Battle of the Bulge

What really disappoints me is that a lot of footage (at least 20 minutes worth) has been cut out from the original print. Please, Warner, release the FULL version on DVD!


Great action and unavoidable continuity shortfalls   June 27, 1999
15 out of 16 found this review helpful

This movie is a great action story built around the Battle of the Bulge. O.K. so the M26 tanks aren't Tigers and the M24s aren't Shermans. If you are looking to pick apart movies check out the M48/Panther/Tigers in "Patton". The parallels drawn of historical characters isn't bad. The Martin Hessler/Joachim Peiper contrast is good, Robert Shaw(Hessler) does an excellent characterization of the historical accounts written about Peiper (the actual leader of the SS Panzer Truppen). For those who didn't like the movie because it did not re-create the actual battle in detail, read the dislaimer promenently displayed in the credits. It says in essence thath the movie was never intended to re-create the actual battle but to re-enact the spirit of the heroism and actions of the soldiers in the battle and some of the historical events (the 101st Abn Div at Bastogne) that took place. For the real history buffs looking for flaws, the fuel dump that was so eloquently defended by Fonda and Mac Arthur never existed as portrayed in the film. The fuel dump was actually spread out and hidden over several square miles of forest. All in all a great action movie for war enthusiasts


A battle that needs an accurate film - this is NOT it!   June 1, 2004
15 out of 27 found this review helpful

This abortion uses the excuse that it is a "synthesis" of events, but it is simply an abomination. Not only are the characters and events for the most part complete fiction, or completely fictional in the way they are portrayed, but just some of the lack of realism in what happens is ludicrous as well. A tank gets hit and ends up looking like a blow torch was used to remove the top half of the turret (probably closer to how it actually got that way), yet the tank commander, sitting higher up in the command hatch than his fellow crewmembers, miraculously escapes unharmed! In the real world, a tank round would make a small hole in the armor and spew hot shrapenel all over the interior of the vehicle, with fuel and ammo likely catching fire/exploding/cooking off. This is more a comic than a serious film. As far as the historical inaccuracies, there was no "Col. Hessler", and for those who think this is a pseudonym for Col. Joachim Peiper, think again; if you recall, "Hessler" is supposed to be a Wermacht officer, not an SS officer, although his "brigade" begins its attack in the Losheim Gap (i.e., where Peiper began his attack). Next, the Germans had very few Tiger tanks, and even fewer King Tiger tanks; the bulk of their tank strength at that point in the war would have been Panzer Mk IV's and Panthers, with the Tigers and King Tigers being attached "heavy tank battalions" that reinforced the Panzer divisions. In the movie you'd get the impression that the entire German army was equipped with King Tiger tanks exclusively. And it wasn't as if the Bulge was the first time the Americans/Allies had seen this tank, since some early examples were knocked out in Normandy. The Malmedy Massacre was portrayed as an organized execution, when in actuality it was not - rather it was spontaneous, started by a single SS tank officer with a pistol at point blank range after he stopped his assult gun at the Baugnez crossroads where the unfortunate prisoners had been assembled (south of the namesake town which was never entered by the German forces during the entire battle). The fuel depot incident is a topic of some controversy, as some historians have it as fact and others fiction, but in any event it was the Francorchamps fuel dump (deep in the Ambleve River valley), the biggest on the continent with over 1,500,000 gallons of gasoline, not a dump on the Meuse River. While we're on the subject, there is the completely ridiculous "calculation" of the German fuel situation by the (fictitiuos) American General, using the fuel consumption of a Tiger tank, the exact distance from the Zeigfried Line to the Meuse, and the estimated fuel reserves of the German Army. Like tanks are the only thing that uses gasoline, like they only had Tiger tanks, like they new what route should be used for the mileage, like even if that were the only information they needed they new exactly HOW MANY tanks, etc. Ludicrous! The Germans in point of fact had accumulated more than enough gasoline for the Ardennes Offensive, but had it on the EAST bank of the Rhine River (in keeping with the extreme secrecy of the operation and its cover plan as a "defensive" operation), and they quite often couldn't get it to the front lines where it was needed because of Allied bombing of bridges railways and road centers. Finally, it wasn't as if the Germans swept the Americans aside like insects and then advanced unnoticed through the fog and then ran out of fuel, nor was the battle a big "tank battle" ala Kursk (which is the way it was portrayed). Indeed, there were some Americans that "bugged out" providing little organized resistance, and some large scale surrenders (think the 106th Infantry Division, the green outfit surrounded on the Schnee Eifel), but there were also stiff resistance and heroic stands that either stopped crack Panzer divisions in their tracks or cost them critical delays and detours (think the 2nd/99th Infantry Divisions in the Elsenborn Ridge area and the Engineer Battalions in the Ambleve River Valley blowing bridges in Peiper's face). The one positive note about this film in terms of historical accuracy is that it wasn't focusing on Bastogne as the "key" to the whole offensive. The Battle of the Bulge was won and lost on the northern flank where the 6SS Panzer Army was stopped, bloodied, delayed and detoured by fierce resistance and swarms of reinforcements in rugged terrain. Bastogne was anticlmactic; though an important road junction, its importance arose more from the failure of the Germans to break through where they intended to rather than due to its location in the middle of the area that ended up being their deepest penetration. Their Panzer Divisions in the south made some half-hearted probes but basically surrounded and bypassed it, leaving its capture to following infantry. It was only later when it was clear the Meuse couldn't be crossed until the lines of communication were cleared up that the Germans made any serious effort to capture it, and by then it was no longer isolated and had been reinforced and fortified. In any event, I'm sure that one small element of realism was purely accidental, since this film could have been a cartoon for all its accuracy.

Now that we can bring back the real tanks and other equipment with the miracles of digital effects, it's time for someone to do an historically accurate epic about this battle or the most important parts of it (Peiper's breakout and his subsequent sacking in the Ambleve River valley if they must keep the scale confined).