Errors in movie Battle of the Bulge (Henry Fonda version)

[Magpie_Oz]

I take it you've never heard of the Eastern Front?

What do you mean ?

[JonS]

Who wrote the history of the Eastern Front? (hint: it wasn't the winners)

[MikeyD]

About taking prisoners, I suspect there was a difference in kind between happening on company of leaderless teenagers in a village waiting for the war to come to an end and a company of die-hard Nazis who exhausted their ammo contesting an intersection in hand-to-hand fighting. There were simply some soldiers who you did not take prisoner. Churchill Crocodile crews was one of them. I suspect senior Gestapo officers didn't fare well either, especially after the town gained its freedom. The reason why the institution of prostitution was abruptly banned in France after the war was because the girls had so willingly 'collaborated' with their money-carrying overlords.

[Invader_Canuck]

Who wrote the history of the Eastern Front? (hint: it wasn't the winners)

Haha. This is so true and this is why most school kids with no formal education at a higher level have any idea about what really happened on the eastern front.

The west was fed their information on the Eastern front by German generals who had lost it and had a bone to pick.

[Sgt Joch]

I am sure surrendering soldiers were shot on the battlefield or not long after they had been taken captive by emotionally charged men , but I can't imagine any soldier in the Western Armies executing another in cold blood, perhaps that is naive.

I am not saying it never happened, just that I have never seen credible evidence so far of US/CW troops in NWE shooting German prisoners in cold blood. You just see a lot of stories, but they usually fall apart as soon as you start to test the evidence.

The only uncontested Allied War crime I am aware of is Mush Morton shooting survivors in the water after he sank the Buyo Maru. We know he did it because he described it in his patrol report.

http://www.militaryhistoryonline.com/wwii/articles/usswahoo.aspx

However, I think we all know the war in the Pacific was particularly savage, even by WW2 standards.

[BloodyBucket]

The US forces shot lots of German prisoners, but it was like hitting 'em with tennis balls.

[Sequoia]

Well since we have some Canadians here, I'll bring this up. I once read about a fued that developed between the French Canadians and the SS that started in Normandy. Again no prisoners. Has any one else heard of this? I believe I read it in an old Strategy and Tactics magazine from the '70s.

[Peregrine]

I think the discussion needs to clearer on when someone becomes a prisoner. For both sides it was difficult for soldiers to surrender during/immediately after firefights. Both sides killed people that essentially had stopped fighting in these situations.

Killing large groups of already surrendered prisoners is a different thing entirely.

[MikeyD]

WWII vets as a group weren't a particularly talkative bunch. But when you found one, usually the old guy in overalls working back in warehouse, he'd spin some stories you can be damned sure never made it into the history books. Same with Vietnam war vets. Vietnam vets today are about the same age as those 'old WWII guys' in the warehouse back when I was a kid.

[Zonks54]

I've seen this same argument on several forums about the movie 300, it's not supposed to be accurate, it's supposed to be entertaining, if your going to sit there looking for historical errors, don't bother watching movies anymore, read a book instead.

[Myles Keogh]

It's Hollywood at its worst, promulgating all sorts of BS stereotypes, bad history and appallingly bad characterization. There were real historical heroes aplenty to share with the American viewing public, but Hollywood has always gone for the lazy way out with cookie cutter bad guys and phoney dialog. Probably because most of the producers and directors never went closer to war than seeing each others' films. Some stars were veterans and when they could, they'd work with a movie to make it better - sometimes. Other times it seemed they just wanted to be paid and then get the hell off the lot. Audie Murphy worked hard to try to give "To Hell and Back" an authentic feel and given the restraints of Hollywood's culture of the day, succeeded more than some others did. But then, he had a personal investment in it that went far beyond ego.

In the end, I think these sort of bad Hollywood films were catering to a special sort of audience, who went for the popcorn and the cheering the good guys and booing the bad ones, not for a reminder that War is truly Hell.

First war movie that ever I saw that left me feeling I'd seen something of value, was "Pork Chop Hill" (No not Hamburger Hill); but then too, Gregory Peck was a thinking audience's sort of actor. If you haven't seen it, you might want to look it up.

"Pork Chop Hill" is indeed a truly great, but underrated war film. (The "unloved" Korean War strikes out again.) It was directed by Lewis Milestone who also directed the original 1930 version of "All Quiet on the Western Front" and 1945's "A Walk in the Sun" both of which were very realistic and terrific war films for their eras.

Some older WWII films that did make an effort to be more than patriotic, popcorn fare are:

"Battleground" (1949)- HBO's "Band of Brothers" aped entire scenes from it.

"Twelve O'Clock High" (1949)- Gregory Peck stars in one of the best films on combat leadership ever made.

"Attack" (1956)- WWII combat veterans Eddie Albert, Lee Marvin, and Jack Palance in an extremely gritty war film (albeit low budget because the U.S. Army refused to cooperate with it producers)

"Hell is for Heroes" (1962)- Don Siegel and former U.S. Marine Steve McQueen at their best.

"The Bridge at Remagen" (1969)- Very much shaped by the ongoing Vietnam War in its depiction of war weary U.S. soldiers.

[gunnergoz]

Thanks, Myles, I forgot about some of those. I'm a Peck fan and "Twelve O'Clock High" was indeed splendid. I'd forgotten about "Hell is for Heroes" and as for the others, I need to find a copy sometime and check them out.

I was overseas a lot as a kid (army brat) and missed out on some of these films. I asked my mother take me to see Pork Chop Hill when we were living in Rome, Italy. Dad was serving in Korea at the time and there was a special premiere there for US troops. He raved about the film and when it came to Rome, I finally got to see what he was talking about. Dad, an Army sergeant, was a war film buff - until he went to Viet Nam a few years later and lost all appetite for war movies, having finally experienced the real thing.

Sometimes I wonder how many forum members here would still be "war buffs" if they'd had any actual combat experience. I know we have a few modern vets with us but still it is an interesting question.

[Myles Keogh]

Sometimes I wonder how many forum members here would still be "war buffs" if they'd had any actual combat experience. I know we have a few modern vets with us but still it is an interesting question.

My Dad and father-in-law were both combat veterans of Vietnam and both enjoyed war films. My father-in-law served as a "grunt" in the 8th Cavalry back in '65, but he loves war movies. I guess it depends on the individual.

[gunnergoz]

Yes, I have a sense the answer lies in what may be undetected, untreated wartime PTSD. I long suspected my father suffered from it, after seeing him jump out of a patio hammock and hide shivering uncontrollably under it when a car backfired in front of the house. Dad finally passed away of Agent Orange induced squamous cell carcinoma in 1985.

[Bigduke6]

Not telling some one of your complicity in war crimes, is not the same thing as not being complicit in war crimes.

Malmedy is an interesting subject in several ways, but one of them is that these "shoot SS prisoners" orders are prosecutable offenses with the death penalty as the maximum sentence. We know this because the Allies prosecuted and executed German and Japanese soldiers post-war for issuing exactly the same orders.

Something to bear in mind if one happens to come across a lawyer or a moralist or indeed a soldier serving or retired talking about Sanctity of Law or the Blindness of Justice or Strict Observation of Rules of Engagement. That may be so sometimes, but in a war being the victor is way more important than being right.

The Soviets had an interesting approach. Pretty much from the war's get-go the Red Army assumed that surrendering to SS units was pointless because they just shot you, either right off or eventually, and therefore, there was no point in trying to take SS prisoner. As for capturing them the SS usually didn't want to and, here's I think another interesting bit, if some SS guy did surrender then he probably deserved (in the Soviet mindset anyway) to die anyway simply for being a member of the SS.

It is worth remembering that SS auxiliaries were responsible for rounding up whatever Soviet civilians that would get shipped off to the concentration camps, and SS police and cavalry units led the German anti-partisan campaign, which was a very nasty war even by the standards of the Eastern Front. Yes there are plenty of pictures of Soviet POWs being treated decently by Totenkopf (although considering it was Nazi reporters or SS soldiers taking the pictures you have to wonder how reliable they are) but in any case, when the POWs got sent rearward they wound up in the hands of other Germans also in SS uniforms who were, frequently, not so nice. If nothing else at the filtration point where the Communists and Jews go this way and the volunteers to serve in HIWI units go that way. Maybe it wasn't fair grounds for a blanket judgement of the entire SS, but for the Soviets things like that left a really bad impression.

The result was a general Soviet assumption that if a guy was in an SS uniform he was probably directly or indirectly responsible for something criminal, if not right that second then probably sometime in the past, and even if somehow he's been clean right up to this moment there's no way he can stay decent as long as he's in the SS. Sooner or later he's going to wind up being part of murdering Soviet citizens. Not to say that was actually the case, I don't want to start up the "were all SS members baby killers?" thread again. Just pointing out that on the East Front, from start to finish, that pretty much was the Soviet assumption.

Western shock at Malmedy is sort of a mystery from the Soviet POV, the standard post-Soviet reaction is "Well what did you expect? They're SS!" Point being of course the SS and indeed probably the Wehrmacht too had different standards for fighting different armies, and of course the Soviets had something to do with the way things went on the East Front.

As to the movie, well, it may suck but it does get a basic point across to the general American viewing public which every day exercises its constitutional right to be willfully ignorant about history and then use popular entertainment to draw lessons from it. The lesson of the movie is "The German offensive at the Battle of the Bulge failed because some US units held out against great odds, and then the Germans ran out of gas." Which is, when you stop and think about it, pretty much really what happened.

Oh, and one more thing, Henry Fonda makes a terrific movie hero.

From the Wiki on Allied War Crimes:

"In the aftermath of the Malmedy massacre a written order from the HQ of the 328th US Army Infantry Regiment, dated December 21, 1944, stated: No SS troops or paratroopers will be taken prisoner but will be shot on sight.[38] Major-General Raymond Hufft (U.S. Army) gave instructions to his troops not to take prisoners when they crossed the Rhine in 1945. "After the war, when he reflected on the war crimes he authorized, he admitted, 'if the Germans had won, I would have been on trial at Nuremberg instead of them.'"[39] Stephen Ambrose related: "I've interviewed well over 1000 combat veterans. Only one of them said he shot a prisoner... Perhaps as many as one-third of the veterans...however, related incidents in which they saw other GIs shooting unarmed German prisoners who had their hands up."[40]

Near the French village of Audouville-la-Hubert, 30 German Wehrmacht prisoners were massacred by U.S. paratroopers "

Always hard to know what really happened, as they say the victors write the history.

[sfas]

Actually there are many changes of names and places. Ambleve is not a city but a river near Stavelot. The city where the battle took place is Saint Vith. The real name of the German 5th column lieutenant is Skorzeny and not Sumacher. Also the names of other officers are ficticious. But these are not real errors. The real errors are (a) the weather, during the period covered by the film was very bad and airplanes could not fly, the ground was entirely covered by snow that caused many casualties and ( the Ardennes never give you the impression that you are on a mauntain, the film shows a real mountain like the Alps, with high peaks and tunnels for trains. For the rest it was anice film. About this battle there are two more films. One based on real footage, and one from the late 40s. It was a really unnecessary battle that caused the loss of about 200,000 people, molitary and civilians mainly Americans, German Belgians in only six weeks and in a triangle of about 100km side, for no reason.

[Vergeltungswaffe]

Welcome to the forums.

Interesting that you dug out a 3 year old thread for your first post.

[Michael Emrys]

...one from the late 40s.

Would that be Battleground?

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0041163/?ref_=fn_tt_tt_1

I saw this as a child when it was first released. I recall that there was a Jeep parked in front of the theater, a .50 BMG set up in front of the ticket booth and a BAR hanging from the ceiling of the lobby. Entirely unlikely these days, but at the time it did help to get one in the mood.

Michael

[Warts 'n' all]

There is no doubt that it is a pretty rubbish movie strewn with errors. But, just as a little aside. Even the original German newsreel footage contained scenes in which their troops are shown "advancing" the wrong way i.e eastwards. I assume because it made for easier filming on the day.

[Pak40]

Even the original German newsreel footage contained scenes in which their troops are shown "advancing" the wrong way i.e eastwards. I assume because it made for easier filming on the day.

How do you know they were advancing eastward?

[mjkerner]

My Dad and father-in-law were both combat veterans of Vietnam and both enjoyed war films. My father-in-law served as a "grunt" in the 8th Cavalry back in '65, but he loves war movies. I guess it depends on the individual.

Myles, if you are still around, I missed this way back when. My brother was a machine gunner in the 2/8th Cav, '66-'67. Mostly around An Khe and Pleiku area. He was in a replacement cadre from the 82nd AB (stateside) for the losses 1st Cav took at I Drang. I assume your Old Man was there?

[Warts 'n' all]

@ Pak40... They weren't.. hence the word being in inverted commas. I think that sometimes both newsreel cameramen and stills photographers wanted to create as realistic scenes as possible. Having burning vehicles etc in the background. Even if it meant that their own troops would sometimes pose facing the way that they had come from. And in winter newsreelmen and photographers had to make as much use of the limited daylight as they could.

[Pak40]

@Warts. My point is, how can you tell from a newsreel or picture which direction a person is advancing?

[Warts 'n' all]

@Warts. My point is, how can you tell from a newsreel or picture which direction a person is advancing?

There should be a PM in your inbox