The War Lovers

I found myself watching a 1960s war film the other day. There was a time when I could watch such films uncritically, simply accepting them as mindless entertainment. However, these days I find them highly irritating. Not just for their historical inaccuracy - the film in question, Tobruk, bore only a passing resemblance to actual events in North Africa in 1942 - it is also their attitudes which I find exasperating. Tobruk is fairly typical in perpetuating the myth that the British were all a bunch of stuffed shirts who were utterly incompetent in their pursuit of the war, and were only rescued by the intervention of those plucky Americans, in this case taking the form of Rock Hudson. Now, apart from the fact that I don't recall any US involvement in either of the Battles of Tobruk, the idea that only we Brits were making mistakes in the conduct of the war is ludicrous. The US hardly covered itself in glory at the Kasserine Pass, or the breakout from Anzio, to name but two instances.

What really galled me though, was the fact that if the US hadn't spent so much time selling the Germans military equipment, we probably could have had them beaten at least two years earlier. Tobruk is one of those war movies in which every piece of military hardware with a swastika on it is of US origin. Trucks, half-tracks, even tanks, they're all US built. At least the trucks and half-tracks are actually of World War Two vintage, the tanks are 1950s and 1960s models (M-46s, M-47s and M-48s). Tobruk is another war film shot in Spain (see also Battle of the Bulge and Patton: Lust for Glory, in which the Spanish army stood in for the Wehrmacht, (quite aptly, as both were controlled by fascist dictators). Hiring themselves out for film crews was probably the closest the Spanish army ever got to actually fighting a war in the Franco era.

I've always found it fascinating that, despite being made within twenty years of the war, at a time when there were still so many people who had served in the conflict around, 1960s war movies were generally so inaccurate in terms of historical accuracy and authenticity of equipment. By contrast, more recent films have been almost obsessive in their attention to detail, despite their subject matter not being within the living memory of most of their audiences. But maybe that's the key - the earlier films relied entirely upon participants' unreliable memories for research, there being relatively little in the way of accurate written sources available in the1960s. Nowadays we have vast amounts of source material on every aspect of the war available. Whereas those who actually took part in the war wanted to put it behind them, those of us who weren't there apparently can't get enough of it!