect of the show is the faithfulness in its visual representations. There are hours of excellent-quality on-the-spot film footage that I've seen nowhere else. When the narration speaks of action in a particular battle, we aren't shown generic shots sloppily thrown together, but footage from the specific event being talked about. In other words, when you see a certain airplane fighting in Russia, it's never some convenient stock shot from Burma. The accuracy is convincing and the level of detail is compelling. There's little emphasis on hardware or military machinery (a major fault of newer cable docus) except as applies to the battles themselves; we see how frustrating and useless tanks can be when they start to break down from bad terrain and bad maintenance. There is a smattering of Hollywood footage that sneaks in, a couple of seconds of ships from Action in the North Atlantic in the U-Boat episode. But that's the exception to the rule. The editing is mostly above reproach. The single disappointing passage I noticed in the whole show was a lame couple of minutes that used a repeat of the same soldiers shouting "Banzai!" to dramatize Japanese victories in Indochina.

Series producer Jeremy Isaacs sees that The World at War is overlaid with a layer of grim dramatic poetry. His final episode is an almost non-linear poetic appraisal of the enormity of the catastrophe that WW2 was, with the world saved from fascism only to be left in a scarcely-improved state of disarray and hostility. This is good history; when victories are celebrated there's never the taint of arrogant righteousness.