Yes. Removing the distributor cap was the way to keep people from driving off in them.
Unless they were indispensable, in which case they could do what they want so long as they did their job. I’ve known soldiers like that.
Look - good commanders are, by definition, brave, audacious risk takers. They always push the limits, and that includes pushing back against authority. If they’re smart and know how far to push, they get away with.
If only our troops could be issued submachine guns with movie-style bottomless clips.
I saw Independence Day in the theater with my brother, who is in the Navy, an aircraft mechanic. During the scene where they’re running around getting the fighters ready before the climatic battle my brother bursts out laughing, for no reason that any of us could see. Later he told us that all the men you see running around doing stuff to planes are all wearing line rat gear from a carrier. He actually was a line rat on a carrier, and seeing them all wearing that stuff on land was hilarious to him.
Patton was eccentric too and was damned lucky that Eisenhower didn’t ship him back to the States. Of course, he couldn’t; George was one commander without which the war in Europe would have taken much longer to finish (forever, if it had been left in the hands of generals like Montgomery, who is vastly overrated).
George “never rose above Army Commander and saw subordinates promoted over him” Patton?
Skippy sounds like my kind of guy, that was fantastic. Thanks
Capt
Well, maybe, and maybe not. Could have been that the war would have been over in about the same amount of time, but with American and Soviet soldiers shaking hands at the Seine instead of the Elba.
To be fair, he did try to go back and correct his mistakes, specifically the way a Death Star properly explodes.
Since all the good ones are taken, I’m going to go off the wall and say Avatar. Yeah, it’s not a war movie, but it was pretty hilarious. Here is an advance space faring population, who wants to clear out a group of stone age aliens from around a tree, and the best they can do is to get within bow range to use their advanced rockets, and then later a shuttle rigged up with explosives and a ground/air assault on the aliens mountain fortress?? No one ever though ‘hey, why are we using troops when we could, I don’t know, drop a rock on them from space’? 
Even leaving that aside, what was the ground assault supposed to accomplish if they were going to drop explosive from the shuttle?? Just to make sure the stone age aliens had a chance to get in a calvary charge through heavy woods and into the teeth of modern troops using Napoleonic tactics and forming line? Why didn’t those troops do something really meaningful and form square?
Here is an interview Rochefort gave in which he was explaining why he wore the smoking jacket and slippers over his uniform.
What was it like serving in the Legions?
Re: the round crews wearing the RAT gear at Area 51 in Independence Day…
I will never be able to not notice that. For those of you who are curious, on an Air Force base, the ground crews would mostly be wearing camo fatigues with elastic reflective belts and eye/ear protection.
In movies with scenes in the cockpits of large aircraft, usually it’s a B-17 or B-29 (what have they got against Liberators?) when the pilot makes a hard turn (like after dropping a bomb on Hiroshima, Japan), he always turns the yoke hard to the right and holds it there until, seemingly, the aircraft is on the desired new heading.
It’s like this. You only hold the yoke like that if you want to roll the freaking aircraft. If you want to change the direction you turn the yoke to the right, for example, until you have the desired angle of bank. Then you straighten out the yoke and the bank angle will remain. Once you’ve turned enough (I haven’t mentioned the elevator and rudder adjustments) you turn the yoke the other way until your wings are level. Then you level the yoke again.
Oh I love Hunt for Red October. Especially Sean Connery. I did recently watch K-19 the widowmaker and while I don’t know if it was technically innaccurate (or indeed procedurally innacurate) but the film kept the tension level constantly high, without a break, which was annoying, and made out that the entire crew is grossly incompetent, but like so incompetent that ordinary tasks on a sub, even if their ordered to do them fast, would result in death and injury…always. And so you see men dying because a torpedo has hit them in the head while it’s being loaded, and all sorts of other weird crap. I refuse to believe any submarine crew is that incompetent.
I mean, to screw up a nuclear reactor, like as happened to the real K-19, you don’t need to be grossly incompetent, it seems to me, you just need to not be brilliant.
And beyond that the acting was sub-par, except for Harrison Ford, who I like cuz he’s a reliable actor. He wasn’t brilliant, but he was better than any other actor in the entire movie. Without him, there wouldn’t have been much reason to watch it.
Back in the mid 80s when I was living in Tidewater VA, I used to ‘social engineer’ my way all over various bases. I still have a belt of ammo cases that I collected on Fort Story, and one time I talked my way onto NOB, and all the way across several flightlines to HM14 to pick up a guy I was dating. I frequently went on base and hung out in barracks sewing on patches and altering uniforms for spare cash. Getting onto military bases pre 9-11 was not all that difficult. I wouldn’t try to engineer my way into a nuke storage facility, or certain other secure areas - but many areas were more or less accessible.
Wasn’t he the one who made some sort of statement about the Germans that they needed to be kicked around until they learned their place every now and again? [referring to the various times the Germans got into a war and ended up losing]
never underestimate how your career can be scuttled by others who dislike you for one reason or another. The military seems to have a lot of grudge lack of promotions/sideways promotions/change of duty station - in the civilian world it is harder to screw someones career if they do not work in the same company - but someone in the Navy can screw someone in the Army handily.
Patton may have had his eccentricities, but by damn, he could inspire loyalty in his subordinates. [and occasionally intense hatred.] I think it was much different back in WW2 - there was a different sort of unit cohesion - frequently all the recruits from say Wyoming County NY [or just Western NY west of Syracuse] would all end up in a specific training camp, sorted out into a specific unit with a set of officers. They would stick together and only get replacements for the combat injured and killed/captured. [hence in the movie Big Red 1 they more or less ignored the replacements until they had survived combat for a while] This new style where everybody sort of trains en mass and gets sorted out after A school always annoyed my Dad, he felt that it wasn’t as good for unit morale. He had ‘his’ General, and any time he ran into someone who had been in his original unit, they always knew who was meant when they talked about The General did <whatever>.
No mention of the hilariously inaccurate film Battleship?
Maybe some of our representatives from the Navy can explain this common trope where an unmotivated slacker fuckup becomes an officer in the Navy, has significant responsibility AND still manages to maintain his fuckedupedness? Because I was under the impression that you had to go to Annapolis or at the very least graduate from college with a math or engineering degree be in ROTC. Both paths requiring a great deal of work.
Not “oh gee I don’t know what to do with my life so I guess I’ll go be the weapons officer on an Arleigh Burke class destroyer until I figure my shit out.”
Not to mention a dozen guys getting the decommissioned USS Missouri ready for battle in a few hours.
I would imagine submarines and ships in general are very dangerous places to work. You have high pressures and temperatures (and radiation) and large, heavy objects moving around in confined spaces while the ship is moving and rolling.
My biggest complaint recently had been with the latest Star Trek movie. This bugged me so much that even as a lifelong Star Trek fan, I couldn’t even enjoy the movie.
James Kirk, a kid who isn’t even a graduate of Star Fleet academy, taking over command of the flag ship!
This is like a Sophomore or Junior at the Naval Academy on a summer cruise on the newest, biggest, baddest aircraft carrier in the fleet, somehow taking over command over the ohh, tens or hundreds of real Officers on the ship! Such complete and total crap that it took me out of the film.
The TV show MASH* was the worst for this, especially in the later years (with Happy Days coming a close second). People don’t understand that hair was a really big deal in the '50’s and early '60’s. Wearing your hair over your ears wasn’t just considered unconventional, it was unmanly. I remember hearing remarks about the Beatles’s mop tops – are they men or women? – for chrissakes
