Battleground is another film that has long stretches of boredom and drudgery punctuated with moments of terror. I’ve never been in combat, so I don’t really know, but it has the feel of being accurate.
Came here to say this. The book is essentially a transcript of the events, with some area and unit history added. The movie, IIRC, was faithful to the book (We Were Soldiers Once, and Young.)
It was a good enough movie, but I’ve yet to see one that captures the sheer terror of aerial combat inside an unpressurized bomber at 25,000 feet. The danger posed by flak is particularly underplayed; like infantry being sniped on the front lines, a piece of shrapnel from an air burst could decapitate you instantly with absolutely no warning. A direct hit, and your airplane could just disintegrate in mid-air; this is arguably better than being trapped inside by G-forces as it spirals into the ground.
The thought of being wounded (the “armor” around crew stations wouldn’t stop a 20 or 40mm cannon shell) and lying in a puddle of your own frozen blood for hours at a time is particularly gut-wrenching. There was a documentary about RAF Bomber Command on the History Channel not long ago, and former aircrew were talking about what it was like trying to get back home after being shot up by night fighters. One tail gunner literally had to be scraped off the inside of his turret.
I’ve not seen Memphis Belle, but I doubt their battle scenes were anywhere near this graphic.
Well, of course not- the “Memphis Belle” was the B-17 whose crew successfully completed the first 25 mission tour.
IIRC, there was a wounded guy, and a bomber got hit & blew up, and blood/guts went all over the nose of the Memphis Belle.
I kind of got the impression from talking with my grandfather, that flak was by far the most awful thing because there was NOTHING you could do- the planes flew in rigid defensive formation, and often the German AAA gunners would start firing ahead of the planes and the crews knew they had to fly into that.
I never had the impression that he was as concerned about fighters because they had the ability to shoot back, and typically were too busy doing that to think about much else.
(FWIW, Gramps was part of the 549th Squadron, 385th Bomb Group out of Great Ashfield from about September 1943 - December 1943. He was transferred to the heavy bombers after the first Schweinfurt-Regensburg mission, and was on some of the more interesting missions- 2nd Schweinfurt (Black Thursday) and Marienburg in particular.)
And they were unbelievably lucky to have accomplished that. The Good Lord must really have been looking over their shoulders.
Some statistics from a website on the US 8th Air Force:
*Approximately 6,000 heavy bombers (B-17s and B-24s) were lost during operational sorties and another 2,000 were written off as a result of crashes or extreme damage.
In addition to the 6,000 heavy bombers, there were 500 medium bombers and 2,500 fighters lost.
Over 30,000 airmen were killed or missing and another 30,000 made prisoner of war.
Only one of three airmen survived the air battle over Europe during World War II. The losses were extrordinary.
The casualties suffered by the 8th Air Force in World War II exceeded those of the US Marine Corps and the US Navy combined.
The average flyer was about 20 years of age and even for these young men the effects of flying very long missions under extreme cold, the constant hum and vibration, and being exposed to enemy fighters and flak resulted in unusual stress that sometimes resulted in a breakdown.
In the early years of the air war crews were required to fly 25 and later 30 and then 35 missions before they were returned to the States. Upon completion of their tour, the survivors automatically became members of the “Lucky Bastards Club.”*
I always thought The Beast about a Russian tank in Afghanistan was likely a pretty realistic story, save for the fact they weren’t speaking in native tongue. The story and acting were good and I like to see things from a different perspective.
Now when you say “combat” are you limiting that to modern combat? Because as for combat between soldiers on the frontier and indians, Apache in this case, I don’t know of many more realistsic than Ulzana’s Raid, starkly brutal in its depiction of violence and from all the reading I’ve done on the campaigns pretty accurate as well.
Jarhead.
Training and waiting and training and hydrating and waiting and lots of macho posturing and almost fighting, then it’s over. Modern war in the desert for the ground pounders.
Generation Kill was an excellent HBO miniseries about the 2nd Iraq invasion. It was closely based off of the book of an embedded reporter from Rolling Stone. It’s like Memphis Belle in Humvees (with lots more swearing, nihilism, and Ripped Fuel.)
I liked both the book and the movie of Jarhead, although Gulf War vets have given it mixed reviews as to accuracy.
Glory is, I think, the most accurate movie in showing what Civil War combat was like, from all I’ve read about the war.
Unless things have changed dramatically since my time as an EOD tech, you would not see an EOD tech getting in sniper battles or generally acting like a special forces member.
No and no, for the most part.
My grandfather was on a B-17 crew as well. He was the pilot, and his plane was shot down. He and some of the crew did manage to get out in time, and he was a POW for the last year of the war.
I always felt Full Metal Jacket felt very “realistic” in how mundane the combat was. There wasn’t a lot of battle scenes with characters going out in a heroic blaze of glory tossing grenades and whatnot. Mostly it was just wandering around the ruins of Hue City with this guy getting killed by shrapnel, that guy getting killed by a mine, some other guy getting killed by sticking his head around the wrong corner at the wrong time. There isn’t even some great climactic Alamo stand against a battalion of NVA. They just kill some sniper whose been harassing the squad (a teenage girl armed with nothing but an old AK rifle) and rejoin the battalion.
I recall there was a fairly graphic scene from Catch 22 where Yossarian is flashing back to an earlier mission where one of the crew was badly wounded.
All Quiet on the Western Front, about World War I, contained very realistic, violent, pre-Hayes Code, combat scenes.
My Dad liked the TV series Combat!, The Big Red One, also The Longest Day (but “Too many officers”).
He said the scene in TBRO where the veterans wouldn’t learn the names of the newbies was correct.
Altho Combat! had it’s ups & downs, Dad said the small patrols going on little daily missions was where much of the fighting went on.
I’m gonna say West Side Story.
Wait, that is what gang fights are like, right?
When you’re a crip you’re a crip all the waaaaay
Dark Blue World has some nicely done air-combat scenes (and is damn good film as well). Trailer on youtube.
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
What I’ve gathered from watching war movies is that everyone who was there had a different war. There’s a lot of fiction and Hollywood drama and some reality in each war movie. For example, Apocalypse Now was a lot of bojive with neat bits to film and a couple fun lines “I love the smell of napalm in the morning”, “Charlie don’t surf!” but that’s probably bullhockey. The one little smidgen of a scene that really clicked with me was the GI refusing to get on a chopper and the sergeant or 2 shouting at him to get on.
Sam Fuller, who lived, and then wrote the book, screen play, and directed “The Big Red One” wrote that he thought the only way you can make the audience REALLY come close to experiencing what combat is like is by having someone in the theatre with a rifle to shoot random audience members as they’re watching the film.
They tried that in Colorado.
The urban combat near the end of Children of Men seems very realistic to me.