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Brilliant scene in a terrible film

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    #26
    Brilliant scene in a terrible film

    Nitpicks: there were no US Marines in Europe (in Saving Private Ryan they're just regular Army), and the Australians were fairly heavily involved in the Pacific (although not nearly to the same extend as the US).
    Really? I could have sworn they were supposed to have been marines. What film am I thinking of?

    I know the Australians were involved, but there weren't as many of them.

    Pretty much the entire planet was engulfed in war. It's really hard to contemplate and I wouldn't believe it was possible if it weren't true.

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      #27
      Brilliant scene in a terrible film

      Can't argue with you on that at all. The terrible magnitude of it kind of puts any nitpicking to shame.

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        #28
        Brilliant scene in a terrible film

        Crusoe wrote:
        Can't argue with you on that at all. The terrible magnitude of it kind of puts any nitpicking to shame.
        What is also remarkable to me is that it happened to people within my own family, and that my parents remember it as very young children. That always makes it leap forward out of settled, perhaps safely remote images and historical study.

        A small example; my mother's uncle was on board a train that stopped late afternoon on the High Level bridge in Newcastle, and he and the other passengers watched a lone German bomber flying up the Tyne and over the train, where they sat as a pretty easy target. We found recently a book detailing all German actions over Northumberland and there was the exact record of this same incident.

        All right, it's not like he was first man on the Normandy beaches but that there is a direct connection between documented history and family anecdote puts the hairs up on the back of my neck. They lived through this cataclysm which seems so extraordinarily unimaginable compared to Europe as it is now.

        Also, from other reading I've done, that whole idea of the What We're Fighting For ethos and especially the idea of the Grand Strategy of war was soemthing that was by and large absent from the lives of ordinary soldiers.

        A good sense of this can be got from Keith Douglas' memoir Alamein to Zem Zem, an account of his participation in the battles in the Western Desert. No sense there of the great sweep of history, just baffled, frightened men stuck in a tank, hearing confusion on the radio, seeing and shooting at the occasional German tank and often not really knowing what was going on or where they are. It's only Hollywood that puts any sort of coherent narrative on these experiences.

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