Admiral & Generation War

While I’m on the topic of war movies, I might as well follow up with these two, which are Russian and German, and well worth the viewing.  Both are fairly recent.

Admiral (DVD).  In Russian with English subtitles.  A historical romance about Admiral Kolchak, the White Russian leader during the Russian Civil War (RCW).  After the Bolsheviks murdered the Romanovs in Sverdlovsk in July 1918, the Whites were left without an obvious leader.  Several generals and this admiral popped up to try to assert that role, desperately courting Allied favor and support.  The British and French latched on to this guy, operating in the East, to somehow make something happen.  As we can guess, it didn’t quite work out. 

            Never mind that he was a Navy officer – apparently one of Russia’s few naval heroes from WWI, a war in which the Russians were usually on the losing end of most battles – active well inland without a single ship or fleet under his command.  The chaos of the war left him with scarcely any armies to command either.  Once the Bolsheviks had taken care of the White armies back west, they turned their attention east, made a deal with the Czechs, and outmaneuvered the White forces in this part of Russia, including Kolchak.

            But there’s some juicy romance here as well.  It turns out he had the hots for one of his fellow Russian naval officer’s wives, Anna Timireva, and the two had an affair during the RCW.  When the second Revolution broke out in October 1917, his wife and son managed to escape off to Paris, which left him free to pursue Anna.   She decided to stay with him as much as she could, so their relationship blossomed in the middle of a crazy, chaotic war. 

            The movie starts with his WWI heroics, some scenes with the February and October Revolutions (1917) (he meets Kerensky, but Lenin & Co. are off-camera) and then his role in the RCW, gradually going east by train across Siberia, his forces melting away around him.  He is captured by the Czech Legion and turned over to the Bolsheviks and shot. 

            It’s a decent film, not too long, with good production values: and it turns out that Anna survived all the way to the 1970s (though she was sporadically imprisoned several times over that period).  The Bolsheviks play little role in the film, too minor to even count as villains.  Kolchak comes off as a tragic hero defeated by a mostly offscreen nemesis – fortunately enjoying an on-screen mistress, though the romance is more implied than explicitly intimate. 

            The most obvious comparison would be with “Dr. Zhivago”.  That film gives us more of the Red side of the equation, but even with competing romances, the older film drags on.  It feels like we could walk across Russia’s vast empty expanses by foot in the time it takes the damn film to finish up.  Prefer something short and sweet?  Non-Red?  In Russian?  “Admiral” is your movie.

           

Generation War (Blu-Ray).  In German with English subtitles.  This came by the local artsy theater but I didn’t find out until the run had ended.  Then it turned out the DVD became available, so I bought it.  This is a very recent film about Germany during WWII from the perspective of 5 young people:

1.         Older brother Wilhelm Winter, a Wehrmacht 2LT.  As with most of these war movies, he’s the smart, sympathetic, idealistic, honorable Army officer leading his men as best he can.  After Stalingrad he’s convinced the war cannot be won, and eventually winds up in a penal battalion after deserting – lucky not to be simply shot.

2.         Younger brother Friedhelm Winter, a Wehrmacht private.  Nominally a coward, ultimately he turns into a very good soldier (10x better than Samwell Tarly), but he’s about as cynical as Wilhelm.  Instead of vocalizing his dissatisfaction he just goes with the flow and tries to survive.  He really doesn’t say much. 

3.         Viktor Goldstein, a Jew.  He’s a young, handsome guy and the BF of Greta, the singer.  Like many German Jews, he can pass for Aryan but arouse suspicions depending on his behavior.  He’s sent to Auschwitz but manages to escape the transport train and join Polish partisans who are just as anti-semitic as the Nazis, so he has to keep his identity hidden.  Mostly he keeps his mouth shut.

4.         Charlotte (Charly), a cute, peppy, German girl, Wilhelm’s fiancé.  She volunteers as a nurse on the Eastern Front and sees some nasty stuff.  As you can imagine, her youthful idealism and good cheer soon dry up.  Charly befriends a Jewish nurse and a Russian girl, and even winds up in bed with the unit’s doctor, an older father figure, but only because Friedhelm told her that Wilhelm had died.  When she does meet Wilhelm again, among the living, she’s torn between joy at his survival and grief at cheating on him.  Like Friedhelm she accepts and understands German guilt for the war but unlike Wilhelm, who acts out and verbalizes his anger and bitterness, Charly absorbs it more like blows on her soul, which she absorbs on behalf of her guilty country and conscience. 

5.         Greta del Torres, Viktor’s GF, a popular singer.  She also sees unpleasant things.  She has an affair with the local Gestapo officer which ends poorly – with her in prison.  Although easily the most glamorous character, she’s also the least interesting.  She tried to save Viktor, but that effort backfired into Viktor’s deportation and her own arrest.  The glamorous singer wilts and decays in prison, kept alive only by her hatred for the regime. 

            The movie is very violent, and shows a small amount of Einsatzgruppen action (though none of the main characters are directly involved).  It covers the period 1941-45, but all the combat is Eastern Front and all enemy soldiers are Soviet, who also come off as very brutal, e.g. they capture a hospital and simply shoot all the German soldiers who are patients left behind.   In fact, there’s lots of combat.  Plus the tanks are authentic: Tigers and T34s, so us WWII buffs can really sink our teeth into it.  Warning, though, it is long: 3 90 minute parts, or 4.5 hours total.  It was a miniseries in Germany.

            The basic theme is that World War II took and destroyed an entire generation of Germany, stuffing it through the meat grinder of war, atrocity and depravity - the women too, and not just the men.  However, it’s not too much on the “let’s feel sorry for ourselves because of all the horrible things that happened to us during the war.”  Wilhelm is the most vocal in not merely articulating defeatism, but also acknowledging Germany’s fault in starting the war.  When an SS officer brutally murders a Jewish child at point blank, the viewer knows the movie is not apologizing for Nazi Germany.  Soviet brutality is not merely expected: it’s well deserved. 

            “Final Victory has been cancelled,” is the sentence Greta utters to a squad of horny German soldiers, deflating their egos, and landing her in prison.  “Final Victory” is the phrase uttered by the uber-Nazi nurse Hildegard – because anything else is unthinkable.  Even Wilhelm isn’t overly troubled that Germany started the war – invading Czechoslovakia (March 1939), Poland, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Holland, etc. countries without the means nor the inclination to threaten or oppose Germany – until after Stalingrad.  Are we the bad guys because we’re losing the war, or are we losing the war because we’re the bad guys?  Could the generals and leaders stupid enough to waste the goodwill of the Eastern Europeans by mistreating them, be also stupid enough not to manage a war against Stalin & the West at the same time?  The same arrogance which leads us Germans to brutalize the Russians and Ukrainians who welcomed us as liberators, could be the same arrogance persuading us that we can somehow defeat three major powers simultaneously? 

            With the Russians pushing us back on all sectors of the Eastern Front, with the Allies in Italy and France, with the people at home pulverized by bombing raids – can the war possibly be won?  Of course not.  Will our enemies meekly stop at the German borders and allow us to continue as we were? Of course not.  Will the Russians be gentle and kind when they rampage through the ruined streets of Berlin?  Of course not.  What we sowed, so shall we reap.  But if the Fuhrer, who must know something we don’t, promises “Final Victory”, despite all the evidence to the contrary, which would we rather believe?  “Final Victory” is what we cling to, desperately.  This is the only hope of Generation War.

D-Day

I missed my deadline for last Friday, so I pushed it to this Friday.  Sorry for the delay.  

Back in college, my buddy Phil and I were helping one of his suitemates – we’ll call him Jim – study for a history exam.  Unlike Phil and I, Jim grew up in the US, far from the beaches of Normandy.  Apparently his high school education somewhere in Virginia failed to include a discussion of World War II, so this important topic came to a complete surprise to him.  Of course, after getting over our shock and horror when Jim gave us a blank stare of zero recognition of “D-Day”, we filled him in.   My own source for this blog is The Desert Fox in Normandy: Rommel’s Defense of Fortress Europe, by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr.  I had read it earlier and simply reviewed parts of it here, but it can be considered a fairly detailed account of the D-Day operation, including the subsequent battles in Normandy until the Allies finally broke through in late July 1944.

June 1944.  World War II was in full swing.   The Nazis still occupied most of Europe, and no Allied or Soviet army had yet to set foot on German territory.   By most of Europe, I mean: Greater Germany, which included Austria, part of Czechoslovakia (the Sudetenland), and parts of Western Poland (Silesia); Denmark; Norway; Holland; Belgium; France; most of Italy; Poland; Czechoslovakia; Hungary; Yugoslavia; Greece; Romania; Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia; and much of Ukraine.   The Allies were pushing up the Italian boot, and in the East, Stalin had taken the initiative after the battle of Kursk in August 1943 and was gradually pushing the Germans westward.  However, Soviet offensives came in bits and spurts as they had to re-establish supply lines, which gave the Germans time to regroup and counter-attack.  While the Germans had permanently lost the offensive initiative on all fronts, they were by no means out.  Germany itself was not penetrated (!) until early 1945.

            The Germans knew the Allies would be landing somewhere in France, probably at Calais – the closest point to England – but also knew that since that was too obvious, it could be anywhere else.  In fact, the invasion occurred on the north coast, but much further west at Normandy.   There is some debate about how delusional Hitler was at this point as to whether or not the war could be won.  The general consensus among the Germans – including their top general, Erwin Rommel - was that their only hope was to blunt the Allied invasion and throw them into the sea; another invasion would take at least a year to launch, giving the Germans time to re-deploy their Western front armies eastward and hold Stalin to a stalemate.  However, if the Allied invasion did succeed, it was definitely game over for Adolf & Co.

            The Allies divided the invasion beaches into five zones, from west to east:  Utah, Omaha (#18!) (US targets), and Gold, Juno and Sword (British/Canadian).   After the Allied weather wizards initially blocked off June Sixth from “good time”, they reconsidered and told the US commander, Eisenhower, that the Sixth was OK.   Fortunately for us, the German weather wizards still thought the Sixth was no good.  Weather patterns generally move from west to east, meaning whatever weather northern France would have would be coming from the west.  With the US and Canada on the Allied side, the Allies had weather stations further west than the Germans and thus more accurate information on what would be coming.  Rommel took off on vacation because no Allied invasion was expected at that particular time - due to the Germans' less accurate information.  

Allies.  Supreme Allied Commander, General Dwight David “Ike” Eisenhower, in charge of (quoting Mitcham), 45 full-strength divisions, all of which were armored, mechanized, airborne or mobile; 17,000 aircraft against the Germans’ 160 (“Luftwaffe?  What Luftwaffe?” – in fact, all but two of the 160 had been transferred to Metz, well out of range of Normandy), and overwhelming naval superiority, as the German Navy decided that the weather was too rough to invade and stayed in port.  The Allies had the aforementioned superior intelligence and a unified chain of command.  The odds were stacked heavily against the Germans.

Germans.   The commander of the Western Front forces was Field Marshall Gerd von Rundstedt, a seriously old-school guy who didn’t understand modern warfare.  Somewhat under him was Field Marshall Erwin Rommel, the Germans’ best commander.   Unlike Rundstedt, Rommel did understand mobile warfare – he’d spent two years dancing across the deserts of North Africa (including Benghazi) somehow competitive with the British Eighth Army with just two panzer divisions – AND he also understood Allied mobile warfare strategy.   Plus he understood that unlike the Russians, who thought planes were nice inventions but no substitute for a tidal wave of fresh meat, in the form of masses of peasants and workers equipped with PPSH submachine guns, riding T34s, the Allies were deadly in the art of fighter-bombers and fully understood how to use their massive air superiority.  Why kill Private Ryan, who might grow up to invent a better light bulb, when you can send a “Jabo” (German slang for fighter-bomber) to get the job done quicker?

            The Germans’ 58 combat divisions were spread out across France because they didn’t know where the invasion would occur.  Many divisions were second tier or first tier understrength recuperating from battles against Ivan.  Logistics were a nightmare because many of these divisions were equipped with a mishmash of mutually incompatible captured and obsolete equipment.  Tanks were short of spare parts and fuel, and France had no Autobahn, meaning beautiful, tree-lined two lane roads everywhere with no bypasses around villages, towns, or cities.  Transport was slow and generally had to take place at night to avoid the ever-present threat of Allied fighter-bombers, and the rails were subject to sabotage by the Resistance or poor service by the SNCF. 

            Nevertheless, the Germans did manage to get the Second SS (Das Reich) and Twelfth SS (Hitlerjugend) Panzer Divisions to Normandy.  In early July, while Cherbourg had been taken (late June – although due to German sabotage, it wasn’t usable until a month later), Caen was still in German hands, holding off the Brits and Canadians and preventing a breakthrough.   

June 6.   The day in question.   Resistance was fairly light on Gold, Sword, and Juno beaches which were taken by British and Canadian forces facing the 716 Division.  German resistance was stiffest on Omaha Beach, where a veteran Wehrmacht unit, the 352 Infantry Division, had been transferred without Allied knowledge, and the preparatory barrage of bombing fell inland a few miles and completely avoided the Germans: thus the US First Infantry Division faced an intact enemy division it had no idea to expect.  Of 48 Sherman tanks devoted to the beach, 32 were landed too far out and sunk immediately, and 8 were destroyed by anti-tank fire.

            The tide worked both ways.  Rommel had assumed the Allies would land at high tide, to minimize the amount of beach the soldiers would have to cover under fire.  His obstacles were designed to destroy landing craft at high tide, but would be useless at low tide.  The low tide landing, as the Allies did it, avoided the beach obstacles but left the soldiers more vulnerable to machine gun fire for another 300 feet of exposed beach. 

            It was naval gunfire that took out the German guns, plus the 352 began running out of ammunition and could not be resupplied (without ammo trucks being attacked by Allied fighter-bombers); this allowed the soldiers to finally cross the beach. Thus despite heavy casualties, US forces were able to establish a beachhead by the end of the day – though they still had no heavy weapons and the beach was not completely secure, alone of the 5 beaches, as by nightfall the 352 was still a going concern.  

            The British and Canadians on Sword, Juno and Gold found themselves up against the 716 Division.  Part of the division were former Russian POWs who simply ran away (which the Germans predicted would happen: “we are asking rather a lot if we expect Russians to fight in France for Germany against Americans.”)  The Germans of the 716, veterans of the Eastern Front, would hang back and hide, then attack the flanks and rears of the British and Canadian forces.  Thus while the beaches themselves were taken fairly easily, German resistance stiffened substantially inland.  British General Montgomery, who had been counting on a 32 mile penetration by June 7, had advanced well short of that – and would not take Caen until weeks later.

            After that, the Allies put together their fancy, clever, artificial harbor and began moving more troops, tanks, and supplies ashore, though a big storm screwed this up somewhat on June 19.  Initial attempts to break out were hindered by the peculiar “hedgerow” country of Normandy, a terrain which favored the defense, particularly if the defenders were crafty, veteran SS tankers in Tigers and Panthers, tanks which outmatched the Shermans and Churchills the Allies were using. 

Aftermath.   By the end of July, however, the Allied onslaught – particularly a viciously nasty carpet bombing of the German forces – blew through the German lines and the breakthrough occurred.  Moreover, at the same time, Stalin had launched another offensive in the East, which likewise broke through Army Group Center and led the way into Poland.   Factor in also July 20, 1944, when Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg’s assassination attempt on Hitler failed (as seen in the movie “Valkyrie”), but succeeded at shaking up not only the Fuhrer but also the German high command.  Rommel was implicated in the plot and by October 1944 forced to commit suicide.   

            Paris was liberated in August 1944, Belgium entered in December, the Battle of the Bulge in late December, but by January 1945 the game was back on.  The Rhine was crossed in March 1945.  Back east, Auschwitz (in western Poland) was liberated in January 1945, and by April 1945 the Russians were in Berlin.

As you might imagine, there have been movies made, and the top two are the following:

The Longest Day (1962).  Up until “Saving Private Ryan”, this was the definitive version.  In black & white, and an all-star cast (John Wayne, Sean Connery, Robert Mitchum, Henry Fonda, Richard Burton, etc.), even featuring considerable screen time of the German perspective.  It’s almost 3 hours long, but it covers the bases fairly well.  It’s not nearly as high octane intense as “Saving Private Ryan”, but it’s a good start.  It was nominated for 5 Oscars and won 2.

Saving Private Ryan (1998).  Now the gold standard, although in terms of scope “The Longest Day” still covers more of the battle:  this film gives us Captain Miller (Tom Hanks) and his squad’s experience on Omaha Beach on the first day, rapidly followed by their Quest to Seek Private Ryan, a 101 Airborne trooper who is the last of his 5 brothers left alive.  If you combine this with “Band of Brothers”, which tracks a company of the 101 Airborne from training in England all the way to the end of the war in Berchtesgaden in 1945, you’ll have more of the airborne element of D-Day, but even there you’re missing the British experience which “Longest Day” still gives you. [If I were British or Canadian I’d be pissed that “SPR” implies that the Yanks did all the hard work in Normandy.]  Better to say that “SPR” complements “LD” rather than replaces it.  ** Note that the characters in “Saving Private Ryan” are fictitious, while those in “Band of Brothers” are based on real veterans. 

            I’ve never been in combat, much less participated on Omaha Beach decades before I was born.  But my impression is that this movie captures more of the intense insanity and chaos of combat, more so than “The Longest Day”, where it seemed like the Germans were just a minor obstacle to overcome.  Spielberg makes you wonder how the hell ANYONE survived Omaha Beach, much less took it.  Even after having seen the movie several times already and know who will live and who will die, the combat sequences still make my heart pound faster.  If “Shakespeare In Love” had come out any other year, this movie would have completely blitzed the Oscars in 1999 – and won the Best Picture award.   

June 4, 1984.  I have been to Normandy, in fact, on the 40^th Anniversary of D-Day.   Unfortunately, our visit to the beach area did not give us access to any of the actual beaches or any of the concrete fortifications or bunkers which are still there.  What we experienced was a huge crowd of French and US civilians and lots of Allied veterans, PLUS a big speech by US President Ronald Reagan (too far away to actually see, and well too far away to meet) which we heard from the big crowd.   While it was a fun day trip, I was disappointed that what we actually got was just a big speech.

A Million Ways To Laugh In The West

As I noted in my blog on “The Long Riders”, I’m not much of a fan of westerns.   However, here are a pair of western comedies – a genre so sparse I can identify both films which qualify as such.   I don’t think of “Back to the Future Part III” as a comedy.

A Million Ways to Die in the West (2014). This is Seth MacFarlane’s take on westerns, appropriately set in the right time (1882) and place (somewhere out west – Wyoming?  Utah?).  

Albert (MacFarlane) is a mild-mannered sheep herder whose girlfriend Louise (Amanda Seyfried) dumps him because he’s a bit too mild-mannered.  She immediately hooks up with the local mustache merchant, Foy (Neil Patrick Harris).   Fortunately for Albert, a mysterious woman, Anna (Charlize Theron) takes it upon herself to coach Albert in gunfighting so he’ll have a ghost of a chance of surviving a duel with Foy to occur in a week.   Meanwhile, equally mild-mannered Edward (Giovanni Ribisi) counts the days until his fiancé Ruth (Sarah Silverman) marries him and then shifts her carnal attention to him instead of the incessant array of customers – she’s a whore.  Aside from Albert, he's about the only one in town not romping in bed with her.

Naturally there’s a showdown by the end of the film, and along the way we get lots of laughs.   Perhaps the John Wayne fans of my dad’s generation might not be laughing too hard, but my peers and younger will probably appreciate MacFarlane’s humor.

Incidentally, the title comes from an ongoing diatribe Albert has about the state of affairs in the Wild West in 1882.  Apparently MacFarlane is upset that so many contemporary Americans wax poetic about this period of American history, and damn it, MacFarlane is going to set the record straight!    It was a dangerous, nasty time!  A FOX animator/humorist with zero gun skills would last…. 5 seconds?  Maybe less….in such an environment.  Poor baby.  The proper solution for Albert – MacFarlane’s 1882 equivalent - would have been to sell his farm and move to San Francisco, New York or Chicago, somewhere he could survive on his humor skill set without worrying about gun fights.

Blazing Saddles (1974).  Here’s the only other Western comedy I know of, and it’s fairly famous - and it's even celebrating its fortieth anniversary.

Out in the west, the railroad is coming to a small town where everyone’s name is Johnson.   The Attorney General Hedley – NOT Hedy – Lamarr (Harvey Korman – missing his surgically attached sidekick Tim Conway) plots to clear the locals out of town so he can snatch it up and make a profit.  He sends a black man, Bart (Cleavon Little) to the town as their sheriff, knowing the locals won’t accept a man of that race in that position.  Bart’s assisted by the fastest shot in the West, the “Waco Kid”, Jim (Gene Wilder).   Eventually Bart wins the townspeople’s affection and they cook up a plot to defeat Lamarr and his army of malcontents – quite literally, as it includes a squad of WWII German soldiers. 

Although the n-word is heavily abused here, it’s really meant to ridicule racism.   Farting cowboys?  Got it.  “Mongo just a pawn in the game of life”?  Yes.   Sultry German songstress, Lili Von Shtupp (Madeline Kahn)?  Yep.  And because Mel Brooks apparently couldn’t figure out how to end the film, he broke down the fourth wall that Frank Underwood talks through and pushed the whole shebang out of the filming lot and into downtown Los Angeles.   Comic genius?  Maybe not.  But certainly entertaining.  And he beat “Holy Grail” by a year in the “absurd ending” department.