I'd like to see a thread listing the most realistic war movies. Ones that capture what it's really like to be in a battle. I wonder if there are any Freepers who've been in particularly nasty battles.
Depends on how you define *battles*. I'm very happy to have missed out on massed troop movement actions of WWII like mass parachute drops and beachhead landings, but I've been involved in a couple of small unit actions that were not all that small, and a few combined forces operations involving infantry, a 5-tank platoon, MPs and various support troops.
Realistic? Everybody has different reactions and different viewpoints to the things that get to them in particular. But in general:
Use of a handgun when all about you have something better: see A Bridge Too Far or The Devil's Brigade when they take the hilltop German artillery positions.
Tank fight: Kelly's Heroes, with 3 Sherman tanks coming out of a railroad tunnel. And some of the interior scenes in Tobruk with George Peppard and Rock Hudson weren't too far off, either.
Vietnam: the pic that struck me as being the most realistic of those I've seen in my little time and place there was The Odd Angry Shot, actually about the Australians operating about as far south of Saigon as we were north. What I wish it had been more like: Go tell the Spartans, with Burt Lancaster. Closest they've ever come to getting the look and *feel* of Vietnam right IMHO: Full Metal Jacket [though that show was about Marines.
About the closest 5 minutes worth of *what it's like*: the WWII Movie Anzio with Robert Mitchum as an Ernie Pyle-like war correspondent. Their slight difficulty in dealing with a sniper was about right, though Farewell to the King had a reasonably accurate portrayal of what it's like when an ambush goes as it should be planned. So too did Merill's Marauders. From the other point of view, defense against the other people assaulting, The Eagle Has Landed has it's moments.
And though I've never tried their sort of war, Das Boot reminded me well enough of some hard times in tanks. I don't think they'd care to try our way of doing that sort of thing any more than I'd have cared for theirs.
Operation Dumbo Drop was far from what my own glimpses at war were like, though that's another where the scenery and look of the place was reasonably well done [need to crank the heat in the theater up to 100º+ and dump a bunch of garbage in the aisles, though!] and had some parachuting scenes that were about the best I've seen. Remind me not to hang aropund any elephants that need to take their medicine.
-archy-/-