Sitting at home getting well with TV, Internet and the SD Board…
I saw on the History Channel that Sherman tanks didn’t do well against Panzers in Europe, but I saw a Richard Widmark flick tonight where they used them in the Pacific theatre. How did they do there? The same flick had the Japanese using rockets against US Marines. I’d never heard of this before. Any comments?
And of course, Widmark, who according to Sidney Poitier was the least prejudice guy in Hollywood, constantly apologized for using the N word in the movie they made and was the first guy to invite Poitier to his home had the line in this 1950 movie “Hose the who hill. (with the tank flame thrower) It’s lousey with Nips.” Sigh.
Tank to tank, the Sherman was no match for a Panther or a Tiger. Panzers is too broad a term, since the Sherman was, indeed, a match for the PKW Mark IV that preceded the Panther as the standard medium tank. When the Shermans could be gathered in great numbers on open territory, they could overwhelm even Panthers with speed and numbers (which was the theory behind using them) despite mediocre armor and a woefully underpowered, short-barreled 75mm gun. The problem in Europe, of course, was that on any given day the allies could not guarantee that they would have more tanks or that they would have open terrain on which to fight.
In the Pacific, the Sherman was more than a match for any tank the Japanese had. (It is possible the the Japanese had a heavy battle tank of which I am unaware, but I don’t think so.) However, none of the Pacific islands had the terrain for a “classic” tank battle. It is hard to swing a hundred tanks around the enemy’s right flank when you cannot even find the right flank in the midst of the jungle. And on the volcanic islands, the dust and rough terrain were pretty hard on the tanks, while the Japanese did not even use them, choosing, instead, to hunker down in hardened bunkers where their artillery could try their hand at bursting the Sherman armor. The Sherman’s pitiful 75mm gun was, again, not much use against such hard points, which led to the favored use of the flamethrower.
I have seen that movie, I think, tens of years ago. The battle scenes are impressive as they charge across the California countryside, but I’m fairly sure that the Japanese did not make extensive use of rockets, either. The rocket in WWII was a barrage weapon. Only a few aircraft-mounted varieties were intended to be aimed at particular targets. For the Japanese to fire salvo after salvo of rockets (out of a hidden cave, no less) seems pretty much a function of Hollywood scriptwriters.
Tomndebb, many of the scenes in the movie - including shots with the leads - had both coconut palms and banana plants in the background. While much of the film probably was shot in CA and on the lot, I don’t recall those plants in SoCal. Was some of the film shot on location ? (besides the stock footage inserted.)
quote:“Hose the who hill. (with the tank flame thrower) It’s lousey with Nips.” Sigh.
I agree. It’s important to be polite to people who are shooting at you.
Well…yeah.
In WWI some Brits took out the first German tank and machine gunned the guys who jumped out. Shooting guys abandoning ship or parachuting is another no-no. You might be the guy jumping out of the tank someday.
Of course, if you want to win the war, or you really doing like those guys who were shooting at you…Case in point, I don’t think they ever gave the submarine guys a chance to get out, did they?
Nah, I just thought it interesting that Biography had Poitier say how cool Widmark was about race, and then they show a movie where he says “Nips”.
Jorge, it’s been 20 years since the one time I saw the movie. I could easily be mistaken about the location of the shoot. In the movie I saw they find an overlay of the Japanese position that fits over a contour map and they are struggling with how much to torture the Japanese prisoners to find out how to use it the battle scenes included several shots across open country that simply did not exist in any of the Marine campaigns with which I am familiar. (It might have been set on Okinawa, with which I am less familiar.) As I said, it was long ago.
carnivorousplant, your ironic juxtaposition is noted, although it could be pointed out that Widmark’s lines to Poitier in a movie about race relations might have had more impact on him, personally, than making statements about an enemy that a lot of people still hated at the time the movie was made. Blacks were an oppressed group in our country vs Japanese were “the enemy.”
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*Originally posted by carnivorousplant *
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What he actually said was “there’s a little nip in the air”. Of course, he meant that it was chilly, not that an ethnic Japanese was strafing them. It’s so easy to get these things out of context if you are not careful. In Viet-Nam we were always careful to refer to NVA as ‘Ethnic North Vietnamese Soldiers’. We has respectful terms for the local armed opposition as well.
I am always amused at the silliness of political correctness. You can see it in any newscast. Often they present some guy who is accused of a few horrible crimes, repe, murder,etc. and , if he is black, they will refer to him as “gentleman” or Mr. so-and-so.
I remember this happening during the LA riots. (I saw this gentleman looting the store… I saw this other gentleman try to kill the driver with a cinder block…)
Of course they would never call Bill Gates “gentleman” or Mr Gates because we all know he is the scum of the earth <sigh>
Quote:
In WWI some Brits took out the first German tank and machine gunned the guys who jumped out. Shooting guys abandoning ship or parachuting is another no-no. You might be the guy jumping out of the tank someday.
Are you kidding? Of course it could be me. That’s why I’ll shoot him - so it WON’T be me, or anyone else from on side.
As for paratroopers, it’s always best to shoot them in the air. Once they land they can shoot back.
I’m all for respecting my enemy, so long as it doesn’t get in the way of killing him.
Alessan, I am not sure if you wrote in jest. Even in war civilized nations have rules of engagement and they should be respected. One rule is you do not kill people who have surrendered and are no longer a threat.
I would not be proud to belong to a country or culture that committed unnecessary atrocities like Irak did in Kuwait.
A guy who’s had his tank blown out from under him has not necessarily ceased to be a threat - he’s now infantry, and a paratrooper in the sky is definitely engaged in being a threat.
Well, we’re working off a brief bit of text that fails to really make clear whether we’re talking about downed flyers and surrendering tankers or not.
Oh. I misunderstood. No, you don’t shoot a surrendering enemy - if you’re sure he’s surrendering, and can spare the men to take him prisoner. As for downed pilots, you don’t blow them out of the air, but you do the utmost to hunt them down on the ground. It’s never good to let enemy officers wander around behind your lines; also, they usually have good intelligence value. I still stand by the rest of what I wrote.
By the way, can anyone tell me how these neat-o quote thing work? I’m new around here.
There’s nothing technically illegal, in accordance with the rules of war, about shooting a parachuting enemy. It may be ungentlemany, but I think we’ve pretty much abandoned any sense of chivalry in warfare.
Shooting a surrendering enemy is technically a war crime if the party doing the shooting is capable of taking prisoners with a reasonable level of safety. A parachuter, however, is not surrendering.
