It’s always easy to spot those altered T-34s either from the front (the tracks are different from a Tiger’s) or from the side (the hull profile is wrong—it’s much shorter in the front than it should be). Still, they’re better than painting American tanks in German colors and trying to pass them off as authentic; I remember one made-for-TV movie in the '70s where Lloyd Bridges (!) was an Afrika Korps officer commanding a Sherman that was supposed to be a Panzer V (a Panther).
I was really impressed when I saw the Tiger this time and recognized it as the real thing! It was also nice to see the other period armor in running condition. In addition to the Greyhounds, I think there were some M24 Chaffees and (my memory may be playing tricks on me here) an M3 or M5 Stuart.
They started with 5 Shermans. The Lt.'s tank (Old Phyllis?)was taken out by the Nazi Youths with the Panzerfaust 60. The other four continued. #4 (Murder inc., I think.) was taken out by the Tiger when they discovered it. The other three turn 90 degrees off the road and through a hedgerow and reversed through the field to the treeline, forcing the Tiger to come out of cover. Then the three Shermans and the Tiger advanced on each other in the final confrontation with the Tiger taking out Lucy Sue and Matador with Fury being the lone survivor.
Yeah, An SS “battalion” as Pitt called it should not have lost so many men to a single immobilized tank. But some of the big war-movie cliches were operating here, (but not enough to really bother me).
Every shot from the good guys puts a baddie down for the count while all the incoming fire whistles past them. The crew let the enemy get right on top of them (literally) before opening fire instead of using the superior range of the main gun to slaughter the infantry before they can bring their antitank weapons into effective range. The SS men run around shooting like angry bees instead of taking cover and methodically eliminating the Fury. That is, until the plot requires a sneaky sniper to bring things to a head.
This was the first movie I’ve seen that showed WP rounds. Nasty weapon.
Vets have said more than once that you can see the rounds coming at you, at least under certain conditions. (Watch some episodes of Great Tank Battles, especially the ones about North Africa.)
I would guess that most rounds, if not specifically tracers, would be hot enough to glow under dim conditions. Especially AP rounds that were solid tungsten.
That whole episode has got me wondering about the quality of rank-and-file SS troopers (as opposed to officers and noncoms) that late in the war. How many would have been experienced, hard-core veterans? Would there have been a lot of unwilling, poorly-trained and unmotivated conscripts (who might actually look the other way if they spotted a survivor hiding beneath a tank) serving in a unit like that? The one with the flashlight looked as though he was fifteen.*
They were shown as having crates full of Panzerfausts, but they didn’t seem to make effective use of them. They should have been the first weapons brought against the Sherman.
*On the other hand, it was Hitler Youth units that put up some of the fiercest resistance in the last days of the war. They were too young and heavily indoctrinated to know any better.
THe major beef I had with the movie was the climactic battle. We are shown the germans marching with plenty of panzerfausts - yet, only one appears to have ever hit the Fury.
And it should have done a lot more damage than it did, assuming it wasn’t a dud. I read somewhere that a lot of the munitions at that stage of the war were being produced by slave laborers who were more than happy to sabotage things.
Yeah, I was thinking about that when the SS officer said, “These are all we have!” What about the ones guys were carrying on their shoulders earlier? I was annoyed by the fact that the SS were marching in tight formation begging to be hit by grenades or artillery instead of the proper spread out formation. I guess the director wanted a certain image whether it was accurate or not.
At that stage of the war, Allied air power was the main concern. Fighter-bombers were roaming freely, attacking targets of opportunity well behind German lines. A column like that, right out in the open, would have been in constant danger of being strafed by Thunderbolts, Typhoons, and the like.
Time to put in another good point about the movie.
In one scene, the main characters on the ground look up to see a huge B17 or B24 bomber formation flying overhead, with a few contrails of German fighters closing in. As a fan of 12 O’Clock High, it occurred to me that those up in the sky are also having their battle, facing death in their tin cans, just like the tank crews. Each crew would probably envy the other, for how much safer they think the other job is.
Now when I see an episode of 12O’CH, I’ll wonder if anyone is watching their air battle from down below.
Yeah, that scene gave me goose bumps! Never again will we see formation flying like that, with literally hundreds of bombers leaving contrails across the sky!
In Up Front, Bill Mauldin wrote something similar to your observation—how the American ground troops envied the air forces for their comfortable billets back in England, but felt terrible when they watched a formation flying through heavy flak and thought of the guys who were trapped inside the bombers.
Yes, they would. The tighter the formation, the better, since that what gave the bombers their defensive capability. Any plane flying outside the formation would have been bounced and shot down immediately.
Formation flying like that was extremely dangerous, due to the possibility of collisions and being hit by friendly fire. In addition, a bomber hit by flak while fully loaded could explode and take out the other airplanes in its box.
It also required a great deal of skill on the part of the pilots, who trained constantly for it (and a great many trainees were killed in the process). Still, it was safer than not flying in formation through enemy airspace, and it ensured good saturation of the target when the airplanes released their bombs.
The tighter the formation, the better, since that was what gave the bombers their defensive capability.
That is, their defensive capability against enemy fighters. They protected each other with their overlapping fields of fire.
Aside from evasive maneuvers, there was no defense against flak; you just had to sit still and take it, while trying not to crap your pants. And that, people, is what real helplessness and terror feel like!
Norman said that he had been in the army for 8 weeks. He also said he’d trained to be a typist. Would he have been there on the front lines a mere 8 weeks after joining? Now, he may have been trained as a typist before the war. So that time could be discounted. But he still would have had to go through basic (where apparently they taught him how to reload and operate the ball-mount model of a Browning 30-cal) and some kind of supplementary military school after that, like office work 101. And there would be the transit time from wherever he started in the US, across the Atlantic to England, across the channel, France, Belgium and western Germany. I’m sure it’s physically possible. But not likely.
A good book on the topic is Stephen Ambrose’s ***Citizen Soldiers: The U. S. Army from the Normandy Beaches to the Bulge to the Surrender of Germany ***.
I’m not going to cite anything here because it’s been a couple of years since I read it, but as I recall, casualties were so horrendous by April of '45 that the US Army was eager to get its hands on as many front-line replacements as it could, just as quickly as it could. So I wouldn’t necessarily discount the “eight weeks” reference out of hand.
I enjoyed the movie. the fire commands seemed accurate, although the loader was yelling, “Clear!” instead of the modern “Up!”.
The only thing that bothered me was that hatches were not locked. Especially at the end, when Norman was left alone in the tank and the American just casually opens it to check inside. I would have locked those hatches.
I really liked the movie despite the flaws. The tank battle with the Tiger was breathtaking - I don’t think I’ve been that edge of my seat for a while. I have the same complaints as others upthread, that the tracers seemed a bit too amped up (color coded red and green so you knew who was firing, even!), the dinner scene was a bit mis-paced, the final immobilized battle was rather unbelievable/overwrought, and the whole movie sort of coming off as a series of “Norman learns a lesson” events. Other than that I pretty thoroughly enjoyed the film and was impressed by how straightforward it took the “War is Hell” route. I also appreciated the bookending of the white horse - perhaps a horseman of the apocalypse, eh? “Conquest.”
My husband is a bit of a tank nerd and was extremely satisfied by seeing a real Tiger in action.
Rotten tomatoes pegged the movie at about 80% and I’d say the same thing. Not perfect, but not bad by a long shot. Great movie for the right type of viewer.
I forgot to mention that Pitt was using the MP-44 Sturmgewehr. That’s practically WWII fanservice considering it’d be easier for him to get ammo for a tommy gun or grease gun.
Now that I think about it, I saw both a tommy and a grease gun being used by the crew. A real mix of weapons on that tank. Newbie got the grease gun, of course.
Shia did show better acting in this, but then again, this was the first role I remember where he got to be an adult.