Saving Private Ryan

What have they done to the driver's slit?

Best regards/ Daniel

 

If the T-34s would have been like that I think that the Germans would have been out from Russia by 1942...

 

http://www.sproe.com/t-tigertank.htm

The driver´s viewport looks totally disgusting in that shot:

"..the driver's viewport is shown as having been replaced with a flat, unconvincing piece of material with what looks to be the driver's port painted on! This can only be seen for a few frames , and is more than likely the result of whatever work was done to rig the tank for an explosion."

Now this version looks MUCH better!!

 

Well. I wanted to post that picture too... But who cares! It looks like a Tiger in some 90%!!!

 

Yeah, I mean where the hell are they going to get the real thing? You've gotta give them a LITTLE slack - it's better than just using shermans like they did in the 60s so often. Then again, how hard would it be to jack up that port so it did look real? Regardless, I think it's a decent attempt.

 

Much better than the thing I saw the other day in the good dramatic film "Tea with Mussolini": A Sherman tank with a long Panzer Iv gun with a German black cross!!!! Voilà! They had a German tank!!! Or maybe it was captured?

 

The material over the "Tigers" view port--looks like a piece of plywood.

"F"--if you think that "German tank" looked bad--look at all the long-barrelled Shermans that were used in the excellent movie: The Big Red One." Several "German Tanks" were Shermans painted to look like tanks from the Afrika Korps. Still though, The Big Red One, is an excellent movie.

Lee Marvin as The Old Sergeant was pretty convincing.

I still cant get over Bob Newhart being in the excellent war movie: "Hell Is For Heroes." But he did OK in it as the clerk/typist non-soldier.

 

And what about the tanks of "Patton", they didn't seem pretty German to me...

 

I couldn't stand those shermans in the big red one. I hated that movie. As for
SPR I thought it wasa badass how they had the marders in it.

 

Tiger accurate or not, Waffen SS 2nd Division 'Das Reich' were of never been so close to Normandy by then. But I'm not sure on where the last "battle" is fought or at what time.

I am sure that the Das Reich's Tiger Company was disbanded after Kursk, and at Normandy they stuck to Panzer mark Vs, IVs and T-34s. No Tigers.

Furthermore, about 60% of Das Reich during Normandy were 17-18 year old untrained boys. Yet their all appear to be tall, strong men. Oh, and would you believe it, their crap too, and the americans are the poor, outnumbered but better fighting force.

I severely doubt the SS would of walked into a trap like that- Damn, I could go on all day.

 

Das Reich was completely outfitted with new Pz IV H and J's as well as the latest variants of the Panther before the Normandy invasion. The Tiger Kompanie was the basis for the outstanding SS Schwere Panzer Abteilung 102 which knocked out over 200 British tanks during the Normandie battles.......

~E

 

Don't think that the SS was ever as supremely effective, compared with regulars, as the mainstream would like to think. Although their bravado, esprit-de-corps, and racial doctrine helped birth a more motivated soldier, a lot of them, officers included, were not of the same tactical ideology as many of their Werhmacht counter-parts (the belief that young aryan farm boys would work to the betterment of German conquest than aristocratic non-aryan military career-men was certainly a farce). By this time in the war, a lot of their better leadership had been killed or wounded which, in my opinion, may have been the reason for their (2nd SS)comitting atrocities in France while on the march north. Furthermore, there is no logical reason to be so dogmatic in thinking that they would not take the bait in the bottle-neck, in SPR.

 

not sure if I agree with your thoughts. Das Reich was a hard hitting unit during Normandie. the unit had 26 Panthers and 50 Pz IV's by July 44. The biggest problem for Das Reich and the other W-SS division against the US ground forces was the 9th AF flying jabo missions destroying much of the 17th SS MT and stug's and also Das Reich feeling the overwhelming pressure of the US AF's might.
Das Reich was to go on and destroy over 200 Allied tanks for a loss of 75 and another 30 at Falaise due to fuel shortage and mechanical breakdowns.

~E

 

There are a lot of studies that pin the atrocities comitted by the SS on the recklesness of its leadership that I tend to agree with.

While it's true, to some extent anyway, that a tank is only as good as its crew, I believe that the Panzerkampfwagens that Germany posessed far outperformed their allied foes. Also, the inexperienced tankers of the U.S., Bitish, and French forces were at a loss when they came up against the battle proven experience of the few German vets that had been involved in the fighting since '39.
Notwithstanding the continuous attacks by allied fighter-bombers, I believe that these two factors alone played out well in helping the Germans to perpetuate an upper-hand against the allies however short-lived it was.
BUT- I also believe that if pitted equally against one another, the tenacity with which the allied soldier fought with regards to what he believed he was fighting for far outweighed the beliefs for which the German was dying.