Bump. Surely somebody knows of a few good docuмentaries.
Does military history interest you? I mean
real military history: close analysis of strategy and tactics, the battlefield terrain, the weather, and every other factor contributing to victory, defeat, or stalemate. Little or nothing in the way of propaganda—i.e., good-guy bad-guy crap.
If the answer is yes, there was a great British docuмentary series (not BBC this time) from the nineties called simply [url=http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0007VXZIG/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B0007VXZIG&linkCode=as2&tag=httpwwwchanco-20 Its subject was largely but not exclusively the principal land and naval engagements in the European theater in World War II. There were somewhere between twelve and twenty programs all told. Each episode was two hours long, and most of them were impeccably and brilliantly narrated by Tim Pigott-Smith. The analysis of each engagement contained a detailed presentation of the order of battle, including such stuff as tank speed, armament, construction, etc. For planes, you were given, in addition to the stats I just mentioned, fuel capacity, ceiling, rate of climb, maneuverability—everything an inquiring mind would want to know.
Once again, alas, the UK edition is much, much cheaper. It is also far more complete (the evil mob at PBS mucked about with everything, of course). Still, if you're stuck with Region 1 NTSC, there's no use crying over spilt milk.