When you realise Hollywood is from the same country that held the microphone to the world for the last 80 years, repeating the same stories, over and over.
That’s right - people who experienced WW2 would have been living a very different story.
It’s only because it’s been retold and edited and embellished over and over again that it fits our narrative arc so well.
People outside the Anglosphere still have a different experience. I mean, the whole “UK refuses to give up, fights for what’s right” bit is… not how that is played out elsewhere.
If you’re from a big chunk of occupied Europe the narrative is more Star Wars-y. The Empire has won, it’s about the plucky resistance. Only a lot more bleak. If you’re from Northern Africa… probably no good guys in this one. If you’re in Spain it’s more of a Game of Thrones. It starts in 1936 and it ends in 1975 after a very long timeskip before which a bunch of resistance fighters wait to take back their country holed up in the mountains and are betrayed by the US and UK because they worry about their ties to the soviets. If you’re from China, the narrative doesn’t have many people from Europe at all, but it sure has a whole lot of Japanese bad guys and an entire holocaust spin-off that somehow you never hear about.
They all get the Hollywood version of it, most people are at least told one alternative take at some point in their lives. I sometimes forget that’s not the case with many things in the Anglosphere.
Many major Star Wars main trilogy and prequel plotlines have real-world analogues.
- Main trilogy plot line: French Resistance
- Prequel plot line: Hitler’s rise to power
- Palpatine gaining emergency powers from the Senate: Reichstag Fire Decree
- Dissolving the Old Republic and forming an empire: First French Empire, Augustus’s rise to power as Roman emperor
Lucas is on record saying the OT was about the Vietnam war (in an interview he did with James Cameron I think)
Germany didn’t almost win. They got extremely lucky with the invasion of France. The French thought it was gonna be trench warfare and unprepared, and the soviet invasion began right when the great purge happened. They got really lucky. Then the Yanks came.
Nah. You’re just repeating myths about the French. The French were not idiots and they did not think the war would be fought at the Maginot line. Despite how the myth goes, the Maginot line did exactly what it was supposed to do: funnel the Germans through Belgium and force them into a shitty river crossing at the Dyle River. This was known as the “Dyle plan”. This actually could have worked out if not for the unexpected agility of the Germans and even more importantly: the fact that Belgium had left the allies after losing faith in them after the remilitarization of the reinland.
They didn’t get “lucky”, the Germans exploited fractured alliances and surprised the allies with their extremely effective and, at the time, novel use of the radio. Hell, they almost won the war before France even fell. Read up on the Dunkirk evacuation if you’re interested. I’d wax on about it, but I’ve got surgery on about 20 minutes.
There’s a good case to be made that Germany would have lost the war even without the Americans entering. The defeat at the battle of Moscow was basically the end of German offensive capability; they suffered a disastrous shortage of resources.
If the US invasion had not taken place Germany would likely still have lost, and the Soviet Union would have occupied a large chunk of Europe.
Germany would basically be all but guaranteed to lose against the Soviets and the English alone. It might have become a war of attrition sort of deal, but all was said and done after Stalingrad
