My favourite WWII movies
(and one TV show)
I grew up watching World War II movies. Today, despite the online movie-watching options, I keep a supply of my favourite war movie DVDs at home. Here is a list of some of my favourite WWII movies:
The Longest Day 1962 Ken Annakin and others
Von Ryan’s Express 1965 Mark Robson
Sink the Bismarck! 1960 Lewis Gilbert
Catch-22 1970 Mike Nichols
The Big Red One 1980 Samuel Fuller
Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison 1957 John Huston
The Secret of Santa Vittoria 1969 Stanley Kramer
The Great Escape 1963 John Sturges
Stalag 17 1953 Billy Wilder
Casablanca 1942 Michael Curtiz
Sahara 1943 Zoltan Korda
Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo 1943 Mervyn LeRoy
Kelly’s Heroes 1970 Brian G. Hutton
The Dirty Dozen 1967 Robert Aldrich
Patton 1970 Franklin J. Schaffner
The Wakiest Ship in the Army 1960 Richard Murphy
From Here to Eternity 1953 Fred Zinnemann
The Guns of Navarone 1961 J. Lee Thompson
Where Eagles Dare 1969 Brian G. Hutton
The Eagle Has Landed 1976 John Sturges
The Diary of Anne Frank 1959 George Stevens
The Bridge of the River Kwai 1957 David Lean
Tora! Tora! Tora! 1970 Richard Fleischer, Toshio Masuda and Kinji Fukasaku
The Enemy Below 1957 Dick Powell
The Battle of Britain 1969 Guy Hamilton
The Odessa File 1974 Ronald Neame
Das Boot 1981 Wolfgang Petersen
A Bridge Too Far 1977 Richard Attenborough
Empire of the Sun 1987 Steven Spielberg
The Best Years of Our Lives 1946 William Wyler
Operation Petticoat 1959 Blake Edwards
In Harm’s Way 1959 Otto Preminger
Judgment at Nuremberg 1961 Stanley Kramer
Father Goose 1964 Ralph Nelson
The Hill 1965 Sidney Lumet
The Devil’s Brigade 1968 Andrew W. McLaglen
Hogan’s Heroes (TV series) 1965 - 1971 various
The Winds of War (miniseries) 1983 Dan Curtis
I have watched many other WWII movies - movies that I did not grow up on. For example, here is a short list:
Harp of Burma 1985 Kon Ichikawa
Memphis Belle 1990 Michael Caton-Jones
The Thin Red Line 1998 Terrence Malick
Saving Private Ryan 1998 Steven Spielberg
U-571 2000 Jonathan Mostow
Enemy at the Gates 2001 Jean-Jacques Anaud
Band of Brothers 2001 various
Pearl Harbor 2001 Michael Bay
Valkyrie 2008 Bryan Singer
Pacific 2010 various
Fury 2014 David Ayer
The Imitation Game 2014 Morten Tyldum
Hacksaw Ridge 2016 Mel Gibson
Allied 2016 Robert Zemeckis
Dunkirk 2017 Christopher Nolan
Darkest Hour 2017 Joe Wright
What did I learn? History? Maybe a little, but only just barely after the stories go through the Hollywood filter. But I think I did learn some things. I learned about the different branches of military service. I learned about the ranks of those different services, their uniforms and insignia, and the corresponding ranks, uniforms and insignia from opposing countries. I learned a little about U.S. military uniforms - what “fatigues” are, and what “ODs” are. I learned a hell of a lot about steel helmets, and I collected a sample of original WWII helmets - the German stahlhelm, the American M1, the French Adrian helmet, and the British Brodie helmet, and many of their variants. I also learned about the German pickelhaube helmet. (I admired it so much that I bought an expensive, exact replica from a military antique and replica business in Georgia, USA.) I learned about command structures. I learned about basic training, physical fitness and weapons training. I learned about conscription, rotation, discharge, mustering out and decommissioning. I learned about wartime economy. I learned about leave, furlough, AWOL, passes, and military scrip and military base commissaries. I learned about the United Service Organization (the USO). I learned about the Officers’ Club. I learned about reveille and taps. I learned about flag raising and lowering ceremonies, and about saluting protocols. I learned about military citations and decorations. I leaned about Military Police, Shore Patrol, courts martial and military justice. I learned about tactical weapons versus strategic weapons. I learned about small arms, heavy arms, armored vehicles and ammunition. I learned about weapons loading and reloading, disassembling and cleaning. I learned about different kinds of explosives and delivery systems - artillery shells, aerial bombs, land mines, marine mines, torpedoes, mortars and hand grenades. I learned different types and models of aircraft, their nationalities and markings, and their operation. I learned about different kinds of ships - submarines, destroyers, cruisers, frigates, battleships, aircraft carriers and naval tenders. I learned about convoys, convoy staging, and anti-submarine warfare. I learned a lot of geography. I learned country names, rivers, cities and islands, plus the names of seas and oceans. I learned a little about navigation and maps, compasses and maritime navigation equipment. I learned the names of political leaders, generals and admirals. I learned about geopolitics and power projection. I learned the names and times of important campaigns and specific battles (and their outcomes). I learned some strategy and a lot of battlefield tactics. I learned about finding cover, about digging in emplacements, about concealing positions, about placement of snipers and machine gun nests, line of sight, line of fire, and evading return fire. I learned the differences among military unit sizes - the squad, the platoon, the company, the battalion, the regiment, the brigade, the division, the army corps, the field army and the army group. I learned about air support and artillery support, and supply chains. I learned about booby traps. I learned about battlefield medical corpsmen and military hospitals. I learned about special operations, espionage and intelligence. I learned about strategic bombing and carpet bombing. I learned about wartime factory production and transportation. I learned about resistance and the underground. I learned about prisoner of war camps and the Red Cross. I learned about propaganda. I learned about war crimes, genocide and the Holocaust. I learned what a Quonset Hut is. I learned what it means to be “on point.” I learned the battlefield virtues of single file, and the naval advantages of zig-zag. I learned some words in German and Japanese.
Even today, when I walk around Tokyo in my daily life, I keep thinking “That’s a good place for cover. That’s a good place for a covering fire position. That’s a potential defilade position. You could put a really good sniper’s nest in there. That could be a trap, over there.” I playfully imagine infantry infiltrating and advancing through the city, through neighbourhoods, through train stations and subway tunnels, establishing positions and slowly occupying the country, house-to-house fighting, street-to-street fighting - the sort of fighting U.S. Marines had to do in places like Iwo Jima and Okinawa, but something they never had to do in mainland Japan proper (although I’m sure strategists anticipated it and planned for it).