This war movie is so inaccurate on so many points that I don't care to list them.
Again it shows the US army being ultimate bad asses instead of actual soldier''s who just do what they where told.
No where in hell would a typist be send to the armoured forces. No where in he'll would a Tank commander put a typist in his Tank thus endangering the crew and the tank.
It was not as if the US lacked soldiers. They had plenty of men and material.
Actually there was a bit of a manpower shortage at the time, although not nearly as bad as what some other armies faced at that point. New US recruits were preferentially placed into new units, and replacements were a bit short.
The film was watchable until the final scene. I agree that last scene was just badass American cliche.
Entropy ain't what it used to be.
[deleted]
Haha. Now that's the best response he read yet. If it was made by.... Deal with it! Friggen Europeans bitch about too much American machismo but never mind movies made by Brits, Russians, or Germans portraying themselves as badasses. Very well said
shareYou're obviously not that familiar with the many British war movies that don't, like The Cruel Sea, Too Late The Hero, The Long The Short And The Tall, and others which show the servicemen as ordinary men, sometimes even as criminals. British war movies tend to go more for character studies rather than overdoing the heroic aspects.
Trust me. I know what I'm doing.
Why should he be familiar with British war movies? What do Brits know about warfare? Just because they are fighting wars for over one thousand years? Big deal!! Americans have been war bad-asses for at least one million years, no? 😁
Have you seen that movie where american sailors caprture the Enigma code machine off a german submarine, about two years AFTER the Brits did it themselves? Now, THAT is correct depiction of history!
Cute and cuddly boyz!!
I am familiar with those you mentioned but, there are plenty of examples of which I speak (Desert Rats, the Dam Busters, 633 Squadron, etc.).
I'm not criticizing it, just pointing it out.
It was made for the US market.
shareUmm...Germans have no war heros. War took place here so we all know from our ancestors that it was no playground for heros. Instead it was a time of hunger, blood, dirt and death. And an complete idiot named Hitler leaded his own people into hell.
Nobody is proud of being at WW II here. So german war movies always try to persuade the auditorum that war should never happen again. For the first victims of war often are truth, humanity and future.
No war is worth that.
Frank Werner (Cologne)
Germans have no war heros.
I've read Cross of Iron and thought it was a well done, thought provoking book.
sharethere originally was no such book...Willi Heinrich wrote a book called 'the Willing Flesh" which as you say, is thoughtful insofar as those genre books tend to be...when it was picked up and made into that movie or the movie based on it anyway, the same book was then re-editioned as 'Cross of Iron".. no doubt they thought they would get a boosted run on the novel, if they branded it with the cult movie name.
I originally read an edition of it "the Willing Flesh" which had no mention of 'Cross of Iron", now I've got one here with that name and movie stills all over it.
I did not know that. I will have to look for it.
shareHaving plenty of men is one thing, getting then to where they are needed, especially in the 1940s is another thing all together. The US army had some serious manpower issues the ETO in 1945. The War in the Pacific was requiring more and more men. The US sharply and as it turned out prematurely reduced the number of men drafted in 1944 and 45, That coupled with 85,000+ unexpected causalities suffered in the Ardennes from mid Dec 1944 to the end of Jan 1945 and a replacement system that was so inept and cumbersome that it was almost criminal meant that getting men with the proper training to where they were needed was often impossible. The end result was that men were often assigned roles for which they were never trained. Would you see a cook commanding a tank? No,of course not. But assigning typist to a tank with a veteran crew to operate a weapon that he was taught to use in Basic Training ? Totally plausible.There are plenty of things historically wrong with Fury, but that is not one of them.
you need to rewatch the movie then.
He is thought how to operate a Thompson by the crew so it is very unlikely he was taught how to operate the M1919, not mishandling it so it would jam, keep it clean and so on.
He had only been in the army for 8 weeks and very likely he only had basic rifle training with the M1 Garand, perhaps even only the M1903 Springfield. In his own words "we where thought how to type, not to shoot people".
Again, they might have had a shortage of man power, but they would likely rather have used a person already in the army rather than putting a typist with basic rifle training to work with a veteran Tank crew.
Of course that wouldn't suit the movie script.
The US Army did a lot of things well during the war. Providing qualified replacements ws not one of them. Soldiers would be sent direct from basic training with no idea of how to work in an infantry squad or even how to use an M1 Rifle. At least tank crews had positions, bow gunner and loader, an unqualified person could fill given a couple hours of briefing. Indeed, I've actually trained people on M1919 type machine guns and one can learn enough to get by in just a couple of hours. In real life, using complete newbies or guys from non-combat trades was quite common.
shareIt was an M3 grease gun, not a Thompson and he was in the Army. But I'm not talking about the movie I'm talking about what actually happened All US Army recruits in WWII were supposed to receive some training on all weapons light to heavy used by the US Infantry at that time. So an army clerk/typist should have received some type of training on the .30 while in Basic Training before moving on to specialized training , in this case to be a clerk typist. In WWII, especially after the Battle of the Bulge men were placed in positions that they were never trained for. There were even some cases especially during the the early days of the German Ardennes Offensive,where rear echelon non combat troops were organized into infantry units and sent up to the line to plug holes, It happened, its a fact, it's been documented. But don't believe me. Do some research , check for yourself.
^This... It was a Sten gun, not a Thompson
shareRead my lips. M3 sub-machinegun. Commonly called the "Grease Gun" because it resembled the grease gun used to lubricate moving parts on vehicles. The M3 was a very cheap, easy to use, inaccurate, POS. But it fired a .45 bullet, and it was small and compact. Get this, finally replaced for good in The U.S. Army unit I was in about 1990. Our tanks had M16A2s by then but our mechanics in M88 still had Grease Guns till 90.
The replacement situation in 1945 was that bad. The man who swore me in as a 2nd Lieutenant in 1988 was BG Mack Kennedy (retired). He was an administrative 2nd Lt. who was transferred to an infantry unit because of high casualties and few replacements.
My grandfather was an combat engineer (but assigned as a truck driver) in 45. He and I used to talk about his basic training vs my own as an enlisted in 1983. I actually believe his basic training prepared him on more separate weapons than my own. The M1, M1 carbine, Thompson M1A1 SMG, M1919 (several versions), the M2, M1911A1. I only trained as a combat engineer on 2, the M16A1 and the M60. As a 2nd Lt. in Armor, I added a few more. My point is the American soldier in general received a very wide variety of training, and by many cases by injured veterans who knew what to concentrate on.
The American soldier is not a bad ass. He's just a guy doing a dirty job for a bunch of ungrateful people across the world and at home. Read the poem "Tommy" by Rudyard Kipling. It could be just as well titled G.I. Joe.
New upcoming book on the Sherman Tank-
"For Want of a Gun: The Sherman Tank Scandal of WWII"
http://www.schifferbooks.com/for-want-of-a-gun-the-sherman-tank-scandal-of-wwii-6155.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99UaCetvfXw
"For Want of a Gun: The Sherman Tank Scandal of WWII"I'm sorry but seriously? Nothing personal here but what a load of bollocks. share
*soldiers
*were
*hell
*tank *tank
at the end of the war, they WERE putting anybody in those tanks...including clerk/typists...with no tank school...my Dad was one of them...so know what you are talking about
shareit's true that they were actually short of combat soldiers in NW europe in that period..which seems funny in a US army of the size of total enlistment as it was...many millions...
when Huertgen Forrest meat-grinder was going on, they were sending anyone and anything up as replacements, apparently..
maybe why they sent a Sad Sack like Eddie Slovik up, and of course, he booked..
although slovik at least was infantry-trained so far as I know, and being a hard-working plumbers or drainer's laboror or something, was probably physically fit..
I haven't seen a lot on documented shortages of tank crew personnel but it's believable. The shortage of trained infantry looks real, and there were situations of tank or tank destroyer battalions going into a fight with about half the troops having no formal armor training.
Guess what! I've got a fever, and the only prescription is MORE COWBELL! -Bruce Dickinson-