Gunpowder (like gasoline) is not a high explosive. Gunpowder is the fire you see coming out of the barrels. The TNT or RDX or whatever is in the shell IS high explosive and looks a lot different.
I don’t necessarily know about “sanitised” as much as “not presented to the public” - I’ve seen plenty of WWI and WWII images from the archives of places like the Imperial War Museum and the Australian War Memorial showing corpses and the general unpleasant aftermath of battles etc.
The thing is, you had to go looking for the images - they weren’t classified or restricted, you just had to search them out yourself rather than having them front and centre.
Excuse me while I put my geek hat on:
I’ve never been in the military, nor have I studied military history, so I undoubtedly have no clue. However, I’ll note that both “Saving Private Ryan” and “Band of Brothers” had Dale Dye as a military advisor. Dye was a Marine in Vietnam, and he now runs a company, “Warriors, Inc.”, which provides consultation to Hollywood on military topics.
His wife, Julia, is a friend of mine, and she works with him in the company (she’s an actress, stuntwoman, and fight instructor). In addition to advising directors and producers on what combat is really like, they also train actors on what being a solider is really like. I know that, for “Saving Private Ryan,” before filming, they took the actors out for a ten-day boot camp, in (IIRC) Montana, in the winter.
To be honest, I found that bizarre too, and yet the cargo net was legitimately a thing. You can find any number of pictures of it.
The difference is that the net in the movie was like a hundred feet high. In real life it was maybe a 20, 25 foot climb. The Japanese were unable to secure the edge of the cliff without coming under heavy fire.
This. For more clarity, the issue is about what’s happening when the projectile hits its target, not what happens when it’s coming out of the barrel. This is pretty common in cinema, i.e. detonation of high-explosive devices is commonly portrayed with a massive ball of flame and heat (that the actors sometimes outrun, when in reality a large part of what you get is a very sudden and destructive blast wave that shatters and displaces objects more than burning them.