WW2 movies, the most/least accurate.

@Wolfshanze:

still trying to convince my kids A&A is the greatest game ever… going to have to give them another year or two and try again…

Show them the movie Midway…or, if it’s too long for them to want to see the whole thing, just fast-foward to all the scenes in Nimitz’s map room and on Yamamoto’s flagship that show ship models (admittedly fairly simple blocks roughy shaped and sized to suggest carriers, batteships and so forth) and a few airplane markers being moved around on map tables (the American one fills a whole room) while the officers on each side strategize as if they were playing a complex and deadly kind of chess game.  I credit those scenes for my own enthusiastic reaction when I subsequently discovered A&A.

@Imperious:

Well he owns Axis and Allies boxes with white paper with his name at least…

Oh come on, give the man credit… he also clearly owns a pen as well…

He also knows the best place to store a beloved game like A&A is a storage shed out in the back yard.

@KurtGodel7:

Only two pictures allowed per post, seemingly. So here are two more games.

If you were a completionist… in the 80s, there were a couple more games in the series… Fortress America (fairly well-known), the far-less known (but I do have it) Broadsides and Boarding Parties… pirate game with two snap-together sailing galleons you had face-off against each other.

@Imperious:

Why don’t you sell AA50 before too many people find out about the reprint? It was going for about $400 on ebay

The others are not worth much

I dunno… I haven’t checked E-Bay lately, but MB’s Samurai (Swords) game is out of print, and it’s rebranded (diff company) game of Samurai Swords is also out of print… to my knowledge, you just can’t get that game in any format anymore, short of second-hand sales… is it worth anything on E-Bay, or were there so many printed the 2nd hand option is flooded with them? No clue, but my guess is Samurai (Swords) might still be worth some coinage.

Oh come on, give the man credit… he also clearly owns a pen as well…

He also knows the best place to store a beloved game like A&A is a storage shed out in the back yard.

LOL, a joke right?

Samurai Swords is worth more than $50, you should sell that too.

Sell the shed while your at it.

Broadsides and Boarding Parties… pirate game with two snap-together sailing galleons you had face-off against each other.

I think this game is worth a few hundred, look on ebay.

The games are worth more than the shed you store them in.

@Imperious:

Broadsides and Boarding Parties… pirate game with two snap-together sailing galleons you had face-off against each other.

I think this game is worth a few hundred, look on ebay.

Come to think about it, my copy of Broadsides and Boarding parties should be in a box up in my attic… now (after determining what condition it is in after 30-plus years of storage), should I see if the kids like it, or sell it on E-Bay?

@Wolfshanze:

should I see if the kids like it, or sell it on E-Bay?

A third option would be the Ferengi approach: sell it to your kids.

I dunno… it’s August in Florida… I might not want to brave my attic…

@Private:

Who really captured those Enigma machines?

There were numerous instances of Enigma machines, parts and codebooks being captured by Allied forces all through and even before WW2, the first ever case being a German (Hans Thilo Schmidt, who’s brother was a General in the Enigma program) selling cyphers to French intelligence from 1931 to 1943. Before anyone says something about him being a hero against tyranny and fascism, he did it for money so he could cheat on his wife, isn’t History great?

The most notable and popularised event was HMS Bulldog capturing U-110’s machine and books without the German crew ever finding out (which was the real achievement) but there were many other courageous and disastrous occasions. In late October '42 Lieutenant Fasson and Able Seaman Colin Grazier of HMS Petard died inside U-559 after retrieved codebooks. (The seacocks having being opened by the crew when abandoning ship, who were ultimately gunned down by Petards Captain when in the water :oops:).

In truth, no one event or person was responsible for the Enigma capture, as I said, there were many events that I could go on about, but I’d be typing all day.

On that note and in response to the actual theme of this post, as enjoyable as it is, the film with historical inaccuracies that bothers me the most is The Imitation Game because it actually doesn’t do everyone involved justice, closely followed by Pearl Harbour, which I do not enjoy.

My favourite and one of the most accurate being Tora! Tora! Tora! Then probably Sink the Bismarck!

@aftertaste:

My favourite and one of the most accurate being Tora! Tora! Tora! Then probably Sink the Bismarck!

Those two films are among my favourites too.  In terms of accuracy, however, they’re in different categories.  Tora! Tora! Tora! is generally quite accurate, almost to a fault from a dramatic point of view: its quasi-documentary approach is probably appreciated by history buffs, but to the average viewer it probably comes across as slow-paced, overly long, and too stiff.  Sink the Bismarck! is based on historical events, but it’s heavily fictionalized.  About half the movie is devoted to Captain Shepperd and his WREN officer Ann Davis, two completely invented characters.  The sequences involving Lutjens and Lindemann on the German side and Tovey (who’s never named) on the British side are heavy on dramatic license, and don’t always reflect well the personalities of the actual people they portray.  And some events shown are completely invented, like the scene in which a Norwegian resistance agent is machine-gunned by the Germans while he’s tapping out a crucial wireless message to the British Admiralty.  (He heroically keeps tapping on his wireless key after being sprayed with bullets, and has be silenced with a second burst of weapons fire.)

CWO Marc,

You are correct, Sink the Bismarck is not accurate by any stretch and re-reading my previous post I can see that I made it appear that I though it is.

What I should have said is the first bit about Tora! Tora! Tora! Then that my favourite not accurate WW2 film is STB.

Apologises for the mistake and thanks for pointing it out.

“Sink the Bismark” is on Youtube for free.  It’s said that some of the dialogue is accurate (I think the wiki says that) and its a fun movie.

“First Light”, the BBC production based on Geoffrey Wellum’s book, is available for free viewing on Vimeo, and it’s very accurate, Wellum endorsed.  Unless you want to complain about the long shots of him flying in the rain.

If you haven’t seen it and you like De Haviland Mosquitoes, “633 Squadron” is also free on Youtube.  Edit to add: I wanted to watch 633 Squadron again, and it’s no longer free.

Saints and Soldiers is really good equipment-wise, the movie itself is mediocre. It’s on Amazon prime instant video. It’s set in the opening days of the battle of the bulge. The only thing I noticed is that the Germans who shoot 70-plus American POW’s at Malmedy are regular Wehrmacht and not SS, but whatever.