What's the Best War Movie?

Someone slammed Patton and the general himself.

Obviously they believe the movie was accurate. What a joke. George C Scott refused to accept the Oscar for it as he understood just how badly it portrayed a military genius and an officer who from the start of his career ALWAYS placed his men first and foremost. He understood armies don't win of the men behind the guns cannot or will not fight.

Patton could've reached Berlin weeks before the Russians. He knew the threat they presented and wanted to take ALL of Germany before the truce was signed. Politicians stopping him gave us decades of a stupid and unnecessary Cold War.

 

The division of Germany had been agreed on at Yalta. Even if Patton had taken Berlin, we would have had to give it back.

Patton also wanted to continue the war, by moving on to attack the Soviets. That was just not realistic. There would have been ZERO public and world support for such a move -- not to mention we were still fighting Japan. Even if there had been public support, the result would have been to extend World War II by years, and millions more dead. The Cold War was a bargain by comparison.

 

Saving Private Ryan is probably my favorite war movie.

 

The Japanese epic "The Human Condition" (Ningen no joken) is good.

 

That was probably me. Patton was a loose cannon and absolutely certifiable.

 

Patton was hated by many of his own troops.
"His guts and your blood."

George C. Scott wouldn;'t accept the Oscar because he thought the movie glorified war.

 

Thank FDR for giving Stalin Eastern Europe on a silver platter. The man was a closet Communist. .

 

I think he looked at the odds against success. Sometimes a man has got to know his limitations.

 

If you're going to watch "Midway" you have to do a marathon, watching it AFTER watching "Tora, Tora, Tora."

Just my $0.02

 

Rightwing Revisionist History Fantasy......

the Soviets had beaten back THE greatest military of the 1940s, mostly without the help of us or the British. They would throw themselves into Wehrmacht meat-grinder battles and take huge losses and still keep coming....

but the Right wants us to believe that a ground war with the Russians in May 1945 wouldn't have been horrifically costly in American and British lives.....and with no provocation except "Patton didn't like Commies" or a false flag hoax that would have destroyed America's credibility eventually...that the American people would have supported it.

It would have been a disaster politically AND militarily....but the Right, angry that they never got to actually "slug it out with the Rooskies" imagines it would be a cake-walk because of ONE borderline mental case of a general.

 

Midway could have been a great movie. But like that latest "Pearl Harbor" movie, the writers thought it was necessary to throw in all that gratuitous 'love' stuff.

 

I am not sure it qualifies as a war movie, but Schindlers List was an excellent movie!

And The Pianist was an amazing performance as well!

Both of these did not have to do with the actual battles fought, but the Holocaust on the Jews.

 

Would you like to know a little about our lovely allies in the Soviet occupation zone.. How about one example...Red Army soldiers entered the maternity hospital at Haus Dehlem and raped pregnant women, women who had just given birth, and women in the process of giving birth. The war was over mind you. What purpose did this sort of heinous degradation of humanity serve? Revenge. They were no better than the Reich. FDR essentially slept with pigs, bolstered a regime equal in every measure to the evil of the Reich.

Patton got one thing right, he hated the Stalinists, and with good reason. We turned over half of Germany and all of Eastern Europe to pigs, and a fine how do you do to Joseph Stalin to show for it.

 

Big Red One which isn't on the list. And of course Saving Private Ryan.

 

If Patton had gone up against the Soviets they would've smashed him. They'd just smashed the Germans and the Germans were better than the Americans.

 

I think your comment is better served for the humor section. The Russians did not have much left in the tank after WW2. While I agree fighting the Soviets and maintaining the war in the Pacific simultaneously would have been a mistake. Once the allies achieved VJ, all of those resources previously dedicated to fighting Imperialist Japan could be thrown at the Soviets. The U.S. had suffered no infrastructure damage, unlike Russia. The U.S. suffered negligible civilian casualties, unlike Russia.

1 in 10 Russians between 1939 - 1945 was dead. 13,600,000 Soviet soldiers were dead in the same time period.
Yet magically they somehow "smash" the Americans? With what exactly? Zombies?

 

You think that a democracy would just accept the casualties needed in attacking what had been an ally?

 

Settle down master debaters!

War movies is the topic.

 

All Quiets on the Western Front and Das Boot are good.

 

They were Germans, after what the Germans did to the Soviet's, seemed like payback maybe they like the stinking Japanese should have behaved more civilized then they might have been treated better.

And the Soviets were as bad as the Reich that is why going to war with them was the stupidest move Hitler could have done if they kept the fight in Western Europe to a stalemate and he could have kept most of the Continent he took.

But the mad dog went after the only other major mad dog who had a bigger population and besides pissing him of, pissed off the Russian people to a fury with major war crimes first.

Hell we firebombed and nuked Japan we were just as vicious.

 

The deerhunter.

 

The Germans weren't better than the Americans in a strategic sense. Which is why we beat them.

They were arguably better in terms of small-unit tactics, and their tanks were generally superior to ours one-for-one -- or four-for-one, in many cases.

But we had superior logistics and transport. We had overwhelming airpower and artillery support. German Tiger tanks, for instance, were tactically excellent but strategically weak -- they were heavy, slow and expensive to make compared to Shermans. Which is why we could afford to lose four Shermans for every Tiger we destroyed: we were producing 14 Shermans per day, while Tigers were initially built at the rate of 25 per MONTH. By the end of the war, we had produced more than 50,000 Shermans; the Germans built fewer than 1,500 Tigers.

The Tigers also had famously complicated and unreliable drive trains, so they broke down more often.

So I think the Soviets would have found us far tougher to handle than the Germans -- but they would have had the political stomach for the fight, while we didn't. Which is why, as I said earlier, it was a complete non-starter to attack them as Patton wanted.

 

Actually I think the love story between Charlton Heston's son in the movie and the Japanese girl was more political than romantic.....it was coming at a time when people were finally admitting that the Japanese-American internment was an outrage.

Remember the girl asks "Why are we being separated out...unlike German-Americans and Italian-Americans?"

And Heston's character says "Pearl Harbor, I guess?".....when the obvious answer was ...racism.

 

Well you are comparing Americans success against the B team of the Germans, the best equipment, best officers, best soldiers were all on the Eastern front. Where many of the best of the best were captured or killed. A whole Army was annhilated in Stalingrad, before one American boot was set in France. I am not saying the Americans under performed, not by a long shot. But one does have to admit that the type of resistance the Americans faced was dwarfed with what the Red Army was dealing with. I think the Red army would have steam rolled the Allies if it came to war, even with American air strategic air supremacy, they still would not have had tactical air supremacy. Strategic air supremacy would not have helped much, as they would have to fly over huge enemy territory without much air support to even reach Soviet Factories in the Urals. Only game changer was the A bomb.

 

I have no intention of slighting the Soviet contribution to the war. They took on the Germans toe-to-toe and won straight up. Don't overlook the massive Allied contribution to their success (via Lend-Lease, for one, and fighting Japan for another so that Russia didn't have to worry about a second front in the east, and opening early fronts against Germany in Africa and Italy for a third, including knocking Italy out of the war), but they did the bulk of the fighting and dying that essentially broke the German military.

Ignoring the political dimension (as I said, the Russians would have had the stomach for the war, while we didn't):

We would likely have switched air production to fighters, not to mention ending lend-lease aid, so we would quickly have been able to swamp them in tactical aircraft production. Maybe we couldn't touch their factories, but they couldn't touch ours, either. Meanwhile, our seaborne supply lines were basically untouchable, while their land routes were extremely long and vulnerable. Those strategic bombers would likely have been used for things like destroying bridges, railheads and rail lines, seriously messing with their ability to move units and supplies. Our industrial base was undamaged and operating at full steam -- theirs had been ravaged by the war. We had lost fewer than a million people -- they had lost at least 26 million, possibly much more. They still outnumbered us at that time (170 million people or so compared to 110 million or so), but they had suffered huge losses among people of fighting age. We were also still fighting Japan, which meant we couldn't devote our entire resources to fighting Russia. On the other hand, after the defeat of Japan, we could attack Russia from both west and east. Plus, most of the population in the conquered areas would have been on our side, not theirs -- the Germans and Poles, for instance, were far more opposed to the Soviets than to us.

I'm not saying we would have steamrolled them. It would have been a tough, largely equal fight. But they certainly wouldn't have steamrolled us, either.