Reflective follow-up

I had to grow up and see war and its backwash to absorb the viewpoint my father and uncles took of nearly all war movies: that they were good smash-em-up entertainment, completely divorced from reality. None of them lived long enough to see the likes of Saving Private Ryan, Band of Brothers, and The Pacific, and pass judgement on them.

I do remember my father watching the 1960s series Combat! with interest. He commented that it was the only depiction he'd ever seen that approached reality. The hallmarks of the series were unrelenting grimness and a sort of film noir cinematography. After reading Atkinson, it strikes me that one departure from reality was the amount of sunshine in that and other series and films of the time. It appears that the war in Northwest Europe was mostly fought under cloud cover varied only by the amount and type of precipitation. Only the more recent films and series have captured the meterological context.

Hindsight again suggests that a veteran in a position to say whether a TV show was a tolerably accurate depiction of the fighting in Europe must have had a fair sample of the real thing.