WWII docos where they get it wrong

[Alex van de Wetering]

Too true. How many times do we see the image of Canadian 3 Div soldiers disembarking at Juno beach used to represent any landing.

That reminds me, I took a Then and Now picture on that location at low tide a few years ago! I will see if I can post it on the forum.

I think part of the problem is that much of the D-Day footage was lost when the bag holding collected films was dropped overboard as it was being transferred back to a ship.

Another part of the problem is probably that some (!) documentaries are made with a limited budget and often there is not enough time to find the right footage, or the right people who have the knowledge to judge what can be seen in the footage. Historians can often give a detailed description of what happened in a certain battle, but some can't tell one tank, airplane, uniform or location from the other.
In some cases the problem is that no footage of that specific subject is available and than someone has to find alternative footage to accompany the story.

But, I think one of the main reasons is what Hanno describes; during the war or shortly after the war a lot of footage was combined to give an overview of the war in "Western Europe", which sometimes included footage from somewhere else, or footage of pre D-day invasion exercises labelled as the actual thing. Also, I have heard that sometimes the film unit didn't even know where they were.....leading to incorrect descriptions.....but, this was only very local, so the wrong village was named as the location.

Alex