"HERE COMES A PANZER TANK!" Topic

I was wondering how with all of the consultants did the word "panzer tank" make it into Saving Private Ryan movie.

When they are at the bridge Tom Hanks is translating what the sniper is seeing and he mentions a panzer tank and a panther, can't remember if he says anything about a Tiger (haven't seen it this year yet).
It shouldn't bother me but… I usually take this time in the movie to go pee or get a drink.
Come on Dale Dye you are better than that man. (nice guy by the way, I spoke with him for a while at Hcon a couple of years ago.)

Perhaps this was standard "GI Talk"? I doubt all GIs of the period used perfect nomenclature in their description of German Panzers. Most were 18-21 years old and this was their first exposure to German terminology.

I'm sorry, but after the first 20 minutes, the movie is just a bunch of ridiculousness piled high. Pulling a gun on your commanding officer? Deciding to hold a bridge with 5 men? The "panzer tank" issue doesn't even rate.

Would a GI say "I see a PzIV Ausf F2!"
Or would he say "I see a big ing tank and it's coming this way!"

this is something only a wargamer would get upset about.

Since I believe the word panzer means tank or armour he is saying here comes a tank tank?

There are some SERIOUS breaches in Saving Private Ryan. Just in the first ten minutes, I think of the chewing gum on the end of a bayonet for a mirror. That one just struck me as very 1950's GI Joeish. But the big no-no in that movie, breaking every infantryman's cardinal rule, is when one GI shouts for a grenade, the other pulls the pin and tosses it to him to toss into the bunker or slit trench.

If you toss a hot grenade in my direction, and I live, we are going to have a very, very serious discussion afterwards.

As to the terminology, I think about the story most GIs I ever spoke to who fought in Europe. To most of them, every tank was a Tiger, and every shell was from an 88. It sort of became a broad term for a German tank and a German shell, like call all carbonated soft drinks a "Coke."

Seeing as "Panzer" is actually a short form of "Panzerkampfwagen", and "Panzerkampfwagen" means Armoured Fighting Vehicle as in:
Panzer = Armoured
Kampf = Fighting (German word for "struggle")
Wagen = Vehicle

- saying "Panzer Tank" can also be interpreted as "Armoured Tank" which is not that unreasonable, even though I am struggling to think of a situation where you might have an UNarmoured tank!

My point as well MajorB, what use is an unarmored tank? Maybe we could ask the Japanese that…

I believe he identifies the Tigers and the others as just Panzers.

This is in the realm of believability. I can't imagine, as John wrote, that the average rifleman could identify the plethora of different afv types that were in the German army. Tigers -- they knew those. Others -- it's armored so that means it's not good.

I'm with you John OFM … probably "mutha" would be put in front of many things GI talk about … at least that was my experience …

I hate to dog pile on SPR because I think it was the first honest effort by Hollywood to get things "right".
I wonder why it took so long to get an adviser like Dale Dye to help out- are the no gaming clubs in Hollywood with over-read history geeks willing to vomit up their wealth of knowledge?

Sort of like when people ask you to put in your "PIN number". PIN stands for Personal Identity Number. So you are asked for your "Personal Identity Number number."

No biggie really.

Back in the day when Allen was here, he had a few choice words to say about Dale Dye.

A friend of mine was , for a brief time, an advisor to that film. When he got a copy of the early draft he told the producers that the US forces did not encounter any Tiger tanks at that time. He was told that, one, All German Tanks were Tigers, and two, that in the eyes of the viewing public, the same goes. They went back and forth for a couple of days on this and other matters, and then the producers told him thanks, but we'll get someone else to do the advising.

Still, at least they ended up using WW2 equipment.

I was wondering how with all of the consultants did the word "panzer tank" make it into Saving Private Ryan movie.

Authenticity. Soldiers would not necessarily be accurate in their descriptions. A has a distinct name. A tiger has a distinct name. A PZIVH does not have a distinct name. So perhaps he was describing the type of tank and that was his short hand for a Panther and a Panzer IV. He is a sniper after all and not a tanker.

Here is another example of a famous soldier getting it wrong. Audie Murphy, in an interview, said 2 M-10s were attached to his company in southern France in the action that earned him the medal of honor. He says it was demoralizing to see 90mm rounds bounce off the front of the panzers. Now, either the TDs were not M-10s but M-36s or they were not firing 90mm rounds. Either way, he made a mistake.

Happens all the time. Everyone wants everything perfect. I think this is a great way to make everything perfect. To add a few mistakes here and there to show the soldiers are not infallible.

I can over look the tank naming. But when you have the characters do really dumb stuff like the grenade toss or the medic going in to take out a machine gun position, it really takes me out of the movie. It's not as if they could not have shot the grenade scene correctly.

I enjoyed the film, but I would rather watch band of brothers.

If I remember correctly, he was meant to say Panther tank, pronounced the German way. It ended up sounding rather like Panzer which just made it worse.
I read somewhere in the production notes (or the producers / directors sound track on the DVD) that they actually wanted Panther tanks as well, but could get no look-alikes. In the end they reasoned that the sniper had simply mislabeled the SP-guns or that the Panthers were in action outside the village.

Very lame actually, but that is what they said.

probably "mutha" Bleeped text would be put in front of many things GI talk about … at least that was my experience …

Not in WW2 -- Vietnam, yes.

My take on SPR is the following.

I had heard how "authentic" the action scenes were months before I actually caught it.

All I could see was special effects. throwing dirt against a Plexiglas screen, jerky cameras etc. I liked The Longest Day much better, but hey. This is modern cinema, and they don't throw us a bone all that often, so accept it.

Then, after the first 20 minutes, half hour, it degenerated into the lamest stupidest excuse for a plot. They were going to send RANGERS traipsing across Normandy to "rescue" a 101st Airborne soldier because his brother got killed????

Only modern Horrywood could come up with such a pointless plot.

The movie is hogwash. As opposed to hogwash, which I prefer.

Sorry, Mrs Ryan, but there's a war going on.

I saw it once and then scratched it off my list of must-see. Maybe if it's on TV free on demand while I am sitting in my kitchen painting, I will put it on, unless Blazing Saddles or The Godfather are on.

I am not about to watch it again and again and memorize whole pages of dialog like a Monty Python reenactor. Nor will I obsess over Wrong Tank Syndrome "errors". Tanks are expensive, and "close enough" is good enough for me.

If I have a yen to watch Tom Hanks, I'll catch Apollo 13.

But when you have the characters do really dumb stuff like the grenade toss or the medic going in to take out a machine gun position, it really takes me out of the movie.

I don't think sending the medic in was so bad. It's not like he was actually fighting. If a man gets hit badly, he only has a minute or two before he bleeds out. If the medic is not near by, you cannot shout for him and the time to get to the wounded man might be more than a minute or two if you kept him far away.

Just a few Goofs!

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It would just be a quick way a GI could say here comes a "German" tank…..maybe they don't know the type!?

(way too much over-analysis, but carry on chaps)

Just a few Goofs!

Who ever came up with those had waaaay too much time on their hands.

Not in WW2 -- Vietnam, yes.

Yes don, but you get the point … They probably would of only said, … not "mutha" in WWII … < Oddball: The only way I got to keep them Tigers busy is to LET THEM SHOOT HOLES IN ME!
>

Spielberg=Schmaltz.

Come on guys, Saving Private Ryan wasn't so bad, was it? Especially compared to most Hollywood productions. Yes, the premise of the mission to save Ryan was silly, and the film is not historically perfect, but I think it succeeds as entertainment.

I appreciate the efforts they took with the uniforms, equipment and vehicles. The mock-up German AFVs were a lot more believable than, say, M-48s painted grey.

I'll even admit to getting a little choked up at the end of the movie, when the older Ryan returns to Normandy to visit Captain Miller's grave. The scene reminds me of recent news coverage of the 70th anniversary of D-Day, with the ever-fewer aging vets returning to honor their comrades.

Also, I think the commercial success of SPR helped spawn HBO's Band of Brothers, notably thru Tom Hanks involvement in both projects.

Yes, the premise of the mission to save Ryan was silly

Might be silly but it is based on an actual event. In the real rescue, they found the guy (Nyland I think his name was) and took him home without incident.

The whole movie is historical fiction. It is also a collage of actual events that took place in Normandy at one time or another though not all necessarily related. The whole purpose of the film was to show exactly how it felt to go into combat on D-Day and show what combat is really like. Apparently Spielberg succeeded admirably.

Tautology is so common there's a special word for it….

Doug

Can we see a list of things they 'got right' vs. things that were 'wrong'?

Productions of that scale are bound to have something incorrect.

Can we see a list of things they 'got right' vs. things that were 'wrong'?

Of course not. Nobody on the internet gets "expert cred" by praising things that are correct or liking a popular movie…

So true.

Further to the above, my father-in-law's best buddy – gunner with 19th Royal Canadian Field Artillery, landed at Juno Beach and soldiered on 'til the Germans gave it up – called every German tank he saw (including the one that brewed up his SPG, which I think from the description was a Panther) a Tiger

"If you toss a hot grenade in my direction, and I live, we are going to have a very, very serious discussion afterwards."

Yea the live grenade thing was definitely a party foul.

I'm still wondering why they didn't go way around the German MG position and come up behind the structures it was up against instead of charging uphill into the muzzle, but that's just me.

"Only modern left wing Horrywood could come up with such a pointless plot."

Must you really drag politics into it while you're hyperventilating?

I can think of many, many more pointless plots from the right wing. But if you don't want to go there, don't bring politics into a discussion about war movies.

I think the only medic who never gets it in the war movies to show the situation is serious is Doc McCoy.

The original script, which I have, is so totally horrendous it is amazing anything reasonable came out of it. It literally reads in places like any research was done by reading the side of Tamyia model boxes.

I kid you not, in one deleated scene they come across an 88 guarding a road. So they 'wait until dark when the crew is asleep and literally steal it by pulling it down the road."

The short answer is, many of the senior tech advisors had no clue about anything. The only reason some decent stuff ended up in it was that the junior people worked really hard to fix things, by making it seem it was someone senior thinking of it.

The real saving of 'Ryan' was more of a Chaplain driving a jeep over to the unit and picking him up. here was no "mission." The movie is really more of what someone would think after watching a ton of war movies, not actually trying to be an accurate depiction of ww2 combat.

Don't get me started.

I had a pompous English colleague at an international school a few years ago; he spoke in history classes of the advantage the Germans had in the "panzer tank". Mind you, he also told geography classes in my hearing that gravity was an effect of the earth's rotation.

Attended a Society for Military History conference where this was the subject of a paper being presented (SVP in general, not panzer tank specifically). It was very interesting the wide variety and great number of inaccuracies in the film (another presenter talked on the same subject regarding The Longest Day, BTW). BUT still fun to watch occasionally.

And regarding the language, I've had a couple of WWII vets tell me no one spoke with that kind of language back then. But I've also heard WWII vets talk like that. Perhaps they learned it after they got out of the military and were back in civilian life?

Ahh yes the armchair critic,cannot enjoy the show,the story or someone else's artwork because someone tried and got it wrong. Hollywood is not reality. People who were really there sometimes remember incorrectly. Sometimes just because some one wrote it down doesn't make it right either. To much negativity . Pardon me I will go back to painting figures that I am not going to bother to share on this site because I am pretty sure after hours of work some superior know it all jerk will find the one thing wrong and point it out. " Chin Chin do carry on with your mud pies."

Some days I want to amass all copies of SPR and burn them!

But in saner moments I just let it go. It is not history – it is ridiculous. But I think they did the best possible in a major Hollywood film at that time. The amount of money involved means it is difficult to get a coherent story and accurate details all at once.

Dale Dye is supposed to be making a film about La Fiere (on which SPR was rather loosely based) and if it ever gets done we'll see how he does.

Personally I don't have any problems whatsoever with kit being mis-identified, it happens plenty in contemporary accounts and sometimes you read multiple accounts of the same action and they may as well have been completely different battles.

I am also unclear as to how a misty eyed flag waving eulogy to the Great Generation can be regarded as 'left wing'? Is the right wing version where they all join the SS and invade Russia instead?

The one thing which really cracked me up in SPR was Ted Danson, the elderly paratrooper. Anyway, it was a film, don't expect a documentary.

My dad fought at La Fiere, he was an airborne infantryman in the 325th Glider Infantry Regiment of the 82nd Airborne Division. Pictures he took with his own camera appear in many books on the 82nd, including the book "No Better Place To Die". I was lucky enough to travel with him back to the battlefields where he fought during the war, and his recall for events and geography were amazing, even being able to find the depressions of his company's foxhole line (still detectable in 1973) near enemy occupied Mook in Holland in 1944. However, dad's knowledge of enemy vehicles, weapon nomenclature, units, etc. wasn't so go – he didn't study this stuff post-war like us enthusiasts do.

Yes – I think calling the Marder things 'Panzer Tanks' or the Tigers 'Tigers' could be put down to the soldier not knowing what he was looking at…

I wish they had gone with a ragtaggle band of Germans supported by obsolescent 1940 era French tanks and given them some semblance of tactical skill – but instead they opted to rehash the 1950s films/TV battles in better costumes…

But I kind of understand why that was all they could manage. Rome wasn't built in a day.

Band of Brothers was another quantum leap forward but still included some gaffes. For me the most glaring is when Winters calls for a raincoat and the trooper whips one out of his pack in like 2 seconds – clearly having nothing else in the bag!

You would want to wait for a soldier to unbuckle his musette bag, and go through its contents "on-camera". I think I would be on the opposite side of that scene, wondering why the waste of time on such useless detail. Besides, GIs often had their raincoats folded and placed directly under the pack flap, because it provided that much more protection of the innards from moisture….so, the raincoats/ponchos were often "right at hand".

Sure – FlyXwire – but if you have seen the scene in question it does not look right. In fact a wasted scene altogether really. There are a lot in BoB IMO.

They somehow had to get from being lost to being orientated and they had Winters look at a map by flashlight under a raincoat. OK – but the raincoat was the ONLY thing in the pack. No ammo – no food – no point in carrying the pack just to have a raincoat in it – except it was needed for the plot point.

This thread is not about BoB of course so lets not take it down that blind-alley

Sounds good -(I didn't bring BoB up).

My dad was an anti-aircraft gunner who was drafted 3 months before Pearl Harbor, and served three years in the Pacific War.

When I was younger, I really got into building plastic models of every Japanese plane in the war.

He was amused by this. For him, any Japanese plane was either a Zero or it was a bomber.

He never saw any reason to make any finer distinction than that. They all were to be shot down, and that was that.

Well, we will soon have Fury, about an M4 crew, behind the lines, to pick over.

YouTube link

Am I right in thinking that there is a 251 towards the end that was a collectors treasured posession and the crew blew it up?

Interleaved road wheels on Fury's Tiger tank

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