Not Good or Bad, but Blitzkrieg

World War II: the Good War, the Great Patriotic War, the war that made the modern world; we like giving sobriquets to that war. We also like setting a lot of fiction in that war, and especially a lot of video games. For a time in the 2000s there were so many first person shooters that there was something of a glut of them, so prevalent WWII is in gaming. The question is, why?

There is the main argument about morality, which I tend to agree with: that Nazis, Italian Fascists, and Imperial Japanese make very good villains. This is completely correct, for these governments were among the most evil in human history, as is common knowledge. It's also still in the public consciousness; there are people alive now that saw that war, that fought in that war. It's something that is still deeply ingrained in our culture.

As much as I do support the above arguments, there is one key reason that I, personally, believe that WWII is so prevalent in video games, and by extension films, less so literature.

It's fucking awesome.

You don't have stuff like this in war anymore.

Before you start excoriating me for downplaying the terrors of the Holocaust and other mass killings (I had family who died in the Bataan Death March, so I know the stories) or for being coarse in an otherwise dignified post, let me explain.

World War II was the last big war, the last war between large industrial powers. This brought the intensity of war to a wider scale and to a magnitude that simply has not been seen since. There were weapons that were flashier and more imposing than anything after it; weapons conducive to video games and movies.

For one, you have tanks. Lots of tanks. Nowadays, tanks are mainly used to fight insurgents in Iraq or Afghanistan, but in WWII you had a significant part of the fighting between armored vehicles. The Wehrmacht shocked the world with blitzkrieg, storming through Belgium past the Maginot line. On the Eastern Front, you had perhaps the finest tank of the war, the T-34, produced en masse, engaging German mechanized horrors in the tundra of Russia. Nowhere else was this more apparent than Kursk, the largest tank battle in history.

Related to this is the mobility of warfare during that war, even with infantry and with armored vehicles that were not tanks. Men were going hill to hill fighting for ground, not searching for an invisible enemy nor ground to death in the trenches by machine guns. Movement makes excitement, and a moving war creates anticipation; it makes large sieges, like Leningrad, Stalingrad, or Berlin more harrowing than any battle in recent memory.

In the Pacific, you have the potential for massive naval clashes between the Americans and the Japanese, and their allies. It is telling that the only ship in the United States Navy, the U.S.S. Constitution, to sink another ship last did so in the War of 1812; the only American naval vessel that has seen ship-to-ship combat is a museum ship.

Air warfare, likewise, was different. It was a warfare of mass, not of surgical strikes. Now, what is done by drones or by the most precise of strikes was accomplished by fleets of bombers flying over enemy cities and unleashing hell upon them. It was far more random, and perhaps more importantly, more vast. There was also more plane to plane combat, unlike the modern insurgent threat from Iraq or Afghanistan. There was more daring, more heroism in the skies rather than just simply going on isolated bombing runs.

And this is the crux of the argument; WWII is so much more dramatic than modern warfare. You have no massive invasions nowadays, no Battles of Britain, no Stalingrads, no Kursks. The rise of a irregular enemy for the United States and by extension the rest of the West has, ironically, sent those wanting entertainment longing for a more powerful enemy who does not have to resort to trickery to oppose its opponents. There is more excitement in modern wars.

Most would rather be in a tank when an enemy is a tank, and as such there is a degree of equality of power between the two sides. There is much more suspense when there is a closeness of power projection ability; nobody thinks a one-sided fight is fun to watch. As such, seeing drones pummel terrorist caves in the middle of the Kalahari is boring; you know who has the advantage and you know who is going to win. Not so in WWII battles; there is horrifying effectiveness on both sides.

This is fundamentally why WWII is popular in media in general; equality of force. Gamers can go head to head in a T-34 or a Sherman against a King Tiger or Panzer IV and expect either side to win. There is a deal of awe in seeing multiple lumbering metal monstrosities firing explosive rounds at one another; likewise, there is as similar sense of awe seeing pilots dogfighting over London, or ships in combat at Midway, or the harrowing building-to-building, hand-to-hand combat of Stalingrad. It's more interesting to see almost equal forces fighting, rather than something so lopsided as the War in Afghanistan or subsequent wars. It's why we won't be seeing any less Nazis anytime soon.