Victory at Sea quite literally invented a genre. It was basically the first show to introduce historic war footage coupled with a narrator to a large amount of viewers. Not even 10 years had passed since the end of world war 2, and people, especially those who had relatives who fought in the pacific, wanted to know more about what horrible (and heroic) things went on there. The series is a very in depth look at one of world war 2's most talked about theaters: the ocean. Victory at Sea methodically goes through pretty much every major naval event of the war at least once. The show does not just focus on the pacific theater against the japanese, and some episodes center around the war in the mediterranean against the italian navy, the mid atlantic with german submarines sinking british merchant ships left and right, and supply convoys being assaulted by u-boats en route to the soviet ports of murmansk and archangel. The narration is one of the show's strongpoints, and the footage of chaotic fighting between the allies and axis forces has become iconic unto itself. There are a lot of world war 2 related things that always seem to be done to death because they focus on the same confrontations and battles over and over again: d-day, the battle of the bulge, el alamein, barbarossa, etc. What separates Victory at Sea from them is that it is naval based, and explores an angle of ww2 that usually gets overshadowed. It also paved the way for other war documentaries like World at War with its use of narration over archival footage, and deserves praise for that too.
Review of Victory at Sea
