Perhaps the BEST B1G Forum anywhere, here at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

Medina:

I second your recommendation of Shattered Sword.  It's an excellent updating of what we know about the Battle of Midway, with more thorough use of Japanese sources than the old account by Mitsuo Fuchida.

My only complaint is what I found the excessive use of Japanese-language terminology.  I'd much rather read "dive bomber" than kanbaku, especially since many contractions having to do with warships also start with kan.  It's almost as if Parshall and Tully went out of their way to demonstrate their fluency.

Some other movies I would like to see made with current technology:

Leyte Gulf
Peleliu
Guadalcanal

The Bulge (The Fonda movie was awful).
Hurtgen Forest
Kaserine Pass ??

France 1940

Tora! Tora! Tora! will probably stand as the last great war movie with real (as opposed to CGI) airplanes.  They reused some of the Japanese airplanes from that movie in the miserable Charlton Heston Midway.  For the American planes, they used WWII footage of Hellcats and Avengers from 2-ish years later in the war.

One bad thing about CGI air-combat video is that the planes are made to do things that no planes and their human pilots would have been able to do in real life.

Yes, The Battle of the Bulge was terrible.  It was portrayed more on a sea of mud than on a winter battlefield.

I recall in B of the B a scene where German tanks pulled up to a crest line and bombarded some town, I guess meant to be Bastogne.

Production doesn't win wars.  It still takes human beings at the tip of the spear to risk their lives employing those machines.  But it's hard to win a war without the machines.

I agree wholeheartedly and I don't mean to disparage or minimize the bravery and sacrifice of the troops at, as you put it, the tip of the spear. 

That said, as you acknowledged, it is hard to win a war without the machines.  Minor shortcomings can be overcome through superior strategy or bravery or luck but as the material difference becomes larger, those things become less relevant.  Ie, if your enemy has 10-20% more material than you do, that might be a winnable war.  However, if your enemy has 100-200% more material than you do then your only plausible strategy is essentially the Ho Chi Minh strategy of extending the war until your enemy unilaterally decides to quit. 

Interestingly, Ho Chi Minh wasn't the first person to devise that strategy and he wasn't even the first to attempt to employ it against the US.  Toward the end of WWII the Japanese fully realized that a military victory simply was not going to happen.  Then their strategy became one of inflicting maximum casualties on the US in an effort to get the US to decide that winning wasn't worth the cost.  It didn't work for Tojo mostly because we simply didn't give him enough time.  A couple decades later in Vietnam (which was known as French Indochina during WWII and occupied by the Japanese) the US tried to win without getting heavily involved and that gave Ho Chi Minh the time he needed. 

Medina:

I second your recommendation of Shattered Sword.  It's an excellent updating of what we know about the Battle of Midway, with more thorough use of Japanese sources than the old account by Mitsuo Fuchida.

My only complaint is what I found the excessive use of Japanese-language terminology.  I'd much rather read "dive bomber" than kanbaku, especially since many contractions having to do with warships also start with kan.  It's almost as if Parshall and Tully went out of their way to demonstrate their fluency.

That was my only real complaint as well.  It was overdone to the point of just needlessly showing off. 

I would focus on the battle of the small boys against Kurita.