As a kid, I consumed Hollywood war movies like popcorn. “The Dirty Dozen,” “Where Eagles Dare,” “The Battle of the Bulge,” “Von Ryan’s Express” — they treated World War II as a great adventure, and even though people died, there was never a sense of wrenching loss. The good guys won, and that was enough. It was, after all, called “The Good War,” and these movies made it seem like one.
But books by historians such as Winston Churchill, Stephen Ambrose and Robert Leckie told a different story, and my eyes were opened to the Great Lie of the “Good War” movies. Unlike Hollywood filmmakers, these authors did not flinch from the reality of what it means to be a foot soldier.
Even when Hollywood tried to get the facts right, it fumbled. “The Longest Day,” arguably the most historically accurate of the WW II movies from the ’60s, made the men who waded ashore on D-Day seem like fearless caricatures, with no sense of the devastating price many of them paid to change history. In my most cynical moments, it seemed these movies weren’t really conceived in Hollywood but at the Pentagon.
In 1994, the 50th anniversary of the Allied invasion of France, Ambrose’s “D-Day” provided a definitive account. The book still moves me to tears, in particular the portions relating to the Omaha Beach campaign, in which young GIs, weighed down by equipment, waded ashore and were methodically chopped to ribbons by entrenched Germans firing machine guns and mortars.
When Steven Spielberg chose to re-create that scenario in the opening scene of his Oscar-nominated movie, “Saving Private Ryan,” I was stunned. At last, there was a major Hollywood film that dared to show the horror of the “Good War,” and I can’t imagine anyone watching that sequence and not being somehow haunted by it.
Unfortunately, Spielberg did not carry through his vision in the rest of the movie. I don’t doubt the nobility and bravery of the men who fought in World War II. But I question the many Hollywood moviemakers who rob them of their humanity, their frailty, in the name of a cause. That’s not art. That’s propaganda.
