WWII? Who writes this stuff?

Squid314's LiveJournal (via Volokh Conspiracy with a hat tip to Instapundit, like he needs it) has an amusing rant about the implausibility of that World War II show on the History Channel. And both he and Volokh forget to mention the comic relief, the Barney Fife of the Axis, Benito Mussolini.

After you've read enough WWII history, you start to wonder why anyone bothers to make anything up.  Squid314 touches on only a few of the unlikely plot twists. You also have the most critical battle of the war, the Battle of the Atlantic, going the right way because of, not one, but two miracles. You have the Battle of Britain won, arguably, not in spite of the fact that the head of RAF Fighter Command was certifiably insane, but because he was. You have Thermopylae in the Pacific, in which the unarmored ships of Taffy 3 turned back a Japanese fleet including the two most powerful battleships ever built, battleships that were designed specifically as US Navy-killers, the Japanese admiral defending his decision to run by saying, "No one could be that brave." You have the Japanese War Cabinet voting to continue the war after the second atomic bomb, the Emperor overriding the War Cabinet, young officers staging a military coup against him, with the wax discs on which the Emperor's surrender speech had been recorded as the McGuffin. (They escaped the young officers by being hidden in the Empress's makeup cabinet.)

And that's just some of the big items off the top of my head.