What would you say is the most under acknowledged part of WWII

The struggle of the Free French to recover colonial territories lost to Vichy government.

 

The Partisans' disruptions.

 

Destroyer Command on the Allied side.

Silent Hunter 3 on the Axis side.

Back on topic........
Just reading this thread shows up a number of black spots that have not or badly been covered. Question is why has this come around?

 

I didn't see anyone mentioning the Balkans.
Those partisans were a real bloody nuisance to the Germans and their allies, and until now I haven't seen a film or a game about those brave men. (Apart from the old-school Yugoslavian propaganda movies, those guys couldn't even act out being shot )

 

I posted a thread about Attu and Kiska in the Pacific Theater forum.
http://www.ww2f.com/war-pacific/23068-combined-attu-reports-japanese-warfare.html

 

I think think the CBI Theater is probably the least discussed for sure.

 

There is a very good partisan film about the Balkins and it was about the leader of the group that fought Tito and the Germans. I can't think of the name of him or the film right now but someone may be able to. I saw it on TV about 5-6 years ago and it was B&W but it was good. I think they were called Chet Niks ????

The invasion of southern France does not get much mention in history.

 

You are probably talking about the movie "Chetniks" made in 1943.
Chetniks (1943)

Partisans: War in the Balkans 1941 - 1945

By Dr Stephen A Hart
Page 2 of 7
Chetniks: Serb Yugoslav troops who had evaded Axis capture ©

In some ways, however, the Axis victory remained a hollow one. For the writ of the Axis powers ran little beyond the towns and main roads. In the remote mountain regions, embryonic resistance forces soon emerged. But before the Germans could crush these nascent movements, their forces were redeployed from Yugoslavia to the east, in preparation for the now-imminent Operation Barbarossa.
Subsequently, those substantial Axis forces that did remain in the conquered Yugoslavia became locked in a protracted and appallingly brutal anti-partisan war, which raged across much of the territory. The resistance groups divided into two main movements - the Chetniks and the Partisans.
'... locked in a protracted and appallingly brutal anti-partisan war ...'
The first resistance group to emerge were the Chetniks - in Serbian the word means a detachment of men. These bands were nominally led by a former Yugoslav Army Colonel, named Dragoljub ('Draza') Mihailovic, who served the Yugoslav Royalist government in exile.
The original nucleus of these guerrilla bands were the ethnic Serb Yugoslav troops who had evaded Axis capture during the invasion, and then fled to the hills of Bosnia, Montenegro, and Serbia. Mihailovic established his first stronghold in the mountainous Ravna Gora area of western Serbia.
Soon Chetnik numbers were swelled by Serb peasants who had fled from Greater Croatia - non-Serbs were not allowed to join Chetnik bands. Many of these participants sought simply to defend their local village from the terrible brutalities of the Ustase. The latter were so brutal that they even drew protests from the Germans - not on humanitarian grounds, but because Ustase ethnic cleansing was fuelling the resistance movements.
The Chetniks were never a homogenous ideological movement, and many sub-groups paid no more than lip-service to Mihailovic's leadership. Some groups were implacably anti-German, whereas others saw the emerging rival resistance movement, that of the Partisans, as the greater threat. The elements that did unite the Chetniks, however, were their loyalty to the old Royalist regime, and their desire to ensure the survival of the Serbian population.
These disparate groups strove to protect the Serbs from what seemed to be the genocidal intent of the Croats and Germans, plus the hostility of Muslims (both Croatian and Serbian) and Communists. To achieve this goal, Chetniks strove to forge an ethnically-pure Greater Serbia by violently 'cleansing' these areas of Croats and Muslims.
On the other hand, Chetniks were often reluctant to attack Axis targets, in case this provoked brutal Axis retaliation against the local Serb population. In addition, Mihailovic wished to conserve his forces for the general uprising that would coincide with the envisaged Allied invasion of Axis-occupied Yugoslavia.

BBC - History - Partisans: War in the Balkans 1941 - 1945

 

Subtitled The Fighting Guerillas, Chetniks tells the story of Yugoslavian guerilla fighter General Draja Mihailovitch. Based on the General's own memoirs, the film depicts Mihailovitch (played here by Philip Dorn) as a selfless idealist, leading his resistance troops, known as the Chetniks, on one raid after another against the Germans during WW II. The best scenes involve the deadly clashes between Chetniks and Germans in the treacherous mountain regions of Yugoslavia. Anna Sten, Sam Goldwyn's 1930s "answer" to Greta Garbo, co-stars as Mihailovitch's self-sacrificing spouse. Initially, some dismissed this movie because of the mistaken belief that the Chetniks collaborated with the Nazis during WWII, but as Michael Lees unequivocally proves in his book The Rape of Serbia, this was actually a myth fed to Churchill by the Communist partisans of Josip Broz Tito, to convince the British prime minister to shift Allied aid away from the Chetniks. The events in this film are thus factual. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Chetniks - The Fighting Guerrillas - Trailer - Cast - Showtimes - The New York Times

 

Good stuff, JC - nice find! - this certainly is an area of the war that I, for one, had little knowledge about - I did find this quick, YouTube blurb that I thought was interesting:

The REAL Truth About WW2 Chetniks

Another front that isn't talked about THAT much was the American Homefront - I know that my Dad served in the infantry in Europe, and Mom has occassionally mentioned what it was like at home waiting to hear ANY news - every night, they would gather around the radio - during the days, they would go to the local civic center and fold and wrap bandages - everyone had gardens and ration cards - gasoline and tires were rationed - there were tin and copper and rubber drives to collect the materials to be recycled in the war plants - Mom still has some of the V-mail that she got from Dad - I've got a pictrue of Dad that was taken when he was in Europe, and sent to their local newspaper, which printed it and then passed on the original to Grandpa and Grandma - there's a censors stamp on the back that says 'Cleared For Publication' - we talk about the Battle of the Bulge, Market Garden, Falaise, Stalingrad, the fall of the Phillipines, Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, Midway, Okinawa..... because we're all interested in it, they all roll off our tongues and fall into place in the big picture.... but at the time, they heard about all of these things days.... weeks or months after they happened.... everyone would rush to the atlas, and, as often as not, not even be able to find some of the names, much less the locations.... thats one of the things Mom HAS mentioned.... how really difficult it was to try and get a handle on what was happening.... initially, the news was all SO bad, but over the months and years it gradually turned around until the victories started - yeah, I've never seen what I thought was a really good depiction of the war years at home in America.

The British Homefront does seem to be addressed (in films, at least) much more often, probably because they were on the receiving end of many violent and bloody attacks on population centers.

-whatever

-Lou

 

I was coming back here to write just that, the war fought on the home front.

 

Thank you JC ! I wish they would show it on TV more often but I guess the Serbs are not PC material right now so they won't show it.
It was good to watch with lots of action.

 

I tend to agree ( although many of the theatres mentioned in this thread are worthy, especially the Aleutians, Italy and Burma ).

The point about movies is valid ; as well as the one mentioned by slipdigit which was made in 1943, two other undoubted classics are San Demetrio - London and Western Approaches. These were all made during the war - afterward , nothing ( except for one or two powerful sequences in Das Boot, ironically ).

No-one can visit the Merchant Marine memorial at Tower Hill in London without being staggered at the scale of the losses.......

 

For a film on Burma Operation Burma was pretty good. Not sure how accurate it was but good none the less.

I would take home front as the most under acknowledged part.

 

I would say the first war between Russia and Finland