HA! I was like halfway thru and I was thinking man I should skip to the bottom and look to see if there's a "tl;dr it's basically the terminator story set in medieval times"
This is going to be a terrible description, but does anyone have that one comic that involves Hitler time traveling and protecting a bunch of animals that eventually evolve into humans? Something close to that? I have a mighty need...
Go watch Space Battleship Yamato right now. It's peak Matsumoto, the ultimate example of WW2 apologia ever created by an axis power, and has kickin' ******* rad space battles.
If you can't handle the older shows (it's one of the first animes that ever made it stateside back in the seventies or something, for reference), an updated version of the first season called Yamato 2199 released a couple years ago. It's reasonably faithful to the original story and has pretty awesome production values, so it's a decent way to experience the series.