I watched the film today. Why didn’t the German grenades thrown into Fury go off?
I don’t remember this. If it happens, it’s because they were duds. Toward the end of the war, Germany was having trouble with armaments, due to sabotage by slave laborers and shortages of strategic materials.
This may be a stretch, but it’s the first thing that comes to my mind. Are you sure the crew didn’t just chuck the grenades back out before they went off?
The thing that surprised me was that an SS battalion could be so nonchalant about approaching an enemy tank, disabled or not. Why didn’t they break out that crate of Panzerfausts they were shown carrying and put a round through the Sherman before they reached it?
I thought they did go off and kill one of the last two Americans left. The other one slipped out the belly hatch before they went off.
That is my memory too. Although I was annoyed by the amazingly long delay on the fuses. Hollywood grenades are designed to allow for a tearful goodbye between the main characters before detonating.
Things seem to be intact when Norman went back into the tank, including Wardaddy. Cinematic liscense perhaps.
The whole movie was kind of screwed up in terms of historical accuracy. At the point in the war when the movie was set, the US Army was pretty much rolling over the Germans everywhere. If they put up much of a fight, it was extremely temporary until the Americans could bring up overwhelming firepower from the air, artillery and whatever else. Units were advancing as fast as their logistical trains could support. It definitely wasn’t some sort of grim final push against last-ditch fanatical resistance, and the US forces weren’t strapped for anything at that point.
That’s not to say that US forces weren’t suffering casualties, but it wasn’t some kind of “Battle for Berlin” situation throughout the entire country either.
A SS squad likely would have wiped out a single tank without any issue, and a battalion (several hundred men) wouldn’t have had trouble- they’d have had panzerfausts at the very least, and those would have made quick work of a M4A3E8 Sherman from just about any angle.
I’d like to think of the film as being about people who did a heroic thing for no reason. They thought they were going to do this Big Thing for the war effort, make the big sacrifice for duty honor and country, for Old Glory and the girl back home, mom and apple pie, do their part to win the war, buying into all the propaganda, but since they didn’t have the big picture, they didn’t realize it wasn’t necessary. The film is basically the movie they wrote about their lives.
And I loved the scene where they look up and see the bomber formation fly over. I can picture them thinking, “those guys have it so good. What a cushy job!”, again not realizing that statistically they have a better chance of survival than the bomber crews.
I believe everyone but Norman had the “Make some other son of a bitch die for his country” concept down pat.
No, the message of the movie was how war changes people. The movie was about a group of men, who had presumably been average Americans, but had adapted themselves to the brutal environment of combat. This adaptation has kept them alive but now the war is approaching its end.
Most of the crew isn’t thinking past the day-to-day reality of being in combat. But Wardaddy is considering the implications of the war ending. This is triggered by the new guy Norman joining the crew. Norman isn’t a hardened veteran like the rest of the crew. This reminds Wardaddy of his own pre-combat existence - and his post-combat future.
Wardaddy begins to question whether he will be able to shed off his combat persona when the war ends and go back to being the civilian he used to be. He tries to recreate a typical civilian life in the apartment with Norman and the German women and realizes that he can’t.
This is why Wardaddy chooses to make a stand with the disabled Sherman. It’s not out of a desire to sacrifice his life for America. It’s out of a recognition that he has no life ahead of him when the war ends so he’s better off dying during the war. Bible, Coon-ass, and Gordo died along with Wardaddy because like him, they would not have been able to go back. Norman is the only one who survives because he is the only one who will be able to live in a post-war world.
Reminds me of something Bill Mauldin said in Up Front: The infantryman envies the airmen for having decent food and sleeping in warm beds every night, but he doesn’t bitch when he sees a formation flying through heavy flak and thinks about the poor guys trapped inside a plane when it goes down.
IIRC, the chance of surviving a European tour of duty (25 missions) in the USAAF was roughly 50%. (The figure was the same for the RAF.) The USAAF also had the highest casualty rate among officers (all pilots, co-pilots, navigators, and bombardiers).
Everyone else in the crew of an American bomber in the ETO was a sergeant, since they would be treated better if taken prisoner. (I don’t know exactly what the British system was, or if the American system was different in the Pacific.)
One, it really depended on when you were flying your missions; during 1943, it was possibly less than 50%, as fighter escort to the target wasn’t introduced until early 1944. But again, at the time the movie was set during, the B-17s typically were only running 8 man crews without waist gunners because of the general lack of fighter resistance at that point.
Second, the 8th Air Force actually suffered MORE casualties during WWII than the US Marine Corps did, with 26,000 8th AF killed to the USMC’s 19,000. People don’t realize that- part is the USMC’s propaganda efforts, and part is just ignorance of the scale of the strategic air offensive over Germany and the intensity of the combat.
That’s interesting. The writer did spend time on that for a reason. I thought it was to show that Wardaay, Norman and the two women were civilized, while the rest of the crew were assholes, but you make a point.
Again, you can’t be 100% sure exactly when a grenade is going to go off, even in the best of times. Things are much worse when slave labor is involved.