I'm not quite sure who they're shooting at,
'cause you don't use a main gun to shoot people.
It isn't the most effective use of that weapon system.
I'm Dr. John Curatola,
a retired Marine Corps officer of 22 years,
former history professor,
and now I'm the resident military historian
at The National World War II Museum in New Orleans.
Today, we're going to look at World War II battle scenes
in the movies and determine how real they actually are.
What we're seeing here is the amphibious assault
of the Normandy beaches on June 6, 1944.
Many of those men who came off those landing craft
had to traverse up to 100 to 200 yards
while under enemy fire
before they would've even reached the shingle,
which is the main slope of the beach itself,
and the movie doesn't really depict that.
They basically get off the landing craft,
and they're already on the beach or on the shingle.
Some of the obstacles are backwards.
They should be configured 180 degrees
from the way they are on the beach.
What they're really intended to do
is to upset a landing craft
as it comes in under shallow water.
The machine gun, the MG 42, that the Germans are using,
this is a high-velocity, high-caliber weapon.
The problem is they're using it in very long bursts.
A weapon like that can only really be effectively used
in two- to three-second bursts,
otherwise the barrel will burn out,
and then you have a problem with the weapon itself.
And if you hear the rates of fire in the movie,
they're pretty long.
Shore party. No armor has made it ashore.
We've got no DD tanks on the beach.
Tom Hanks' character is on the radio
talking to the commander of the amphibious task force.
A lowly Army captain talking to an admiral;
that is way beyond his pay grade.
A company commander is not calling the commander
of the amphibious task force from a field radio
just to report his position.
But it does show an excellent portrayal of the confusion.
In the clip, it doesn't really show how the US forces
got on top of the high ground,
off of the shingle and the beach, and that's OK,
because depending on where you landed on D-Day,
whether you were at Utah or Omaha Beach,
the topography was very different.
Some units had relatively shallow heights
that they had to scale.
Some had cliff faces, like the rangers at Pointe du Hoc
had to literally go up a cliff face
to get to the German positions.
While it does have a few technical errors,
it's very accurate of the assault on Normandy Beach,
and I give it an 8 out of 10.
Oh, s---!
The Germans are well defended within the town itself,
and the Americans have to assault it.
The unit move into the town of Carentan
into what we call a MOUT environment,
military operations in urban terrain,
which is very difficult.
The danger with an urban environment
is that the enemy can hide anywhere and everywhere.
Dog and fox are pulling back.
What?
You have German armor that is
coming down upon their defensive positions.
They're showing that the other companies,
D and F, are breaking and running.
Only one company ran.
The other one stayed there for a long time,
and that company kind of took some umbrage
with this depiction 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 at the tactical level.
Most companies had them,
and so they were distributed widely while they were engaged.
Armor is soft skinned on its belly.
When its belly is exposed, you can indeed pierce it.
Well, hello, 2nd Armored.
It isn't the 2nd Armored Division
that saves the company in this particular scene.
What happens is Dick Winters,
who serves as the company commander,
calls in mortar support,
and it's the mortars that help drive off the German armor.
In most tables of organization,
infantry companies and infantry battalions
have mortars attached to them
within a weapons company or some other attachments
to provide that additional firepower
for infantry forces that are relatively lightly armed.
2nd Armored Division does relieve Easy Company
later on in the day, but it isn't like 2nd Armored
showed up in the nick of time to save Easy Company's bacon.
This is a very accurate portrayal,
and I would give this a 9 out of 10 easily.
In this scene, we're seeing the British forces
as they evacuate the continent of Europe at Dunkirk.
You see the men lined up in queues
in order to get on the ships, and that's true,
and many of the pictures of Dunkirk
see the soldiers indeed doing that.
They would get in their lines,
and they would break apart if there was an air attack,
and then they would get back in their queues.
One thing I didn't understand
is why guys would stand in the water all day
when there's no boat there.
This is a really good depiction
of what air combat was like during this part of the war.
You have to lead the enemy target,
and the German basically flies into the bullets,
and that's really how it's supposed to work.
And one of the things you'll notice,
he has to do it in short two-, three-second bursts,
because they only have so much ammunition in their wings.
They have to be very conservative
about the rounds that they do fire,
because you only have maybe 10 seconds.
Yeah, he's down for the count.
The British fighter is jumped
by the second German fighter.
That's accurate.
This is the days before radar. There's nothing to hear.
It's too noisy, it's too loud,
and so as a result, a lot of aerial kills
in both wars really result from surprise.
What's problematic with that scene
is Germans don't operate solo.
Usually, they're going to operate
in two- or four-man ships working together.
Here you see one enemy 109
and then followed by another enemy 109,
and it really don't work that way.
Because this is 80 years after the war,
those really aren't enemy 109s,
those are actually Hispano 1112 Buchons,
which are basically Messerschmitt airframes
with Merlin engines installed in them.
But we use them a lot on air shows today
to represent an enemy 109,
since there are very few of them
actually in existence today.
Overall, I'd give this movie a 7 out of 10.
What we're seeing here in the movie "Enemy at the Gates"
is a Russian assault on a German position
in the Battle of Stalingrad.
And so this idea that they would send troops forward
without a weapon and with limited rounds
is a little absurd.
The Russians had plenty of guns, weapons,
in terms of small arms.
Basically a human-wave tactic.
Just throw men into the mix and see what happens.
And that certainly does occur in places in history.
However, this idea of just throwing men nilly-willy
into a cauldron is certainly a waste of manpower,
and it's not something that they did in large scale.
The way the Russians actually win this fight
is they provide a pincher movement
on the north and the southern edges
of the city of Stalingrad,
and they cut off the German 6th Army.
Fall back!
Fire!
Another problem with this particular scene
is once the Soviet assault fails,
they're running backwards,
and then their own forces fire on them
to prevent them from coming back into their friendly lines.
They didn't do that either.
Did they certainly shoot individuals
for desertion and cowardice?
Sure, absolutely, but not in the manner
that they're depicting here.
They had blocking battalions
that would be used to keep formations intact
and to keep them beefed up on the front lines,
but not in the manner that's depicted here.
Certainly you have to pull back,
reconsolidate, reassault.
That's just a reality of warfare.
So I'd give this a 3 out of 10.
Tank!
Get down!
What we see in this movie, "Defiance,"
is the Bielski brothers are Jewish partisans
who basically defy Nazi occupation
of the Belarus area where they live.
They use light arms because they can move
in and out relatively quickly.
The Germans will use a lot of vehicles
that get their troops from point A to point B,
and there's many accounts
of the Jews who are in hiding here
attacking those kinds of convoys, but not against armor.
There's a lot of problems with this particular scene.
When they're firing the main gun,
I'm not quite sure who they're shooting at,
'cause you don't use a main gun to shoot people.
Can you shoot people with it? Absolutely.
But it isn't the kind of thing
that is the most effective use of that weapon 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 the fact that there's a tank there
is by 1943 and 1944,
the Germans need all the armor they can get,
and using it in a rare action capacity like this,
it's a problem.
That armor asset would probably be used
on the front lines fighting the Russians.
Regarding the gentleman in the cupola of the turret,
there are two schools of thought on this, actually.
There are those that believe the tank commander,
who would sit in the cupola,
should be up and out so he can see things better.
However, for the Soviet Union,
they thought very differently.
They wanted to go into battle buttoned up and protected.
So it's a matter on how you see the tank commander's role.
Is he somebody who should be just commanding the crew
and the utilization of that armor piece,
or should he be up and out, looking around the battlefield,
and scanning it for potential targets, for coordination?
Is that an accurate depiction?
Yeah, probably, depending on the commander himself
and what risk he can assess.
Given the fact that the partisans are lightly armed
with just rifles, a couple of pistols,
and maybe some hand grenades,
there's not much they could really do to this tank.
If they were to button up, they could easily drive off
unless there was some kind of obstacle,
and that's one thing the brothers did do.
They did fall trees to block roads.
We don't see that in this particular scene.
I'd probably give this a 4.
All right, let's get the boys off.
Get them off. Get me the last man.
Radio: Watch your f---ing spacing.
There's a couple of problems here with this scene.
First of all, tanks don't operate independently.
They're not out there on their own.
They're 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 so in this movie you see these tanks
operating almost as independent elements,
and armor doesn't work that way.
You see the infantry following closely behind the armor.
That was a tactic, technique, and procedure
used early on to follow the armor,
but the problem with that is you can't talk to each other
'cause the tanks are loud,
and you can't talk to the tank commander.
Get down!
There's some tactical problems here
with this particular scene.
The Germans set up a linear ambush,
but there's no L-shape to this ambush.
An L-shaped ambush is intended to stop the enemy advancement
and then attack them from the flanks.
Here, the Germans are just in a parallel formation
to the Americans as they're trolling along.
Let's go, let's clean it up.
One tank next to the other tank next to the other tank.
That's not how they would do it.
They would immediately get into some kind of
a combat spread, one providing a base of fire
with one or two other tanks moving as a maneuver element
to kind of flank the enemy to provide additional support.
And if this is a prepared ambush,
and it looks like it is because the Germans have dug in,
you wouldn't see them in a linear formation
because, again, it's too easy to pick off those tanks
as they're sitting there in a nice, neat formation.
It looks great for parades.
It doesn't work in combat.
It looks like a laser. It's not.
The flashes of light you see are tracers.
Usually soldiers will use those
to help mark where their rounds are going,
because rounds are basically invisible
while they're in flight.
It's not out of the ordinary to see
that many tracers going downrange.
It does show the grittiness of war.
It does show how dirty it was,
the cramped quarters within a tank itself.
But, again, the tactics that both the Americans
and the Germans are using here kind of fall short.
I'd give this a 6.
So, when you look at this depiction
of the Battle of El Guettar, it really is lacking.
First of all, you got guys
with weapons slung over their shoulders,
they're not even in any kind of a tactical formation,
they're just kind of walking around,
and the German army's better than that.
Even at this stage of the war, the Germans are still
a highly disciplined, mobile 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,
rounds generally just don't blow up in the air like that.
Can it happen?
Yeah, but not to the degree you see in these movies.
There's a lot of air power that occurs
during the Battle at El Guettar
from both the German and the American perspective
that's largely absent in this particular movie.
I would give this a 3 out of 10.
What we're seeing here is depiction
of the Battle of the Scheldt in September of 1944,
and it's a fairly accurate engagement,
one, because it's so muddy.
Many of these fields are already flooded
by bombing from Allied bombers
who are destroying some of the dikes,
and the Germans do some flooding on their own
to make it an obstacle for offensive operations,
and so what that leaves is only a few avenues of approach
that the Canadian and British forces
can actually cover to get to these objectives.
And then this is one of the hardest fights
during the Western European campaign.
I think they lose up to 13,000 casualties
in the short span of a month.
The Germans have put their defensive positions
on these few avenues of approach,
and so the British army, the Commonwealth forces
have to go up these particular avenues of approach
in order to rid the Germans of their location.
So it's pretty accurate that it's a very narrow frontage.
You also see the use of British artillery.
Keeping in mind too that because the fields are so flooded,
the use of armor doesn't really
help the British forces out at all,
and so this really becomes an infantrymen slog
with some artillery support,
and there's some aviation support.
It's not seen in this movie, but in the actual battle,
the aviation really does help
in this combined-arms integration.
What you see here too is a German artillery piece.
It's an 88-millimeter antitank gun.
It is a legendary piece of artillery
that the Germans initially designed for antiaircraft,
but then they found that it's a great antitank weapon,
and if you lower it, and you see it in that example
as it's traversed down, being fired parallel to the deck
as opposed to vertically in the sky,
and the Germans did that to great effect.
I'd give this a 9 out of 10.
My favorite World War II 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 gritty,
but it's also respectful of these men and their experiences.
It probably stands out as my favorite.
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