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Best WWII movie?

DLow

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Like most, my top would be Saving Private Ryan, but Fury is pretty good. Have watched it a couple times recently.
Found Dunkirk… lacking.
What are some other top pics?
Doesn’t need to be historically accurate, obviously.
 
Outdrive1

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Taboma

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Let's dig back even further, one that as a kid, captured both my heart and imagination and spawned my youthful lust for PT boats.

They Were Expendable-1.jpg

They Were Expendable-2.jpg

They Were Expendable-3.jpg
 
Mandelon

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Kelly's Heroes is just fun from beginning to end. I love that movie.

So many good ones here, I'm gonna have to get started watching these again.
 
havasujeeper

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When we toured Normandy, the tour guide said "The Longest Day" was the most precise movie ever made. It was accurate to a "tee". After watching it again, I can see what he was saying. I still like "Saving Private Ryan" since it was so well made.
 
Taboma

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havasujeeper said:
My PD buddy, a stunt man, was killed 6 times in the movie "They Were Expendable". I guess being Asian and a 6th Degree Blackbelt also helps.
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If he were a stunt man in 1945, is he still amongst the living ? Hell, I didn't even know they had colored belts back then. 😁
 
rrrr

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Kenboat said:
A couple of old ones worth watching
The Longest day
Midway
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Midway premiered the year after I graduated from high school. No Wikipedia was used in this post, I remember all of this.

😁

The 1976 version of Midway starred several of Hollywood's then leading men. From memory there was Glenn Ford, Charleton Heston, Henry Fonda, Robert Mitchum, and others too. Pat Fujita, star of The Karate Kid, played an officer on a Japanese carrier. During WWII the Navy filmed many of its operations in color, and that footage was used liberally in the movie. Some of the scenes involving Navy aircraft and the burning Japanese carriers were the real thing.

The sequence showing the Japanese attack on Midway Island prior to the carrier engagements is the actual event.

It was filmed by Hollywood crews on the island because famous director John Ford had been asked by the Navy to produce a film for newsreels back in America. The Navy and Ford suspected they would see action, but did not know in advance the Japanese attack would occur while the filming was to take place. Those are real Japanese aircraft and bombs in those scenes.

The scene were Charleton Heston dies when his aircraft has a carrier ramp strike and the massive ball of flames slides down the deck really happened. The plane was actually an early Navy jet fighter, an F9F Panther. If you watch closely, it's easy to tell. The incident occurred during the Korean War. The filmmakers contacted the family of the dead pilot, and they agreed to allow his death to be shown on film.

Midway was also the first movie released with surround sound in the theaters. The amplifier and speaker sets were produced prior to the film's release, and installed in select theaters around the country.
 
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Aces & Eights

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CLdrinker said:
BlackHawk down. Those boys who requested to insert to help the guys in the helo are fucking legends.
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Great movie, but not a World War II movie.

The guys who you are referring to are Delta, and definitely legends
 
CLdrinker

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Aces & Eights said:
Great movie, but not a World War II movie.

The guys who you are referring to are Delta, and definitely legends
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Lol brain fart I was just thinking war movies. I met one of the Delta guys who advised on that movie.
 
The Prisoner

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I have never seen Judgement at Nuremberg but coincidentally I recorded it 2 days ago from TCM. I only had time to watch the first 10 minutes.
 
rrrr

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How's this for a coincidence? I went out to get the mail, and the summer issue of World War II magazine is here. Check out one of the cover stories.

It details the assignment of director John Ford to Midway and the transport of his Hollywood film crew to the island. On June 3, 1942, Ford was a passenger in a US Navy PBY Catalina flying a search pattern miles from the island. The aircraft lookouts spotted the Japanese fleet assigned to the land invasion of the island.

It consisted of destroyers, a couple of cruisers, and some troop transports. The main naval fleet, which included battleships and heavy cruisers, was still hundreds of miles away. Admiral Isoruku Yamamoto, the Japanese commander, was in one of the battleships. Ford's plane, observing radio silence, flew in clouds back to the island and alerted the garrison.

The next morning over 100 aircraft, based on four carriers still 200 miles from Midway, attacked, but the invasion fleet didn't land a man on Midway. The US Marine and Navy personnel on the island repelled the attempt (filmed by Ford and his crews), and within hours, the battle between the carrier forces became the all important focus.

The American carriers were northeast of the island that morning, and when the fighters, bombers, and torpedo bombers first engaged the Japanese, their aircrews suffered significant losses.

Perhaps you've heard the story of VT-8, AKA Torpedo Squadron 8. Every plane in the squadron was shot down while on torpedo runs at the Japanese carriers, and Ensign George Gay was the only pilot to survive. He was picked up after hours in the water.

I won't tell the entire story, but Navy aircraft located the enemy's four carriers, all of which had participated in the December 7 attack on Pearl Harbor, and sank them. The carrier USS Lexington and destroyer USS Hammann were also sunk, but most of the crewmen survived.

The battle occurred six months after Pearl Harbor, and gave the United States and her citizens a much needed boost in morale. The battle dealt a blow to the Imperial Japanese Navy that was just as serious as the loss of the carriers. Almost 400 front line pilots, almost all of whom had undergone years of training and had gained battle experience in China since Japan's invasion of that country in 1931, were lost.

This began the inexorable decline of the IJN's First Air Fleet, and the losses were never made good. An additional 2,500 Japanese sailors and officers were killed. About 350 American personnel were killed in the battle.

I'm enjoying this thread, and I always like to tell these stories of The Greatest Generation.

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rrrr

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A very good modern movie about a pivotal WWII battle in the Pacific is Clint Eastwood's Letters From Iwo Jima. It is a drama about a very average Japanese soldier who increasingly realizes his chance of surviving the invasion of the island by US Marines is unlikely. The movie details many historically accurate events and actual participants in the battle.
 
Mandelon

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Last night we watched The Imitation Game. It was about a group of dorky math and linguistic geniuses trying to solve the Nazi's Enigma code during WW2 and how they did it. It is based on a real man named Alan Turing who it seems was essentially the guy who invented modern computers.

There's not exactly any action in it, but we enjoyed it. I think it was streaming from Amazon Prime.
 
QC22

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A very interesting one, that I just recently watched as a recommendation from my son, is Jojo Rabbit. Some of you will probably hate it, but ultimately I thought it was great.
 
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