(looks like some rather racy videos are below the story)
The book “Life and Fate” was smuggled out of the Soviet Union. Parts of the book are missing. With a story like this the film writes itself.
I’ll hand it to the Russkies, when it comes to war films, nobody does it better.
I’m impressed that they were able to find six functional T-34s. (I’m not good with the individual models...can anyone tell if they’re T-34/76s or the end-of-war T-34/85s?)
Ping
Germany never had the population that could absorb the sheer manpower losses inflicted at Stalingrad while the Soviet Union did. While we in the West can bemoan the fact that it was these two tyrannies fighting for last person standing, the war and the world would have been a completely different place without this battle.
Of course this pre-supposes different people in charge of these two nations. Herr Hitler and Comrade Stalin should go down in history as idiots fully capable of snatching defeat over and over from victory.
Still it is the unsung masses who are the heroes and victims of Stalingrad and Leningrad (places which no longer bear those names) who endured hardships we can barely acknowledge let alone imagine enduring ourselves. If I were to ever meet a survivor, let alone a fighting veteran, of those campaigns, I would have no difficulty in saluting him or her.
PS: What is your favorite Bolo story?
Yeah, love English Russia but the ads are definitely NSFW.
Anyhow, hope the movie is good. Russia's film industry is really coming along. I have access to a lot of Russian entertainment so hopefully I'll get to see it reasonably soon.
Oh, come on. They should do a REALLY good tank battle - KURSK!
from Wikipedia
The two acting main characters in Stalingrad are the Panzer-Oberst Vilshofen and Gnotke, NCO of a Punishment Company. Both men come from different backgrounds and experience the war differently. The Colonel is a convinced soldier who obeys orders and cares for his men. He fights with a sense of duty, but loses confidence in the German military leadership as he senses that he and his men are being sacrificed to a lost cause. NCO Gnotke's work is to collect the dead, or their dismembered parts, from the battlefield. He loses his humanity as he works under constant fire and is exposed to unrelenting horror month after month during the war. The reader learns how he warms up his body on freshly fallen soldiers. These chapters resemble true horror-stories.
Plivier's book Stalingrad has been regarded as the most important work of literature to emerge from the eastern front during World War II. Its pitiless descriptions of battle and the failures of the German military leadership indicts Hitler's megalomania and illustrates the senselessness of war. He died in 1955 and is today a largely forgotten author, at least in the English-speaking world.
Here is the German movie, “Stalingrad”, which shows Stalingrad from the German perspective.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilB2ukvXXfc&feature=related