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Every War film , a few German machine guns firing thousands
of rounds at the Allies, and then he fires a pistol and kills
the machine gun crew , with a few well placed shots !!
Did the Germans not have a Specsavers ??
of rounds at the Allies, and then he fires a pistol and kills
the machine gun crew , with a few well placed shots !!
Did the Germans not have a Specsavers ??
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Replies: 38
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The German pilots ate the same
 They swoop out the sky , pass after pass, Hundreds of bullets and cannon shells churning up a double furrow line next to the static Ally on the ground -- then the Ally fires a burst from a machine gun and hits the plane travelling at over 400mph !! which then blows up or crashes.. |
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You're not wrong, Audie L. Murphy sussed that out all on his lonesome.
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It's the helmet design. It causes an imbalance and confusion in aiming organ, that's the medical truth. You can see the same effect in the star wars films.
The stormtroopers helmets were based on the Stahlhelm, the result is in over 400 years of empire, the only thing a stormtrooper ever hit was an Ewok, and that was by accident, he was aiming at a tree. And they were not happy about it. A gang of outraged Ewoks torturing a stormtrooper to death was one of the more controversial scenes left on the cutting room floor. |
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The original German/Austrian stahlhelm had a clip-on visor that came down over the top half of the face. This had a design flaw: It could bend to the side, rendering the wearer blind because he couldn't see out of the eye holes.
The solution was to cut off the lower half of the visor to make it lighter. They didn't round off the edges so it was now useful for chopping off your own nose if it fell down when you dived for cover. This also made short-sighted men blind (just like the previous version) because without a nose, how does one wear glasses? The visor was abandoned but the holes above the ears to hold the hinges were retained for some time. There were complaints about rain getting in and making haircream run down into the eyes thus blinding the soldiers. A new design, mit nein holen, was made. It was stamped out of one piece of steel (some people said aluminium but that was a filthy Britischer lie) and did not let in rain. Neither did it let out heat, and sweat would run down the forehead into the eyes and... The holes were re-introduced but this time with small chimneys sticking out. The chimneys could hold wadding to protect the soldier from rain and also allow heat to escape. This helmet was also larger and protected more of the head, especially at the side. The soldier was now deaf. |
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The answer is very simple- the entire German Army, Air force and Navy used Hogans Heroes as training films!
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All German machine gun operators were required to wear spectacles, unfortunately there was a shortage of eyeglass lenses but a vast surplus of binocular lenses. When installed in the wire rimmed spectacles this made the target incredibly large and appear to be only yards away thus causing machine gun crews to fire into the ground.
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I thought making war films where the Germans are stupid was a thing of the past until I saw Brad Pitt in Fury. There he is on top of a Sherman, lit up like a Christmas tree by the burning building behind. In the fields around him 300 SS troops, and none of them can hit him. And of course he's killing loads of them though they're in the dark.
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German infantry v USA - generally no contest
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Flower Myth - I thought Fury was appalling. The scene with the Sherman v the Tiger was ridiculous. The Tiger would never move towards its target (giving the Sherman a chance) given it's longer range.
Then as you say the final scene which went of for ages was just stupid. 5 SS troops would have dealt with an immobilised tank quite easily. I had hoped that this long after the war, research would have been complete but no. The usual Hollywood propaganda. |
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Injera, they sell what the public wants to buy. Americans don't want to know that Shermans were known as "tommy cookers."
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If we look at the figures for the number of losses sustained by each side during WW2, we'll find the Germans must have been very good shots indeed.
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A Sherman was no match for a Tiger.
See that clip in The World at War, where the British tank commander said he caught a Tiger within range who hadn't seen him. He said we fired and scored a direct hit. Then were filled with despair as we watched the shell bounce harmlessly off the Tiger. |
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There are some good shots here:
http://www.wio.ru/galgrnd/sniper/sniper.htm List the number of kills for WW2 snipers. Unbelievable totals. No wonder Three on a Match is supposed to be bad luck. |
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Was a big thing ,when i was at school noone took 3rd light ,was a massive no no ,certain bad luck
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Was a big thing ,when i was at school noone took 3rd light ,was a massive no no ,certain bad luck
Same here back in the 60s. My mate took third light once and now he's got lung cancer. True story. On shooting straight, snipers are one thing but machine guns probably were spray and pray. In WW1 the British had to help out the Germans by walking slowly line-abreast directly towards the German guns. Same with aircraft: a lot of the time the RAF and Luftwaffe just missed each other. When Argentina invaded the Falklands, their crack commandos and the Royal Marines shot at each other for two hours. Total casualties on either side: none. German tanks were far better than the American ones but they could not make them fast enough, whereas the Shermans just rolled off the Detroit production lines. Tigers were over-engineered with few common parts. Same with aircraft: the Luftwaffe started with a huge numerical advantage over the RAF but could not build replacements quickly enough. We sorted out aircraft production at the start of the war (under Beaverbrook) but it took the Germans till two or three years in when Speer took over. Of course, as the war progressed, the Germans increasingly had the problem that we were bombing their factories, whereas America was out of reach (and the Uboats were a busted flush thanks to convoys and ultra) and the Russians moved their production east out of harm's way. |
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of course we all know films are a true depiction of how it used to be :D
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That's true detraveller. Many people in Britain grew up to believe that WW2 was mainly fought between the Americans and the British.
And the Russians against the Germans was little more than a skirmish never mind being the main event. |
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@Dr Crippen -- That's true detraveller. Many people in Britain grew up to believe that WW2 was mainly fought between the Americans and the British.
And the Russians against the Germans was little more than a skirmish never mind being the main event. Was Russia the main event? Certainly lebensraum was a key Nazi war aim, along with seizing oil and Ukrainian agriculture, and the red team racked up an awful lot of dead bodies -- it was where the WW1-style mass slaughters in battles of attrition occurred, but if Germany never invaded Russia (and Russia never attacked Germany) then it is not really clear what else changes. Britain is still an island, and a well-protected one, so the war would continue, as Churchill said: until, in God's good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the Old. |
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My old man spent the last year of the War in the Ukrainian division of the German army, and he operated an MG 34/42, so I guess he must have been a reasonable shot, or I wouldn't be here.
The MG 34/42 was air-cooled, which meant that when the barrel finally overheated you had to unscrew it and replace it with a new one. (This was the point at which Audie Murphy used to charge the pill box.) The team was provided with a fireproof glove for this, like you use to open a woodburner these days. The problem came when the glove got mislaid. You could see the result of this in the way my dad seemed impervious to burns. If a hot coal fell onto the hearth, he just used to pick it up and throw it quickly back in the fire. I guess he'd learnt the hard way just how resistant to burns you can actually be. |
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That's quite some anecdote. Incredible..
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Yes quite a story.
I'll bet sfb never answered him back. |
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He was OK. He had a sense of humour at least.
He had a friend who had been with him when they were fighting Tito's communist partisans in the Yugoslavian mountains. He used to tell the story of how my dad once got detached from the unit, presumed dead or (far worse) captured. They were preparing a wake for him when he turned up, still carrying the big MG over his shoulder. "I right bloody idiot," my dad would say. "No bullets, but still carryin' bloody great em-gehr vid me." |
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The MG42 had a ridiculous rate of fire. It's so fast you can't distinguish the individual shots like a normal gun, the di-di-di, it's like a brrrrr noise.
The allies I believe sometimes called it "Hitler's Buzz Saw". Yes it was designed to have quick change barrels, you'd have like a team of I think and one would wear an asbestor glove. Interestingly, it was such a good design it is in effect in use 70 years later by many armies, just with plastic in place of wood, called the MG 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rheinmetall_MG_3 |
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Re Shermans some were fine with Tigers. The British for example had the Sherman Firefly with a much better gun in it, that could take out Tigers. The idea was to have a number of fireflys around to back up the standard shermans that were fine for normal stuff (killing/suppressing infantry etc) and if they had to fight big tanks the firefly could do the heavy lifting. Shermans are susprisingly small imho in real life, if you ever get to see one, I can only think it's claustrophobic inside. They ran on petrol not diesel (I think the engine was a plane engine on its side) so if they were hit they tended to go up in flames. I believe they were nicknamed "Ronsons" after the lighter.
There is a bit of a myth about how great german engineering was, AFAIK the tiger was pretty unreliable. Strong armour and good gun but not so handy if it keeps breaking down! |
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Actually when you think about it the mg42 thing isn't unique. The AK is essentially a ww2 era gun, the .50 cal is essentially unchanged in 70 years.
They kind of got most of these things right back then, seems a bit like the technology peaked? |
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Fury it starting on channel 5. I'll be watching that hot sherman v tiger action, never seen it. Love a good war film, so here's hoping.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fury_(2014_film)
missed the start ,only seen last ten mins ....hmmm |
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Well so far all Fury has made me do is hope the Germans kill Brad Pitt and the rest of the d1cks in his crew.
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If I was the young lad I'd take the next chance I had to put one in Pitt's back, see how he likes it.
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the green laser tank firefight was bad .....but norms three notes on the piano routine was sickening
fck this even comic relief would be better  let me know when brad cops it |
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Actually there is another guy in the crew worse than Brad.
It's a stunning advertisement for the american GI! |
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The final battle scene is ridiculous :)
SPOILER: A good way to suicide a tank is letting infantry swarm around it armed with anti tank weapons - so they let 300 SS troops, at a time when the germans were being given panzerfaust like lollipops, swarm around and over it before opening fire? And didn't think to bring the spare ammo in during all the time they sat waiting? And then when they go to get the spare ammo, germans don't pepper the tank with fire, and brad pitt is able to beat off the swarm of germans whose training is that the best way to attack a tank is to scramble up and over it - unarmed!!!  Is this dawn of the dead or world war two? |
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And the tank is immobilised, the front MG has a limited arc of fire, yet somehow it's still firing all the time, which means germans to the (safe) side of the tank are deciding to go back round and attack the front of the tank, which is the strongest part anyway, rather than just walk round in safety and shoot it in the back or side
Germans be stupid, no wonder they lost  |
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aye ,not the best film ,moving swiftly on this next one Schindler's List is a diff kettle of fish ,never seen it ,very good .
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during the trench wars of WW1, they placed one machine gun at the left, another at the right further down. the'd swivel/pivot 90 degrees and cover every inch of the field. basically creating a curtain of death. no chance there? the bigger you are, the more of a target you are.
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Infantry versus tanks. There is a gripping account by Jeremy Clarkson of such a WW2 action in his documentary about the Victoria Cross. Arnhem starts at 29 and a half minutes in. There is a twist at the end for those who've not seen it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BP3AVSx6Kyw#t=29m28s |
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Interesting Ramruma very brave men. I was intrigued by what you said about a twist at the end and it certainly was.
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Good fred, some funny posts here!
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