• @dezrtfish:

    What year did they start calling them “Wing Nuts”  :evil:

    I think that ended right about the time General Mitchell used a small squadron of bi-planes to sink a WWI battleship to prove the ability of aircraft for use by the Navy…  :evil:

    That would be the summer of 1921 when Mitchell’s pilots use Martin MB-2 Bombers to sink the “Unsinkable” German Battleship Ostfriesland

  • '19 Moderator

    LOL, Switch I think yo ushould add “Wing Nut” to your list of titles  :-D


  • I’m not trying to draw this off-topic. However, if you really enjoyed SPR, I think you’d LOVE Band of Brothers. Something like 10 1-hour episodes from HBO. It blows Private Ryan out of the water! I highly recommend the DVD set as a b-day or holiday gift. It covers Easy company of the 82 Airborne from Curahee to V-E day. It includes interviews from actual members of Easy Company. The entire series is very historically accurate and based on the true account of these heroic airborne! The drama is incredibly compelling… I can remember getting choked up a few times.

    Awesome series for any big WW2 history fan or the average Joe.

  • 2007 AAR League

    wow i hated every episode.  its like the americans could kill soooooo many germans without suffering terrible casualties themselves.

    when those german machine gunners open up.  they dont miss like in BOB, they would hit 3 guys in the first split second and begin to rake the shit outta everyone else.

    in some instances, from accounts on history channel, there are multiple times that 1-2 mg42’s have taken out a platoon up to a company in 2 minutes - 30 minutes.

    too many times does easy company inflict big casualites and in firefights only have a few wounded or 1 dead.  they may be accurate on what easy company did(where they fought and against what other unit), but not in the details of how many were killed or wounded and when.  you couldnt do that as a director and they dont.

    BOB didnt do it for me on the realism.  realism for me, thats platoon.

  • 2007 AAR League

    when those guys are in the open field with a bad commander telling them to stay put……they would have been wiped out.  not even time to get orders in to take cover.

    or in the second episode where they take out the artillery pieces.  not that easy to take out those types of positions with people shooting back.  that LT would have gotten his ass shot off running around like that.


  • Except he didn’t IRL, so portraying that in the series is historically accurate.  Sorry to bust your bubble.


  • @DrixDzanth:

    I’m not trying to draw this off-topic. However, if you really enjoyed SPR, I think you’d LOVE Band of Brothers. Something like 10 1-hour episodes from HBO. It blows Private Ryan out of the water! I highly recommend the DVD set as a b-day or holiday gift. It covers Easy company of the 82 Airborne from Curahee to V-E day. It includes interviews from actual members of Easy Company. The entire series is very historically accurate and based on the true account of these heroic airborne! The drama is incredibly compelling… I can remember getting choked up a few times.

    Awesome series for any big WW2 history fan or the average Joe.

    I highly recommend it as well, being another Hanks/Spielburg production.  It complements the book rather well.  And it’s the 101st, not the 82nd.  :wink:

    @balungaloaf:

    wow i hated every episode.  its like the americans could kill soooooo many germans without suffering terrible casualties themselves.

    when those german machine gunners open up.  they dont miss like in BOB, they would hit 3 guys in the first split second and begin to rake the sh*t outta everyone else.

    in some instances, from accounts on history channel, there are multiple times that 1-2 mg42’s have taken out a platoon up to a company in 2 minutes - 30 minutes.

    too many times does easy company inflict big casualites and in firefights only have a few wounded or 1 dead.  they may be accurate on what easy company did(where they fought and against what other unit), but not in the details of how many were killed or wounded and when.  you couldnt do that as a director and they dont.

    BOB didnt do it for me on the realism.  realism for me, thats platoon.

    Dude, what’s your problem?
    We are talking about 100 men here, over the course of 3 to 4 years.  They had plenty of casualties, it was just mostly centered on Dick Winters and the men around him.  Do you remember the Bastogne episode where the guy is reminiscing over fallen comrades?  That’s just a handful of the guys who died or were wounded.

    Like ieatcrayons says, it’s historically accurate. The 88s Winters and others took was not only a perfect assault, it’s still taught in military theory today. Sorry more people didn’t die for your amusement.

  • 2007 AAR League

    you ever hear of allied propoganda?

    that position was defended by a 50 man german platoon.  the americans are going to lose more than the 5 that you get to see.  as i said, not accurate.

    but you can watch americans mow down tons of germans in this series.  which by all accounts, the US, brits, canadians, french, belgians, dutch, norwegians, and UK empire troops as a whole only killed 1 out of every 9 germanys.  the russians got 8/9 germans.

    the germans with their armor handed our asses to us every time.  the only way we were able to keep going is b/c we had reinforcements for our casualties more than the germans did.  1 german tank can easily take out many american ones.

    like the episode where germans counter attack with some tanks.  like 2-3.  easy fights back until american tanks show up.  to bad they didnt show that most of the time, our shermans with their weak guns couldnt take out german armor from the front.  or that no bazooka man in his life would run 50 yards out into the open.  sit their for 3 minutes and try to shoot a tank.  every german who is not blind would have capped his ass.

    its not accurate.  its entertaining though.


  • That action was on hill 30. about 5-6 panzers roll up for about 10 min and shoot, but not kill anyone. Then 1-2 Shermans roll out of the hedge and destroy every other panzer, and the rest retreat. One hit on those shermans would’ve taken them out. Also when the Shermans did recue hill 30 in real life, 9-10 of them came out, not 2.

    I agree also on the bazoka gunner in the field, honestly, if you were a german soilder, and saw a few guys run out with an anti-tank bazoka and started to shoot at your suport tanks, you would’nt just sit there and do nothing.

    As for the battle of the buldge…seemed fine to me. Altough I think there should’ve been more dead in that bazi chrge to the town, that 88 could’ve easly shot that bail of hay to ashes. Also you never saw that tiger tank fire, in the end it just retreated when it coulv’e been killing off men hiding behind those wooden carts!

    Overall to me it’s a good show. SPR is still better.

    For my war movies, the order is:
    SPR
    BOB (specificaly, the Normandy episodes)
    Black hawk down (even if it enrages me when I see it)
    Letters from Iwo Jima
    Pearl Harbar
    Jarhead
    Flags of our Fathers

  • 2007 AAR League

    letters from iwo is just about how blood thirsty americans are and when they shoot the prisoners, its all the bad bad americans.  not ever mentioning how savage the japanese REALLY were in the pacific theater.  they make the japanese look noble and better than the americans.

    flags of our fathers had a lot of politics in it.

    nobody likes the oldies and greats anymore?

    platoon, platoon leader, hamburger hill, hell is for heroes, sands of iwo jima, to hell and back, merills mauraders, the old 30’s version of all’s quiet on the western front, the longest day, patton, macarthur, midway, tora tora tora, empire of the rising sun, guns of navaronne, boys of company C, the big red one, battle of the bulge, i cant think of the rest, but they are all good.

    the longest day is probably the best.


  • Thank you, I couldn’t think of the names of those  :-D

    Those were my other favs.
    Hamb hill
    tora
    Patton and big red 1(especialy)

    all’s quiet on the western front I want to see.

  • Moderator

    @balungaloaf:

    letters from iwo is just about how blood thirsty americans are and when they shoot the prisoners, its all the bad bad americans.  not ever mentioning how savage the japanese REALLY were in the pacific theater.  they make the japanese look noble and better than the americans.

    flags of our fathers had a lot of politics in it.

    nobody likes the oldies and greats anymore?

    platoon, platoon leader, hamburger hill, hell is for heroes, sands of iwo jima, to hell and back, merills mauraders, the old 30’s version of all’s quiet on the western front, the longest day, patton, macarthur, midway, tora tora tora, empire of the rising sun, guns of navaronne, boys of company C, the big red one, battle of the bulge, i cant think of the rest, but they are all good.

    the longest day is probably the best.

    I haven’t seen Letters from Iwo, but isn’t written from the Japanese perspective? And it is historical fiction… if you try to push a accepted morality into a view of someone from the past, when you are writing it from their viewpoint, you are going to mess up the movie, and inadvertently make the audience question your handle on the accuracies, and ultimately validity of your story. Going out of your way to portray them as evil (which they were, no doubt about it) when this is there “Last Ditch Defense”  is not going to fly…


  • :-o
    For those who are interrested in seeing good movies covering the Eastern Front, see “Enemy at the Gates” and “The Iron Cross”. Also There was a TV series on the “Great Patriotic War” I think was broadcast on KPBS.
    For realism in combat, I about jumped under my seat when Forrest Gump and his Viet Nam buddies were ambushed in the jungle.  :-o and then almost cooked by our own Napalm. Also, I liked Apocolipse Now, for it shows how insane war can get, (and because I was almost in the movie). Another crazy war movie was, “Catch 22”, (not for kids).
      My favorite WWII themed movie has to be, “Das Boot”. In the original german with english sub-titles. My stomach was in knotts after that one. :-P
      IMHO,The old classic movies are all pretty good, but the modern special effects make the latest movies a much better show.
    OK, who’s bringing the Popcorn?
                        :roll:


  • …I want popcorn  :cry:

    Letters of Iwo.The commander (if you’ve seen it) didn’t even want the war, he was given his .45 from the US, he liked the US, thats why he was kind to the American soilders, alos the POW wouldve been killed by the others, but the cammander stoped them. As for the other two characters, just becuase the japs were known for their “suicide rather than capure” doesn’t mean that all of them did that. The two guys didn’t kill themselfs at mount…what was the name, cuase they still wanted to fight, just somewere else. Also the end was acurate too with the kamakazi charge, just from the japs perspective. Also the way that guy was trying to protect his loyal commanders grave from being robbed by the americans, there was nothing untrue about that. And the reson it seamed the Americans were “mean” to the japs becuase they were, atleast to the few actual good decent jap siolders that the story is about. It realy is a good movie though.


  • Compared to most of the major battles of the civil war DDay was pretty tame. Cold harbor, picketts charge, antietam, Fredericksberg, Shiloh, Wilderness were all blood baths, and not just because americans were fighting americans. The North lost horrendous amounts of men to outdated tactics. i Guess when you introduce a rfile that can kill at half a mile for the first time, your gonna see lots of casualties before the tactics catch up to the technology.


  • Smacktard….nice, I mean the name +1!  :mrgreen:


  • I didn’t think Enemy At the Gates was very good as far as representing the reality of WW2 in Russia.  It was still entertaining.

    I liked Stalingrad a lot better.  Worth checking out, if you can find it.

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