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RE: Today in History: First successful use of tanks in battle
Wow, awesome post. When I was a kid there used to be this author named CB Colby I think and back then all of his books were in our school library. They were basically just books full of military guns and vehicles and weapons. Hard to believe that would be allowed in a school today. Anyway, that is the first time I saw a picture of one of these original tanks. The time period is a bit later, but if you haven't watched the movie "Fury" you should. It is an awesome depiction of tank warfare in WWII.
I've seen fury. Great Pitt film.
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What's best about it is the set design. The grit and dirt of the battlefield are palpable when watching the movie. I think they went a little overboard with the heavy use of tracer rounds. They were absolutely not used to the extent they were in the film.
The final part of the movie where the crew stands their ground in the immobile tank for a whole night is atrocious. It's just pure stupidity. The tank was completely unprotected and surrounded by hundreds of enemy soldiers who seemed to be well-equipped. It would've taken exactly one Panzerfaust to kill that particular Tommy cooker. End of story. SS battalion marches on to its objective with very few losses apart from the initial ones.
Also, the scene with the Fireflies taking on the single Tiger was odd. Why did the Tiger decide to leave its position? It should've just kept on picking the Shermans one by one. Surely the Tiger commander would likely have been very experienced by that time.
The main characters are not particularly sympathetic but I think that's the point. The new guy gradually becomes hardened by the war. The banter between the crew members is mostly pretty good because its crude and crass, which is exactly the way rank and file soldiers and NCOs talk in real life. The jokes on Hitler and cock sucking, for instance, are actually funny. I wonder, though, how the vocabulary and the expressions used by the soldiers of that era differed from those used by today's soldiers. I'm not very well-versed in American military slang.
It would be interesting to see a movie about the invasion of Western Europe by the Allied in the summer of 1944 from the German perspective.
This Russian tank movie titled T-34 at least looks great:
It has been praised for its production values and visual effects. You can actually see that the cinematography looks fantastic. A captured Russian tank crew is sent to a concentration camp
and forced to train German tank crews. The crew escapes - with the T-34. Maybe not too credible a plot but looks great.
well, i like the look of that really. Plus i know this is being a bit mean, but these days i have lately been drawn to non-English-language movies. Perhaps because they have to work harder with being inventive because they don't have Brad Pitt or a 80 million dollar budget. I'm gonna check this T-34 out right now.
The trailer is subtitled but I wonder if the whole movie is. It was one of the top grossing Russian movies ever.
The losers of wars tend to make better movies about them for one additional reason. They are somewhat less about patriotic glory. [Edit: Or, well, glory maybe but not bullshit.]
One interesting movie made by the losers of WW II was the Japanese film about the Battle of Midway:
Here's the final battle of the battleship Yamato: