Warbird Information Exchange

OK...I'll agree that BoB is a great piece...BUT...From our tours of the D-Day beaches and the tour of the route of Easy Co., Mr. Hanks and Mr. Spielberg took a few liberties with the facts. Many of the scenes depicted in the series never happened that way. (Jiggers has BTDT and he'll probably agree with me.)
Don't know how many of you have done those tours and I'm not trying to set myself up as an expert so don't everyone jump on me at once.
We've done the tours twice and gotten the same story both times from two different guides.

Sorry to hear about "Shifty". Talked to him for a couple of minutes at last years MAAM WWII weekend.

Mudge the fact finder

OK... but keep it civil

ps. did you know that Tom Hanks bought one of the summer houses at Omaha Beach?

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Land of the free because of the brave

Jiggers, how is Major Winters doing?

I've been to Normandy 3 times and Bastogne once, walked through the woods near Foy at dawn, amazing to think of what happened at those places.




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http://www.biplanerides1.com/

The Major was 91 last January and battling Parkinsons disease. He is still sharp as a tack and giving it his best every day.

Ashamed to say I never watched Band of Brothers....

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Cheers

Daz

I agree, when you've watched it a few times as I have, some of the errors get pretty annoying. But it's still brilliant viewing.

A good friend here in Melb worked on the sets of the Pacific one coming out soon and said the effort, detail and scale is even more phenominal. I can't wait for it really!

Here is a link that will give the skinny on the mistakes in BOB.

http://www.101airborneww2.com/bandofbrothers.html

HBO is in the entertainment business and historical aacuracy took a back seat to financial considerations in many things.

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I highly recommend to read the book, Beyond the Band of Brothers by Dick Winters and Col Cole Kingseed . It gets more in-depth into Major Winters and also "fixes" some of the mistakes in BOB. Also there was a story of a mock battle where captain Sobel was one of the "wounded" soldiers. While he was on the strecher, someone actually put him "out". While he was out, someone put a small incision with stitches. As to say, he was non to pleased. Very good reading however.

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Some people are like slinkys, good for nothing but bring a smile to your face when pushed down stairs.

I recommend also ,

Brothers in Battle by Wild Bill Guarnere & Babe Heffron

Biggest Brother , By Larry Alexander

and 3 otehrs who 's exact names and Authors escape me this morning.

Marcus Botherton's "Those who Remain" and his work on Buck Compton.

And, Don Malarkey's book .

Unfortunately, like many critiques, the author, in only the critiques of the first 2 episodes, had several items that he claimed to be "easily fixed" that unfortunately aren't.

The first was his comment about parapacks. I'm sure all of us here will agree that there are two things that make it difficult to quickly modify a real aircraft to have them - insurance and regulatory agencies. The aircraft in the series shown with parapacks installed already had them, meaning they'd already gone through the paperwork and inspections. I doubt in the timeframe allowed for production that they could have done the same for the other aircraft. In addition, I don't know that all of the owners of the aircraft would have been "game" for it. And as CGI was very sparsely used in the series, adding parapacks would have added unnecessary cost and time to the post-production period.

The second was his comment about the lack of hearing or seeing the 8 and 14-inch shells exploding. There's two things I can think of off the top of my head that would be problematic with this. First being - how does one know what such an explosion sounds like? There's not a lot of high quality audio of such explosions available as neither caliber has been used since the 1960s. Second, if they wished to replicate it with an effect, they would have had a lot of serious additional permitting and preparation to do because of the massive size of such an explosion and the resulting minor earthquake it'd cause. It's one thing to say that they're "inexpensive" to fix, but sometimes the logistical time required to get it done isn't that small.

I just watched this series for the fourth time when I picked up the tin at Target last week. I must agree that it gets better each and every time. And while there might be some flaws, they are minor and show me a flawless war movie anyway, there aren't any. It is a great series and I highly recomend it to anyone interested in World War II or military topics.

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Scott Rose
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>>The second was his comment about the lack of hearing or seeing the 8 and 14-inch shells exploding. There's two things I can think of off the top of my head that would be problematic with this. First being - how does one know what such an explosion sounds like? There's not a lot of high quality audio of such explosions available as neither caliber has been used since the 1960s. <<

Wouldn't there be some higher class audio of 16" guns from the Iowas dating only to the early 1990's. As for 8" doesn't the Army still have some long range howitzers of 8" caliber? Frankly I was happy that they didn't use lots of gasoline to make thier artillery explosions.

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"I can't understand it, I cut it twice and it's still too short!" Robert F. Dupre' 1923-2010 Go With God.

Yeah...they do tend to overuse the napthalene in H'wood.

Mudge the critic

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Land of the free because of the brave

The largest rifle in the Army inventory is the 155mm Paladin SPH and it's trailer mounted cousins. That's a roughly 6" caliber.

As for the 16" vs 14", the lower quality recordings I've heard (from WWII and incidentally of the Iowa and Texas respectively) sound quite different. I think a lot of it has to do with the much larger standard powder load per pound of projectile that was possible with the 16" gun.

I think that in the end, had they done it the way they wanted to (i.e. with as little CGI and SFX as possible), they would have needed to actually create the explosion on set, something not really feasible.

IMHO, there are many reasons why BoB is so good and rewarding to watch multiple times.
Obviously it is a terrific true story. However, unlike many movie adaptations of historical events, BoB actually tells the many stories in a motion picture way, as opposed to having actors "relate" and "act" the events. BoB never forgot to tell the story, not merely shooting history.
The best example is the episode where they attack Foy. (excuse my faulty memory) In the heat of battle an officer is replaced. At the end of the episode, the Sgt. says to the Lt. something like "the men now have a leader" and the Lt. says "They had one all along". The Sgt. says "Who?". The Lt. says "you". That's when you realize the story being told in that episode was as much about the Sgt. as the events. They did this for every episode. That is why its compelling.
The casting of the actors is first rate and the directing/acting equally so. By every measure, this is a fine example of motion picture story-telling...the best way to educate is to engage the mind and the emotions.
Sorry for the bit of a ramble, but lets get w-a-y past the relatively truly minor inaccuracies and applaud its successful treatment of the truth in every sense of that word.

The first official look at the follow-on series "The Pacific' has now been released.

http://www.pacificfans.com/trailer.mov