Thank you to whomever replied to email regarding biography specials for the WW2 channel. Since you seemed to appreciate my input, I thought I would list here some other names who might be interesting to research. My list focuses on people who are probably more famous for what they did after the war, but were a part of the Second World War.
Basil Plumley
JFK
Nikita Khrushchev
QE2
Ho Chi Minh
Kim Il Sung
Wild Bill Donovan
Alexander Haig
Chesty Puller
Creighton Abrams
Jimmy Stewart
George McGovern
Joe McCarthy
James Doohan
Julia Child
Lee Marvin
Don Adams
Ferdinand Marcos
Mitsuo Fuchida
Clark Gable Aleda Lutz
Mervyn Bennion
Audie Murphy
Ronald Reagan
Gerald Ford
Richard Nixon
LBJ
George H. W. Bush
Noor Inayat Khan
Eileen Nearne
Ruby Bradley
Here’s my VIP list (plus my favourite Italian commander of the war)
Christopher Lee
Mel Brooks
Ed Wood
Toshiro Mifune
Günter Grass
Horst Tappert (the actor who played Detective Derrick)
Former Pope Ratzinger
David Niven
Kirk Douglas
Clark Gable
Audrey Hepburn
Sir Alec Guinness
Amedeo Guillet
I would also like to see together with bio and episodes about the roles of individual nations also specials dedicated to what major industrial companies and their CEOs did during WWII such as IBM, Ford, General Motors, Coca Cola, Opel, Coco Chanel, Fiat, Hugo Boss ecc.
All joking aside, MacArthur & Patton shared a bio video on TGW so I was thinking about one on both Christian X of Denmark & Haakon VII of Norway. Not only are they both Nordic kings who’s countries were invaded by the Nazis, they are also brothers.
I listen to “To Hell and Back” by Sabaton every day, so I have to pick Audie Murphy. He might be my pick for the Greatest American. There are numerous others to discuss though:
-J. Edgar Hoover
-Robert Oppenheimer
-Curtis Lemay
-Chuck Yeager
-Ted Williams
-Grace Hopper
-Thomas Watson Sr. and Jr.
-Hedy Lamarr
-Alan Turing
-Mordechai Anielewicz
-Richard Sakakida
There are some extremely relevant figures on the Fascist side worth discussing too for historical value:
-Yamamoto
-Eiji Toyoda
-Rudolf and Adolf Dasler
-Schuschnigg
-Hans Massaquoi
Mohan Singh & Subhas Chandra Bose (leaders of Indian National Army)
Vasily Chuikov & Aleksander Rodimtsev (commanders of 6th Army at Stalingrad, famouslyu Rodimtsev had urban warfare experience in the Spanish Civil war winter 1937-38 battle of Teruel, with sub zero temperatures in Spain)
Wolfram von Richthofen (the Red Baron’s newphew and commander of the air fleet at Stalingrad, also active with Condor Legion in Spain)
Konstantin Rokossovsky (from NVKD imprisonment and near execution to Stalin’s favorite commander at the end of the war because of his success during Bagration)
Kantaro Suzuki (last Japanese PM of the war)
Korechika Anami (Japanese war minister, extreme war hawk but also almost certainly responsible for helping the mid August 1945 coup fail by refusing to participate in it, committed ritual suicide after signing the surrender declaration)
Is was watching the Great War and learned that Heinz Guderian was in Latvia in the Freikorps. This made me thing of a brilliant literary device used by Norma Mailer in the excellent The Naked and the Dead. He started each chapter with a character’s time machine, these were the character blurry memories of what they were doing just before the war (or between the wars in case of older characters).
This could be an interesting format, short segments going to the big moves of key persons in the conflict.
Among the ones I would like more info are:
Heinz Guderian
von Paulus
De Gaulle
Zhukov
Andrey Yeryomenko
