This is some original German black/white videos taken during their trial versions. What a scary sound!!
@Hal Pollner You might enjoy this clip. They also explain (no words no music) in titles along the bottom of the screen.
I don't know if all countries do that but when we learn world history here, it's from the perspective of how it affects the United States. For example, World War II began when the United States declared war on Japan after the Pearl Harbor bombing, and it largely involved the United States and Britain against Germany and Japan, sometimes acknowledging Russia, but only insofar as this led to the Berlin Wall. While it wasn't entirely absent, there wasn't much about all of the other countries that were involved, on both sides. We learned about Mussolini and Italy, but a lot of other countries were acknowledged more as battlegrounds than as participants in the war. Yet, looking at military deaths alone, World War II claimed the lives of about 10,000,000 Russians, 5,000,000 Germans, 3,000,000 Chinese, 2,000,000 Japanese, 407,000 Americans, 400,000 Yugoslavakians, 380,000 British, 300,000 Italians, 300,000 Romanians, 240,000 Polish, 200,000 French, 200,000 Hungarians, 90,000 Finlanders, 87,000 Indians, 57,000 Filipinos, 45,000 Canadians, 40,000 Australians, 40,000 Czechoslavakians, 35,000 Greeks, 34,000 Estonians, 30,000 Latvians, 30,000 Albanians, 25,000 Lithuanians, 18,000 Bulgarians, 15,000 Ethiopians, 12,000 Belgians, 11,900 South Africans, 11,000 New Zealanders, 11,000 Dutch, 5,000 Irish, 6,000 Thais, 3,000 Burmese, 2,000 Norwegians, 1,000 Brazilians, 1,000 Egyptians, and 1,000 Guamese. That's just the military losses. Of course, some of these countries had soldiers fighting on both sides. In the countries that formed the battlegrounds, civilian lives sometimes exceeded the military losses. Yet, the participation of many of these countries was barely acknowledged in my K-12 history classes. Canada was less than two hundred miles away, yet they were barely mentioned. I think there was something about the Canadian participation in the Normandy invasion. The numbers, for some of these countries, might not seem so high, in comparison, but may have been quite high as a percentage of their population. China wasn't even mentioned, as far as I can remember. Not to get off on a tangent, given that this is a World War II thread, but we barely learned anything about World War I, except that it didn't end all wars, after all.
Nor in our history classes. When the historians penned this conflict a world war.. they were not kidding. The obvious point from your list @Ken Anderson is the overwhelming number of nations that were with the allies.. to my knowledge other than the three known Axis members.. only former Eastern Block countries such as Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia plus Finland joined forces with the enemy.
I think Finland changed sides a couple of times. Of course, at the start of the war, it was defensive; they were fending off an invasion by the Soviet Union. Probably, their overall involvement was defensive and depended on who was threatening them.
@Ken Anderson You are so right about what we were taught -vs- the full reality. I watch documentaries now and am always surprised at all the things I had no knowledge of all through out USA history. Sometimes, it sounds so completely different than my original version of it, that I actually have to get online to check out if it is even true. Also, there are times I wish I didn't even know the real truth. I feel happier thinking Americans are always the good guys.
Even the high school classes that I took in European History and World History, pretty much everything we learned was US-centric, and it might be considered the Reader's Digest version, big on memorizing dates and places, but short on examining any of the issues that brought the events about.
I suppose with limited class time and limited teen-age attention spans, they did the best they could.
Actually, WW2 began officially when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939. But from the American perspective, it began when Pearl was attacked.
But not for some brave Americans who by doing so were threatened with treason for fighting for freedom. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eagle_Squadrons
Some may say that America was late in entering the war and only did so when forced into it. But to be honest it was, at that stage, a European war and America is a long way from Europe and American mothers did not want their sons returned in body bags from someone else's war. But it became personal when Pearl Harbor was bombed. To be fair America had been doing its bit prior to entering by aiding Britain with massive supplies of military hardware.