A Film Review - Fury

I went to see Fury today and I can highly recommend it, especially for the lovers of tanks and World War II movies.  My personal MOS when I attended the Fort Knox School for Boys was Armored Scout Observer, though being National Guard oh those many years ago, I never served in that role in anger.  I enjoyed the film very much and it held my interest so well that I hardly noticed the film’s over two hour length. 

It is a fantastic thing to watch a movie about World War II in which I am not asked to pretend that an M-48 Patton tank is a German Tiger tank or that an M-24 Chaffee is a Sherman.  The last movies that come to mind to do that were “A Bridge Too Far” and before that “Kelly’s Heroes” (courtesy of the Yugoslav army and Tiger mock ups built out of Soviet MT-LBs) or some of the various Soviet era movies about their “Great Patriotic War.”  Of course, Soviet filmmakers had an advantage because the Red Army never threw away any of their T-34s, etc (they gave away a lot of them and one could get nit-picky about what year different model T-34s entered service, but hey they were still T-34s!).

The depiction of the weaknesses and strengths of the Sherman tank and the tactics that had to be used to overcome or take advantage of those are also reasonably well portrayed (as are the tricks and habits of living and fighting in the same place – your tank).  This was especially true of the battle by 4 Shermans against a lone Tiger tank firing from ambush.  Obviously, it helps when you are able to draw upon the resources of The Tank Museum at Bovington in the UK which has the only running model of the Tiger tank in the world plus the staff who know how to fight those two model tanks against each other.  (The Tank Museum at Bovington ranks as one of the top armored fighting vehicle museums in the world.  Two others are the Central Museum of Armored Fighting Vehicles at Kubinka, Russia and the Tank Museum at Saumur, France.  Much of the collection at the Patton Museum at Fort Knox, Kentucky has been moved to Fort Benning, Georgia and is not yet on display there.  I've had the happy opportunity to visit all of these museums personally, though there are others still on my bucket list.)

The story told in the movie takes place in April, 1945 though perhaps they don’t make that sufficiently clear, especially how every combat arms soldier in the American (and British) armies by that time is  desperately trying to not be the war’s last casualty.  The characterizations are all pretty well presented within the world view framed by the film though a couple of moments might be considered rather overdrawn and exaggerated, especially by those accustomed to the more classic Hollywood portrayals of American GIs.   Just about every incident depicted in the film can probably be demonstrated to have actually happened during the war – but the filmmakers exercise fully their capability to concentrate them all within a roughly two hour film rather than burden the viewer with the long hours and even days of military routine and boredom that were also a part of the reality of World War II.  The film also makes every effort to expose the viewer to the mud, blood, gore, and noise of the war, though the movie cannot share any of the myriad smells of war and a battlefield nor the blinding feel of the smoke from fires and explosions.

SPOILER ALERT:  The climactic battle of the movie brings to mind a Soviet tankisti epigram learned from the film “The Beast” (aka “The Beast of War”) about a Soviet tank crew (including a World War II veteran) fighting in Afghanistan, “Out of commission, become a pillbox. Out of ammo, become a bunker. Out of time, become heroes.”  With complete recognition that “it’s only a movie” I would suggest that it also shows why a cannon-armed armored vehicle will remain an important battlefield weapon for some time to come as five men in a tank engage several hundred lightly armed infantry supported by man-portable anti-tank rockets, crew-served weapons, and thin skinned vehicles.  (Personally, I might have dismounted the two turret mounted machine guns and positioned them to either flank of the tank and the road it sat on – but that’s perhaps just me and we never learn whether or not they have the mounts to use.)  

The Universal Soldier – the mud-rain-frost-and-wind boys of the infantry

Having recently written a blog about books on tanks and armored vehicles, my more recent readings have focused on the infantry, so I will now present several postings on books on the subject. (And don’t worry tread heads and tankisti, I will return to the subject of tanks for I am also fond of the great metal monsters myself.)

Ultimately, every individual who goes to war is an infantryman (or infantrywoman where applicable and accepted) for the individual soldier and his personal weapon is the fundamental building block of the military. The lot of an infantry soldier of any army of any period of history is recognizable to any of his counterparts, comrades, or foes who are also infantry. Some years ago, a colleague shared a text that illustrates this point as it describes the lot of an Egyptian infantryman (it was reportedly used as a practice text for Egyptian scribes learning their art and perfecting their craft):

Come, [let me tell] you the woes of the soldier, and how many are his superiors: the general, the troop-commander, the officer who leads, the standard-bearer, the lieutenant, the scribe, the commander of fifty, and the garrison-captain. They go in and out in the halls of the palace, saying: "Get laborers!" He is awakened at any hour. One is after him as [after] a donkey. He toils until the Aten sets in his darkness of night. He is hungry, his belly hurts; he is dead while yet alive. When he receives the grain-ration, having been released from duty, it is not good for grinding.

He is called up for Syria. He may not rest. There are no clothes, no sandals. The weapons of war are assembled at the fortress of Sile. His march is uphill through mountains. He drinks water every third day; it is smelly and tastes of salt. His body is ravaged by illness. The enemy comes, surrounds him with missiles, and life recedes from him. He is told: "Quick, forward, valiant soldier! Win for yourself a good name!" He does not know what he is about. His body is weak, his legs fail him.

When victory is won, the captives are handed over to his majesty, to be taken to Egypt. The foreign woman faints on the march; she hangs herself [on] the soldier's neck. His knapsack drops, another grabs it while he is burdened with the woman. His wife and children are in their village; he dies and does not reach it. If he comes out alive, he is worn out from marching.
Be he at large, be he detained, the soldier suffers. If he leaps and joins the deserters, all his people are imprisoned. He dies on the edge of the desert, and there is none to perpetuate his name. He suffers in death as in life. A big sack is brought for him; he does not know his resting place.

The American GIs, whom Ernie Pyle referred to as “the mud-rain-frost-and-wind boys,” would recognize themselves and their lot in the lament of this ancient predecessor. Ernie was with and reported on the GIs in North Africa, Italy, and France and then moved on to report on the war in the Pacific. He was killed on April 18, 1945 by a Japanese machine gun on the small island of Ie Shima near Okinawa. Perhaps the most indicative comment on how well Ernie Pyle told the story of the American infantryman of World War II came from the soldiers themselves for they posted a sign board on Ie Shima bearing the following words: “At this spot, the 77th Infantry Division lost a Buddy, Ernie Pyle, 18 April 1945.”

You can read what Ernie Pyle wrote about the American soldier in the two published collections of his wartime columns. Since these were meant for newspaper syndication, Ernie did clean things up a little bit for the home front audience but you can still get a sense of what it was like from his writing and I highly recommend them.

This presents Ernie’s columns from the North African campaign, Algeria to Tunisia.

Here is Your War by Ernie Pyle, Consolidated Book Publishers, Chicago, 1944 © 1943, Henry Holt and Company, Inc., New York

The second volume presents Ernie’s columns from Sicily (June-September, 1943), Italy (December, 1943-April, 1944), and France (June-September, 1944) including a column actually written while he was in the Pacific as the war in Europe ended but that was not published. It was found when he was killed and not printed because its tone was considered too depressing at the time.

Brave Men, by Ernie Pyle, Bison Books Edition, University of Nebraska Press, © 2001, University of Nebraska Press (originally published 1944, Henry Holt and Company, Inc., New York)

There are other memoirs relating experiences of GIs that should be easy to track down. However, one of the best and now a classic standard work for those studying the WWII GI was written by an infantry officer:

Company Commander, Charles B. MacDonald, Ballantine Books, New York, © 1947 Charles B. MacDonald.

In September, 1944, at the age of 22, the author took command of Company I, an infantry company of the 23rd Infantry Regiment, 2nd Infantry Division. He was wounded in January, 1945 and after two months convalescence was placed in command of a different infantry company, which he led until the end of the war in Europe. He received the Silver Star and the Purple Heart. His memoirs describing this experience were first published in 1947 but have remained available ever since. This book is widely considered a classic text for the study of command in the 20th Century and especially the American Army of the Second World War. After the war, MacDonald would rise to become Deputy Chief Historian at the Army Center for Military History at his retirement in 1979. Highly recommended.

Roll Me Over, An Infantryman’s World War II, by Raymond Gantter, Ivy Books, New York, © 1997 The Estate of Raymond Gantter.

Ray Gantter was a 30 year old draftee, after turning down his third draft deferment. As a result, he his jobs playing jazz piano and working as a program manager for a Syracuse New York radio station to join the army as a private, becoming an acting squad leader, and then acting buck sergeant, serving with the 1st Infantry Division where he earned the Silver Star and a battlefield commission. This book is based upon the wartime journal he kept from September 1944 to the end of the war and which he turned into a book manuscript in June 1949. The author’s wartime experiences covered northern France, Belgium, the Bulge, Germany, and finally Czechoslovakia. He also intersperses his descriptions of combat with discussions of the soldier’s daily life and its more mundane and less dramatic aspects. Recommended.

Night Drop, The American Airborne Invasion of Normandy, S.L.A. Marshall, © 1962 S.L.A. Marshall, published in 1962 by The Battery Press, Inc, Nashville, and in 1984 by Jove/The Berkeley Press, New York.

This work differs from the others discussed because it is neither a memoir nor autobiographical, and covers only one single combat operation rather than a longer period of the war. Noted military historian S.L.A. Marshall, Brigadier General, USAR, (ret.), based this book on the after action reports and his interviews with participants in the operation to tell the story of the American Airborne (parachute and glider) assaults in Normandy. Critics and scholars have found fault with some of Marshall’s work and you can find a great deal of material on that debate elsewhere on the internet and in the academic journals. Nevertheless, this is still a harrowing account of the confusion, chaos, courage, and desperation that surrounded the American paratroopers and glider troops in the D-Day operation. Recommended, with a caveat that Marshall’s methods as used in researching for this work have been challenged in connection with other books by him.