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Ive experienced the dreaded malady over the past five or six days and its not been nice but while recovering what better way to do it than to enjoy the generous helping of war films they stuff the schedules with in this season of goodwill. Yes war and Christmas seems to go together very well. Odd that, bizarre even, it all jingles in together well with peace on earth!
Ive had the Great Escape, Battle of the Bulge, Heroes of Telemark, Von Ryans Express, all standards of the christmas schedules for many a year. There are others of course but the stamina can only manage the few.
Many of these films claim to be authentic and have assorted military advisors in their listings as the credits roll. Major this or General that.
There is an interesting strand though that runs through all these films. The Germans of course are the baddies and have to be seen as such, they do considerable snarling and a lot of menacing but the real strand is this...in all or nearly all these films the ordinary german soldiers are always seen butchering prisoners in cold blood by machine gun fire from the backs of trucks. In some cases they butcher the wounded, in other cases they butcher the hapless prisoners. This is clearly seen in the authentic sounding Battle of the Bulge and in The Great Escape, but is this really true?
In the lighter Von Ryan's Express, with no real claim to authenticity, they butcher the wounded, so the malady is self propogating, and so on so forth throughout a whole series of films. But is any of this based on any truth?
In war many unfortunate and regretable incidents happen with all sides, but despite our current war torn world, it nevertheless remains hard to beleive that the Germans systematically murdered in this way many of the prisoners they took.