A question about the M4 Sherman: What did the assistant driver do? How did he assist the driving? New Guy only seemed to be used as a bow gunner which, if that’s his main job, is what he should be called.
So, how did assistant drivers assist driving on the M4 Sherman?
Also, given the damage inflicted by the mine, how easily should they have been able to deal with the damage on their own? Aren’t busted tracks a rather routine problem? Was it the broken wheel that posed a significant problem? Or was it a rather easy problem passed off as a major one because the script required it?
Here’s where you can downloadFM17-67 The field manual for operating a M4 Sherman.
I’m skimming it now and there doesn’t seem to be a lot of duties listed for him. They don’t even call the position “Assistant Driver” they use “Bow Gunner (BOG).” Most of the stuff listed for him apart from using the MG are things like “Pass/stow ammo” and “Service MG.”
Yes, and it’s one reason why not so many Purple hearts were issued- many men would demur getting any more than Medic treatment for a minor bullet wound- as being sent back to a hospital would mean losing your unit. The “Repple-Depple” worked well logistically, but it was a nitemare otherwise.
-Of all the times and places in history, I find Germany in 1945 to be one of the most interesting. Setting the movie in April was a great decision. It sets up the military operations not as a glorious campaign, but as a dirty job that has to be done. The enemy is in a state of collapse, but they keep resisting, and the soldiers have to keep putting themselves in harm’s way to kill them, and they clearly resent it.
-Loved the combat scenes, particularly the tank’s-eye view of shots going down range, and tank rounds screaming past heads and ricocheting off armor. They have to assault the enemy from an open field in one scene, and there’s no safe way of going about it, they just have to get in there and destroy them. The veterans are wearied and cynical by this point, and they have no tolerance for Norman’s naive idealism.
-Seems like many found the apartment scene with the two women to be controversial because of the ambiguous sexual encounter. The SacBee reviewer seemed to demand a more explicit rape scene than what the movie delivered, that not making it uniformly awful ruined the movie. I actually appreciated that they didn’t depict a forceful violation, because I found the whole scene to be tense enough. It had already been established that any sort of humanity and gentlemanly restraint had very nearly been beaten out of the soldiers, which provided a palpable tension when the other three members of the crew barged in, drunk and surly. Would one of them take liberties with the girl? Would anything stop him?
-I had no issue with the movie accepting that it was fundamentally an action film set in a historic time and place. It didn’t feel the need to make any grand statement about our involvement in the war, it was just about the danger and ambiguity (or lack of, really) these soldiers had to deal with.
There’s a tad bit more emotional stress, IMO, too, on the soldiers that have reached that point.
Nobody wants to die in war, but for whatever reason it seems especially more tragic to die in the last few days of war. (Imagine WW1: the 8th hour, of the 11th day, of the 11th month in 1918. Your commander wants one last “big push” to showcase his courage and “leadership” skills to the brass above him.) The war’s end is a forgone conclusion, your death wont change that.
But you can’t just disobey the order to advance, either, and risk being shot or imprisoned.
I thought the early battle scenes were well done. I thought the last battle scene was just the usual Hollywood crapola. Dozens of SS just running round like headless chickens in front of the tank being machine gun fodder despite there being heaps of cover available. Then once the story requires the Hero to fall, (as someone else said upthread) one guy decides to just calmly take a shot from cover which had been an available option for the Germans the whole damn time. Hell for ages the Hero is just standing on the back of the tank firing forward not even looking behind him! You could have walked up to him with a handgun and he wouldn’t even have noticed. Not to mention an anti-tank weapon.
As to the social aspects, I think the film didn’t want to be a straight action flick so it included the meal scene with the German women, but it didn’t deal with the subject subtly enough to come across as other than cartoonish.
My vote: it’s Saving Private Ryan but without the evenness of tone, and with better tank battles.
I watched the deleted/extended scenes, and Wardaddy gives the backstory for his burns; happened before the war. Also helps explain his state of mind.
Loved the movie. My biggest nitpicky complaint/question (the reason I signed onto the site for the first time in several months) was the climatic battle. The kid sees the SS column, and there were literally dozens of troopers carrying what I thought were Panzerfausts. I figured the battle would start, Fury would be surrounded by 10-12 of those, and boom - no more Fury. I guess that makes for a bad ending, since we then see the SS officer busting out the box of Panzerfausts and saying ‘this is all we got.’ Sloppy on the part of the filmmakers, but I still loved the show.
I wonder if Norman’s girlfriend was killed by the same liebeschreck round that killed Eugene’s nurse friend as Bastogne in Band of Brothers? If war movies have taught me anything, wait until you ship home to fall in love or tell anyone about your big future plans.
I liked Fury, but I did feel that the film couldn’t decide between “authentic and brutal look at war” and “series of horrific war images punctuated by war movie clichés”.
Also, the final stand at the end seem a bit poorly thought out to me.
Why didn’t they bring all the ammo inside the tank earlier so you don’t have to leave the tank?
Why not grab some extra small-arms and ammo from the dead bodies BEFORE the battle
And this is a big one. Why not light up the SS column at 500 yards when they’re all bottlenecked walking down the right directly at the tank? Letting the infantry get close enough to walk on top of the tank seems counter to everything I’ve ever heard about tank warfare. I mean wasn’t that the whole point of Saving Private Ryan?
I think at this point in the movie “what good tactics dictate” and “what the story requires” had become so confused as to make it hard to analyse.
However, for what it’s worth my take was that if they had opened fire at 500 yards they would have got one effective round in. After that, the whole column would have scattered into the hedgerows, which were quite permeable for infantry. At that point they would have been shooting blind with very little chance of hitting anything.
I believe I am speaking for my eldest daughter when I say, “Rape? But it’s Brad Pitt!” I’m not sure that Norman and Emma had sex, just made out.
M/Sgt. Kouma’s MoH citation isn’t enough to show that it isn’t just Hollywood crapola? How about Audie Murphy’s? Just because Hollywood creates some crapola, it doesn’t mean some very brave–and lucky–men don’t exist.
One interesting insight I got from reading George Macdonald Fraser’s autobiography Quartered Safe Out Here was how often real life warfare tended to be unbelievably cliched - to the point where, if you accurately portrayed it in a screenplay, it would not be believable and/or appear absurd.
I suppose he would know - he fought in Burma with the 14th army, then went on to become a writer and a writer of movie screenplays.
I watched this movie for the first time tonight and enjoyed it, though I agree with some of the comments above that the ‘dinner scene’ seemed out of tone with the rest of the movie.
I wondered about that as well, I don’t know anything about tanks other than what I’ve picked up by cultural osmosis but I thought it would be better to split the four remaining tanks up into two pairs and try to flank the German tank at much wider angles, so the German tank would take longer to traverse its turret from target to target as much as anything else. It would also be more difficult for it to watch what all four tanks were doing.
But it was probably filmed the way it was to have all four American tanks on-screen at the same time and it was a very tense combat scene.
I’ve read that book as well and recall that part, he wrote about a comrade being shot and calling out something like, “He got me, the dirty rat!”, as he says if that was in a war movie the audience would be rolling their eyes, but it actually happened.
As I said above, I feel this was a key scene of the movie. It was Wardaddy attempting to find out if he could stop being a soldier and go back to domestic life. He apparently found out that he couldn’t go back to being the person he was before the war and I feel this explains his later decision to stay and fight rather than flee the German column; Wardaddy felt he had no future ahead of him anyway.
H2 (I think) showed a documentary on the making of this movie a couple of months ago. While they did bring in a real Tiger from a museum in England (the only one in the world that’s still operational, IIRC), it was only used for one day of filming, since the danger of it breaking down was far too great. All of the other battle scenes were filmed with an armored vehicle (I forget which kind) outfitted with a fake superstructure that matched the real Tiger’s. Everything below the superstructure (the hull, wheels, tracks) was CGI added in post-production.
As an added note, those who did “discharge themselves” and rejoin their units were seldom (if ever) punished. At most, they might have gotten a slap on the wrist from a sergeant or junior officer before being sent back into combat.
