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! 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. If you enjoyed this video,
please click the link above.
