Ellis Sharp does not much like Peter and Dan Snow’s latest television series, Twentieth Century Battlefields:
I taped and have now just watched the Snow family show on the 1968 Tet offensive, commonly regarded as a key moment in the Vietnam war (as it is called — though funnily enough the Vietnamese call it ‘the American war’). It was a lazy, reactionary, offensively shallow programme. I guess the BBC is selling it on to American TV networks, since it was hegemonic to an absurd degree. South Vietnam,
Snow senior explained, was run by ‘a military elite’. Euphemising a client dictatorship doesn’t get much blander than that.[…]
The programme was nauseating in its thrilled-adolescent approach to aerial warfare. The U.S. “deployed…the might of its air force.” Cut to exciting computer models of B-52 bombers zapping hillsides, interspersed with old newsreel footage, all resting on a bed of thumping Wagner-type ersatz classical music. And waddaya know — “some of the targets were near populated areas…inevitably civilians were killed.”
I don’t disagree with any of Sharp’s criticisms, but I think he misses the point of the series. It is after all supposed to be an examination of great battles of the twentieth century, tailored to a lay audience, in which the political context is almost irrelevant, other than to explain briefly why this particular battle happened. This is why the story the Snows tell of how the Tet offensive came about is so reactionary, because it isn’t important to the programme the writers fall back on the stories that need the least work to be explained to the audience, that work with their expectations.
I also agree that the programme is part propaganda for the British Army (the cringeworthy segments in which one of the Snows gets to play soldiers), but on the whole I think the series has been worthwhile despite this and the lazy assumptions about the context of the battles they talk about. Because the heart of the series, the battles themselves, are handled very well and in such a way that it becomes clear why a battle enfolded the way it did, how the strategy and tactics chosen by the combatants played their part in determining the battle’s outcome, how the terrain of the battlefield helped or hindered both sides, etc. S— said that the programme on the Tet Offensive was the first time that this really clicked for her, that she understood how battles work. That makes the series worthwhile to
me.