I have heard the Normandy Battlefield tour guide and creator of WW2TV, Paul Woodridge, discuss the Saving Private Ryan/Band of Brothers 
‘effect’. This is where people on his tours only want to see where the actions in a film or series took place.
His dilemma is that he wants to show people beyond what has appeared on screen but that many people would not have been there in the first place if they had not seen such things on screen. It’s quite difficult for him as the fact or fiction of Saving Private Ryan is that none of it was filmed in Normandy and most of the story is made up.
Dilemma
My dilemma is similar. Therefore, despite this website being called Second World War Books, it will also deal with films and other media. Like many others, my first experience of the Second World War was through watching films like 
The Dam Busters or TV series like Dad’s Army. Movies, TV series and more recently podcasts have continued to be important in my ongoing interest in the war. They are also many other people’s ‘gateway’ to discovering how interesting so it would be hypocritical and detrimental to the success of the site if I failed to include them.
Success
I very much want to make this website successful. The first measure of success would be people interacting with the content. To do this I need to get a lot of traffic to the site. A way of doing this and getting the site ranked higher in search engines is to regularly write and update the number of blogs on the site.
My research has shown me that blogs must be a certain length to get ranked by those pesky algorithms we hear about all the time. This length is one thousand words. As much as I love reading, I cannot possibly manage to finish reading enough books to post often enough. Therefore, I need other topics to write about.
I have had some writing lying around in the form of the thesis I wrote for my MA on Second World War films, I have decided to publish this on the website partly to keep the content going but also because I believe it might stimulate some discussion, therefore, killing two birds with one stone. Apart from the paper copies I have, the only ‘digital’ copy I have is a scanned copy on PDF, so I have decided to transcribe it into Word.
As many readers might have already noticed, I have also begun doing reviews of books partway through my reading of them. I will also continue to do this as I tend to have several books on the go at the same time.
Thesis disclaimer
Initially, the plan was to transcribe it verbatim but whilst re-reading it before transcribing it onto PC, I realised how poor the grammar and punctuation were. Fortunately, the dinosaur of a word processor I used to type it in the late nineties and early noughties, had a half-decent spell check, even though I remember it taking hours. During the transcribing process, I corrected the punctuation and grammar in such a way that the original meaning is not lost. I seem to lack many commas!
I am not usually one for acronyms, but I have come up with one for this process: TPGHBCPI (The Punctuation and Grammar Have Been Changed to Protect the Innocent). I think this has achieved its goal of shortening the original… I have also changed World War II to Second World War out of both preference and consistency.
I have quoted but not included the references as I had to in the original. The academic rules I was following when I wrote this work also required the date of the production of the film to be in brackets every time the film was mentioned. This seemed somewhat tedious for this website, so I have left it out or rewritten it like this – The Great Escape of 1963 or something similar. The content from the thesis will be in italics to differentiate it from my current thoughts.
They are books too
Apart from a couple of films such as The Longest Day and A Bridge Too Far that I knew were based on books in the thesis, I have recently discovered that many of the films were also based on books, so I do not feel that guilty about including films on the website. This discovery has also added to my book wish list and will hopefully lead to more direct comparisons between the books and whatever way they have been represented. 
Oppenheimer has just opened in cinemas in the UK, a second series of BBC’s World on Fire has just begun, Spielberg’s and Hank’s Masters of the Air should be released soon
, and a new series of Rogue Heroes is due next year, so new material is always being produced and will allow for debate to be current. Revisits to the films considered in the thesis will also be made as I have not seen some of them since I first wrote it.
In other news
I have also recently added an affiliate link policy to the website as I will get paid commission if you follow any of the links on this site to websites such as Amazon, any purchases will be greatly appreciated.
On today’s walk, I finally finished Speed Aggression Surprise after my Bomber Mafia/Natural Born Heroes distraction. I have now begun (As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases) Big Week by James Holland and will make a comparison of that to Al Murray’s Command: How the Allies Learnt to Win the Second World War as to have a battle of the We Have Ways presenters.
In addition, I am continuing my research into my grandfather and waiting for PIAT: Britain’s anti-tank weapon of World War II by Matthew Moss to arrive. I discovered this book through another podcast hosted by Matthew Moss and Robbie McGuire, Fighting on Film, a must for anyone like me who loves a war film.
Keep reading, keep watching, keep listening, keep debating.
BigT