By: JWBM
Towards the latter portion of World War II, technological advances were heating up to a boiling point. More clever and destructive means were being invented and employed to get an upper hand in the war. It was to the point of being a coin toss of who could have come out on top, or who would have been crushed savagely by boots below.
Jewish physicists—that fled from Germany to the United States—warned the American government that Nazi scientists were on the track to inventing the atomic bomb; considering they were the first to split the atom, along with to discover nuclear fission. The US didn't waste time and implemented their own action plan: "The Manhattan Project." A man by the name of Robert Furman was recruited to head a parallel mission to dismantle Hitler's nuclear program with the objective to halt head Nazi physicist Werner Heisenberg in his tracks.
Meanwhile, Germans were simultaneously attacking European targets with neighborhood-flattening self-guided missiles that were near impossible to stop once the course was plotted. It was unlike anything anyone has seen before, or knew how to react fast enough to handle. British intelligence assembled their own team—30 AU—to stop or capture German rocket engineers, including their leader: Werner Von Braun, a Major in the SS; along with Hellmuth Walter, inventor of advanced fighter planes that could put a spin on things to come. Once the dust settled after the war, there was controversy due to their expertise being too tempting not to exploit by the US and Russia.
This uses a combination of interviews with living persons of interest, archive footage, re-enactments, and voice over to tie it all together. There's a high quality and seamlessness to it. For the most part, it keeps a steady momentum by highlighting certain pivotal points. However, it acts more as an overview—you won't get an exact time line, or the means to show everything or everybody behind the scenes. By being a little longer, it could have benefited by showing Russian, Italian, and Japanese points of view. That's where a lengthy history book would end up filling in the gaps to the rest where this medium—PBS' "Secrets of the Dead"—might pose a challenge as a televised event. It seems more to loop you in to a specific window of history that was classified and secretive for decades after the war. I found myself engaged and captivated by all this technological advancement in such a short time; while other portions then showed the grave consequences those led to. It was a mixed time in history, where scientific advancement was at an all time high level, no doubt, though things nearly escalated to a point of no return.
Director: Mark Radice
Info: IMDB link
Trailer: Youtube link
PBS: Episode link
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