My son Nigel and I watched the 1965 movie Battle of the Bulge just before Memorial Day. I first saw this in Boston at the Loews theater, one of the few theaters in Boston that had the Cinemascope projector allowing them the full screen effects of this movie. The Theater had velvet curtains and plush seats. I had never been to a place so opulent.
I loved the movie. It certainly had some influence on my later career as a tank commander. But even as a 12-year-old I had read it enough about in World War II to know that the tanks on this screen were from between World War II and what was then the present day. Sherman tanks were actually M 24 Chafee tanks in the tigers were M 47 Patton tanks.
It was fun to watch Telly Savalas as a Tank commander/Black market entrepreneur, a roll he would hand off to Donald Sutherland and take to another level in 1970 in Kelly’s Heroes when Savalas became a bank robber.
For my son, I could also place this movie among the other World War II movies we watched recently. Fury, which had actual Shermans and an operational tiger tank, was four months after the Battle of the Bulge. Band of Brothers has the Battle of the Bulge near the center of the drama. In the movie Patton the Battle of the Bulge is near the end. Last fall I visited Bastogne and Malmedy. I brought out some of the pictures from that visit.
So along with this movie we had a world war two review.
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