World War II Historian Rates 8 WWII Battles In Movies And TV | How Real Is It? | Insider

I'm not

real

ly sure who they're shooting at, because there's no main gun used to shoot people. It is not the most effective use of that weapons system. I am Dr. John Curatola, a retired Marine Corps officer of 22 years, former history professor, and now the resident military

historian

at the National World War II Museum in New Orleans. Today we will look at World War II battle scenes in

movies

and determine how

real

they really are. What we're looking at here is the amphibious assault on the beaches of Normandy on June 6, 1944. Many of those men who stepped off those landing craft had to go 100 to 200 yards under enemy fire before they even got there. the pebbles, which is the main slope of the beach, and the movie doesn't really represent that.

They basically get off the landing craft and are already on the beach or on the pebbles. Some of the obstacles are backwards. They should be set up 180 degrees from the way they are on the beach. What they really intend to do is disrupt a landing craft when it enters shallow water. The machine gun, the MG 42, that the Germans are using, is a high-velocity, high-caliber weapon. The problem is that they use it in very long bursts. A weapon like that can only be used effectively in bursts of two to three seconds; otherwise the barrel will burn out and then you will have a problem with the gun itself.

And if you listen to the

rates

of fire in the movie, they're pretty long. Party on the coast. No armor has reached land. We don't have DD tanks on the beach. Tom Hanks' character is on the radio with the commander of the amphibious task force. A humble army captain talking to an admiral; That's way beyond his pay grade. A company commander does not call the amphibious task force commander from a field radio just to report his position. But he does show an excellent portrait of confusion. In the clip, it doesn't really show how the American forces got to the top of the high ground, off the shingle and the beach, and that's okay, because depending on where you landed on D-Day, if you were in Utah. or Omaha Beach, the topography was very different.

Some units had relatively low heights that they had to climb. Some had cliffs, like the Pointe du Hoc rangers who literally had to climb up a cliff to reach the German positions. While it has some technical errors, it is very accurate about the assault on Normandy Beach, and I give it an 8 out of 10. Oh shit...! The Germans are well defended within the city itself and the Americans have to attack it. The unit moves to the city of Carentan, in what we call a MOUT environment, military operations in urban terrain, which is very difficult. The danger in an urban environment is that the enemy can hide anywhere and everywhere.

The dog and the fox are retreating. That? You have German armor that is falling on their defensive positions. They are showing that the other companies, D and F, are breaking and running. Only one company worked. The other one stayed there for a long time, and that company was a little offended by this description of them running, and that's not accurate. Fire, McGrath! Fire! The bazooka you see used is accurate in the fact that they were down on a tactical level. Most companies had them, so they were widely distributed while under contract. The armor has soft skin on the belly.

When her belly is exposed, you can pierce it. Well, hello, 2nd Battleship. It's not the 2nd Armored Division that saves the company in this particular scene. What happens is that Dick Winters, who serves as company commander, calls for mortar support, and it is the mortars that help drive away the German armor. In most tables of organization, infantry companies and infantry battalions have mortars attached within a weapons company or some other attachments to provide that additional firepower to infantry forces that are relatively lightly armed. The 2nd Armored Division relieves Easy Company later that day, but it's not like the 2nd Armored Division shows up just in time to save Easy Company's bacon.

This is a very accurate description and I would easily give it a 9 out of 10. In this scene, we see British forces evacuating the European continent at Dunkirk. You see men queuing to get on ships, and that's true, and many of the Dunkirk photographs show soldiers doing that. They would fall into their ranks and split up if there was an air raid, and then return to their ranks. One thing I didn't understand is why the boys stayed in the water all day when there was no boat there. This is a very good description of what air combat was like during this part of the war.

You have to lead the enemy objective, and the German basically flies into the bullets, and that's how it's supposed to work. And one of the things you'll notice is that he has to do it in short bursts of two or three seconds, because they have a limited amount of ammo in their wings. They have to be very conservative with the rounds they fire, because you only have about 10 seconds. Yes, he is out of combat. The British fighter is attacked by the second German fighter. That's exact. These are the days before radar. There is nothing to hear.

It's too loud, it's too loud, and as a result, many air deaths in both wars are actually due to surprise. The problematic thing about that scene is that the Germans do not operate alone. They will typically operate in boats of two or four men working together. Here you see an enemy 109 followed by another enemy 109, and it doesn't really work that way. Because this is 80 years after the war, those aren't really 109 Enemies, they are actually Hispano 1112 Buchons, which are basically Messerschmitt airframes with Merlin engines installed in them. But nowadays we use them a lot in air programs to represent an enemy 109, since very few of them currently exist.

Overall, I would give this movie a 7 out of 10. What we are seeing here in the movie "Enemy at the Gates" is a Russian assault on a German position in the Battle of Stalingrad. So the idea that they would send unarmed troops with limited ammunition is a bit absurd. The Russians had a lot of weapons, weapons, in terms of small arms. Basically a human wave tactic. Just add men to the mix and see what happens. And that certainly happens in places in history. However, this idea of ​​just accidentally throwing men into a cauldron is certainly a waste of manpower, and not something they have done on a large scale.

The way the Russians actually win this fight is by providing a pressure movement on the northern and southern edges of the city of Stalingrad, and they isolated the German 6th Army. Back! Fire! Fire! Another problem with this particular scene is that once the Soviet assault fails, they run back and then their own forces fire on them to prevent them from returning to their friendly lines. They didn't do that either. Surely they shot people for desertion and cowardice? Sure, absolutely, but not in the way shown here. They had blocking battalions that would be used to keep formations intact and reinforce them on the front lines, but not in the way described here.

Certainly we must go back, reconsolidate, re-highlight. That is simply a reality of war. So I would give this a 3 out of 10. Tank! Lower! What we see in this movie, "Defiance," is that the Bielski brothers are Jewish partisans who basically challenge the Nazi occupation of the area of ​​Belarus where they live. They use light arms because they can get in and out relatively quickly. The Germans will use many vehicles that will take their troops from point A to point B, and there are many accounts of Jews hiding here attacking those types of convoys, but not against armored vehicles.

There are many problems with this particular scene. When they fire the main gun, I'm not really sure who they shoot, because you don't use a main gun to shoot people. Can you shoot people with it? Absolutely. But it's not the most effective type of use of that weapons system. I think it's supposed to be a Panzer Mark IV. Not even close to looking like a Panzer Mark IV. The other problem with there being a tank there is that in 1943 and 1944, the Germans need all the armor they can get, and using it in a rare action capacity like this is a problem.

That armored asset would likely be used on the front lines fighting the Russians. Regarding the knight in the tower dome, there are actually two schools of thought on the matter. There are those who believe that the tank commander, who would sit in the cupola, should be above and outside to be able to see things better. However, in the case of the Soviet Union, they thought very differently. They wanted to go into battle warm and protected. So it's a question of how you see the role of the tank commander. Is he someone who should simply command the crew and utilize that piece of armor, or should he be up and out, looking around the battlefield and scanning it for potential targets to coordinate?

Is that an accurate description? Yes, probably, depending on the commander himself and the risk he can assess. Since the partisans are lightly armed with only rifles, a couple of pistols, and maybe some hand grenades, there's not much they can do with this tank. If they buttoned up, they could easily leave unless there was some kind of obstacle, and that's something the brothers did do. Trees fell to block roads. We don't see that in this particular scene. I'd probably give this a 4. Alright, let's get the guys out. Get them out of. Get me the last man. Radio: Take care of your damn space.

There are a couple of problems here with this scene. First of all, the tanks do not work independently. They are not there alone. They are usually part of a regimental combat team or some other larger organization. Again, this idea of ​​combined arms: infantry with armor, with artillery and maybe with some air power. And in this movie you see these tanks operating almost as independent elements, and the armor doesn't work that way. You see the infantry closely following the armor. That was a tactic, technique and procedure that was used from the beginning to follow the armor, but the problem with that is that they can't talk to each other because tanks make noise and they can't talk to the tank commander.

Lower! There are some tactical problems with this particular scene. The Germans prepared a linear ambush, but this ambush is not L-shaped. An L-shaped ambush aims to stop the enemy advance and then attack it from the flanks. Here, the Germans are simply in a parallel formation to the Americans as they advance. Come on, let's clean it up. A tank next to another tank next to another tank. That's not how they would do it. They would immediately go into some sort of combat deployment, one that would provide a firebase with one or two more tanks moving in as a maneuver element to flank the enemy and provide additional support.

And if it's a set ambush, and it looks like it's because the Germans have dug in, you wouldn't see them in a linear formation because, again, it's too easy to take out those tanks while they're sitting there. a nice and orderly formation. It looks great for parades. Doesn't work in combat. It looks like a laser. It's not. The flashes of light you see are tracers. Typically, soldiers use them to help mark where their bullets are going, because bullets are basically invisible while in flight. It is not out of the ordinary to see many tracers drop in rank.

It shows the harshness of war. It shows how dirty the confined space inside the tank itself was. But once again, the tactics that both the Americans and the Germans are using here fall short. I would give this a 6. So when you look at this depiction of the Battle of El Guettar, it's really lacking. First of all, you have guys with guns on their shoulders, they're not even in any kind of tactical formation, they're just walking around, and the German army is better than that. Even at this stage of the war, the Germans remain a mobile and highly disciplined force.

One of the things you see in this movie is the use of artillery. These puffs of smoke that you see in the battle itself, bullets usually don't explode in the air like that. It can happen? Yes, but not to the extent seen in these

movies

. There is a lot of air power that occurs during the Battle of El Guettar from the German and American perspective that is largely absent in this particular film. I'd give this a 3 out of 10. What we're seeing here is a depiction of the Battle of the Scheldt in September 1944, and it's a pretty accurate engagement, because it's very muddy.

Many of these fields are already flooded by Allied bomber bombing that is destroying some of the dikes, and the Germans flood some of their own to make them an obstacle to offensive operations, so what remains are only a few access roads. that the Canadian forces andBritish companies can really cover to achieve these objectives. And this is one of the hardest fights during the Western European campaign. I think they lose up to 13,000 casualties in the short period of a month. The Germans have placed their defensive positions on these few access roads, so the British Army, the Commonwealth forces, have to go up these particular access roads to rid the Germans of their location.

So it is quite accurate that it is a very narrow façade. The use of British artillery is also seen. Bearing in mind also that because the fields are so flooded, the use of armor does not help the British forces at all, so this really becomes a problem. Infantry soldiers work hard with some artillery support and there is something aviation support. You don't see it in this movie, but in real battle, aviation really helps in this combined arms integration. What you see here is also a German artillery piece. It is an 88 millimeter anti-tank gun. It's a legendary piece of artillery that the Germans initially designed for anti-aircraft, but then they discovered that it's a great anti-tank weapon, and if you put it down, you see it in that example as it moves down, being fired parallel to the deck. rather than vertically in the sky, and the Germans did this to great effect.

I would give this a 9 out of 10. My favorite WWII video has to be "Band of Brothers." The entire series. Not only is it technically accurate, but it really shows the human cost of war, it shows the camaraderie, how difficult these conditions were, and it does it in a way that is not only brave, but also respectful of these men and their experiences. It probably stands out as my favorite. If you enjoyed this video, click the link above.