I envisioned an American submarine crew walking into British Intelligence, 'Look ... we captured an Enigma machine.' 'Good show... put it with the others,' Waves at a pile of Enigma machines.
The British Naval Intelligence teams collected about a dozen…(along with the code books). Ian Fleming (yes the James Bond author) had a couple of teams who did it repeatedly… The U.S. did capture a set with U505 (currently on display in Chicago) on June 4, 1944 (late but useful).
By that time 1942 they had already broken the enigma machine and were ready the Nazis mail for a couple years already (which the Americans knew as well). So the whole premise of the movie was just a complete joke. It would make just as much sense if UK came to us with Japanese equivalent (red machine if my memory is correct right now) at that time as we had broken their codes. Pretty good movie though.
A note that there's not just one Enigma, there are a few versions. The story stolen by U-571 for example wasn't just Operation Primrose, but also a separate unnamed event where the crew of HMS Petard (G56) boarded U-559 and captured not the machine, but settings for a more complicated 4-rotor Enigma. While it's often said that the Enigma was long broken, this 4-rotor version had caused an information blackout on U-boat operations for 10 whole months.
In high school one of our history teachers showed us Braveheart and thought it was historically accurate depiction of the war. But our teacher also had the misfortune that year of having two students by the name of James and Sara in the class; they were twins that had just immigrated to Canada from Scotland since their stepdad was Canadian. James basically spent the entire time we watched the movie making fun of how inaccurate it was. This was probably one of the funniest moments I ever saw of a teacher getting personally offended by a student, our teacher tried to claim James was "mocking historical events and the suffering of the Scottish people" to which James reminded the teacher that he was actually Scottish and the teacher wasn't. James then went on to explain not only are these events taught as standard history lessons in Scotland, but his late father was obsessed with that era of Scottish History something James shared with him before his passing; which shut the teacher up very quickly.
James may have been bluffing a bit. I was at school in Scotland when Braveheart came out, and not once had a history lesson on the Wars of Scottish Independence.
What became of the teacher afterwards? I mean, resorting to Hollywood movies as a formal curriculum material is one thing, but fully believing them to be these factual accurate beacon of truth and getting offended on their behalf is a whole another thing loooool Please tell me there were reprimands. US students already suffer heavily from Us-centric skewed history lessons, and to have clowns like that as our children's teachers is just outrageous
@@trentitybrehm5105that’s all well and good, what do you think of the subject at hand tho? I fail to see how your comment connects to the discussion you’ve posted a reply in.
Thank you for mentioning Argo. I am Canadian and I was a teenager at the time of the hostage crisis in Iran and the rescue of the 6. I was so pissed off at the movie because I remembered following the story and the movie was nothing like that.
Having a degree in history, I would vastly prefer if the visual entertainment media started off their films with the superimposed title: "The movie you are about to see is utter bollocks and any resemblance to factual events or real persons is laughable considering how high we were when made this, so eat your popcorn and shut up."
and the unusual preface for Master and Commander 'This one is reasonably accurate except it was an american privateer not a frenchy, but we do so love the american box office proceeds'
This only true for movies where American Exceptionalism is the underlined theme of the movie, like Argo or Pearl Harbor... Movies like "Tora, Tora, Tora" don't need this title... And weed is not the reason, American Jingoism is...
Thanks for setting the record straight on Argo. As a Canadian, I'm used to our roles in nearly everything being downplayed when it comes to films. You can do an entire video on how Canada's significant contribution to DDay was almost completely ignored in the Longest Day, as an example. Same for the Great Escape.
American stars == Box office $$$ The big problem the Canadians had in WW2 was a shortage of high calibre, rapid firing film studios.... 🙂 The UK suffered the same way. To get most WW2 films made a major part had to be created for a US actor. For example Bridge over the River Kwai
@@JAmediaUK Absolutely. Hence Gregory Peck playing a Brit Capt in Guns of Navarone. It still rankles how, beyond the somewhat fake insertion of American stars, how the Canadian contribution to the war almost always is pushed aside.
There are 2 types of "historical" movie. Those that are fictional stories set within a historical context, and those that claim to be a depiction of historical events. Gladiator, IMO falls into the former category; at no point does it claim to be "based on a true story" and, while some of the characters are loosely based on historical figures, the central character is entirely fictitious. Braveheart, however, presents itself as an account of actual history, which makes it's crimes against accuracy and authenticity all the greater.
There's an argument to be made that the former makes for a more reliably "better" film. It's easier to have character growth occur in the film's runtime if that person isn't real and you're basically making them piecemeal from people who actually existed. "The Last Samurai" fits in with that category, it's hard to fit the entirety of the Meiji Restoration and it's context and have a historically accurate film - so it crimps a bit on the accuracy (the winning any battles part) to deliver a lot regarding the context of what's happening at the time.
@@smalltime0 I completely agree. Accuracy shouldn't necessarily be the primary objective when making a film in a historic context, I consider authenticity far more important. But *IF* one is going to make a film that claims to depict history as it happened, then one is obliged to be as accurate as possible.
As a fellow Canadian ya it kind of pissed me off as well. But then again it’s Hollywood, what do you expect? I’m surprised in Braveheart they didn’t have the Marines charging in and rescuing the airports from the dastardly Red Coats😂😂😂😂🇨🇦🇨🇦🇨🇦
There is a very good reason why the Canadians were involved. The location of their embassy compared to the location of the UK Embassy The other embassy involved was the New Zealand one. The British Ambassador in Tehran was VERY scathing of Argo (after he retired). What will probably never come out is the reality of how the US staff who were not in any way field operatives got out and to the UK Embassy in the first place. There were some Pilgrims knocking about who got them to the UK Embassy, Due to the location they were moved to another Comomwealth/5-Eyes embassy that was not in the middle of things. It was the Brits and Canadians who got the US people out and safe for 80 days. As the UK SF were staying in country (for many months longer) they did not want to be known about and as with most British stuff like this it is kept quiet. In fact they were still hanging around near the US Embassy when the abortive raid went in 1980. I remember the fuss (I was on a joint UK/USA base at the time) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Eagle_Claw
Fellow Canuck here. Canada's role I'm anything like these representations are always grossly underrepresented. Credit where credit is due. Just look at many stories and books regarding the Battle of Monte Cassino, or D-Day, not to mention a large number of other battles over the course of history that paint the US as the saviors when they truly only played a part in the entirety of an operation/operations.
As I read more and more about the actual events, i rolled my eyes at how bad the movie painted the Canadian part of the whole affair. I did see an excellent documentary where Ken Taylor is interviewed, as well as others in the gov’t during that time.
Many of the Hollywood WWII movies made after the war were in fact based on actual events. But.... yeah. Those two bridges in the clip are in Stirling Scotland. (I've been there.) But they are not THE Stirling Bridge of the battle. They aren't even in the same location. So why even show them? Breaking the Enigma Code began when the Poles figured out it was possible. As soon as it was introduced in the mid 1930s, they started working on the problem. Their first important insight came after stealing a machine in pre War Berlin. However many millions of iterations the Germans thought they had, Polish mathematicians almost immediately figured out it was half that number. This becomes a theme in cracking the code. All messages started with repeating the same thing twice, and on Hitler's Birthday, acknowledging this is always at the beginning. Another critcal factor in all of this is the German assumption Enigma Codes could not be broken. As Poland was overrun, they first brought all of their work to France and then to England. During the war Germans added more code wheels and connections, massively complicating the task. British code breakers, especially Alan Turing were brilliant at cracking it ( The Imitation Game is about as stupid an example of a bad history movie as there could be. All the deadlines in the movie are ridiculous.) The Brits invented the first electronic computer to decode messages. The one question remains, and is worthy of discussion (but not an uniformed internet pissing match) is, Would the Brits have started on this task had not the Poles already figured out it was possible? The real importance of addressing a question like this is not Who gets the glory? but what other things might we succeed at if we identify them and begin working? I think the Poles got the ball rolling, but without the level of resources and work at Bletchley Park, the Poles would've been stymied as the rotors were added. Another way of looking at this type of thinking is. If you can think of the United States as an extension of England, what then was it the Americans did that ultimately made the U.S. so much wealthier than the UK? Sometimes the most important step is deciding to tackle a problem or pursue an idea. I remember when someone criticized me for not making enough money. Well, I'm the problem solver of last resort, so..... Once I looked at this as just another problem.... The importance of accuracy even in fiction is that it informs us as to what actually happened and how it happened, and how it might inform the present and the future. One of the most important aspects of historiography over the past hundred years or so is What were all those people who weren't kings and queens, or rich, or popes doing that changed history?
@@tripsaplenty1227 well, he is a far right nutter who supports Trump, so naturally he thinks he is an expert on everything. IF he wasn't a movie "star*" he would be on social media trolling and "owning the libs."
No, not true at all. He put the machine on top of the Stone of Scone. And then, centuries later, the thieving English stole it to break the French and Spanish codes at the Battle of Trafalgar.
I heard a story about Mel Gibson being asked about the Bridge by a Scotsman, Mel said the Bridge was in the way, and the Scotsman said, "that was also what the English found out".
I'm still waiting for the Hollywood version of Dunkirk, where the intrepid American boat owners leave Nantucket and sail across the Atlantic (fighting off a strange white whale in the process) to rescue the British army from France and deliver them safely to Number 10 Downing Street and a grateful Winston Churchill, who then gives them all an OBE each and the thanks of the British people.
You forgot the event where they were haunted by aliens but managed to drive them back launching a homemade explosive made with nitroglycerine, old newspapers and chewing gum using a potato cannon.
I like "Churchill The Hollywood Years" which claims the real Winston Churchill was an American GI. The person we recognise as Churchill was an actor named Roy Bubbles. Of course it's actually a satire of American films where they take credit for stuff they didn't actually do.
@@Psyk60 Actually, Winston's Mother was American.... en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Randolph_Churchill Which is all Hollywood needs to create a story "based on Real Events" 🙂
The line "you make take our lives, but you'll never take our freedom", was actually close to what Wallace actually said. They used the word "freedom" instead of " Nintendo Game Boys" as the producers believed that no-one would believe that William Wallace would not be a fan of Playstation........ True Story.
I was involved in an actual "snakes on a plane" situation in 1977. Air Wisconsin was transporting a crate of non-poisonous snakes when at least one got out. Upon taking off from O'Hare Airport in Chicago, the Captain saw it poke its head out under the instrument panel. When I, a mechanic, came into work that night, I was told to open up the inspection panels in the floor, "and look for anything unusual." I was told afterwards what I should have been looking for (and didn't find.)
@@highcountrydelatite a. I didn't say anything about it one way or another.. b. I lived in the country with the most deadly snakes there are, and played golf on a course where there were Brown snakes that were as thick as a girls thigh. YOUR most venomous snake has a little rattle, and curls up in a ball and tells you off. Brown snakes leave you alone and sit tight, unless they get upset, in which case they will chase you about and you better hop. c. No one asked your opinion, chump.
The Poles were brilliant at it! Before the invasion the Germans sent an enigma machine to their embassy in Warsaw - by parcel post! It arrived at the sorting office on Friday giving the Polish Intelligence two full days to strip it down, photograph every part and then rebuild it before delivering it to the Germans the following Monday!
And the Poles delivered it to British Intelligence, who played that down..and virtually didn't acknowledge them or even allow them to participate in code breaking...
@@thomaslawry5238 Erm, that entire Polish team was part of the codebreaking. I don't know where you got THAT information from but its false. And while its important to remember the Polish contribution, its also important not to overplay it. The Poles broke the pre war Enigma machines, Even by 1939 the machines had been made far more complex, and the Poles while trying were simply unable to break Enigma after those changes. Not really a lack of ability, but a lack of resources. So yes, the Polish contribution was important, but this myth that the Poles broke the Enigma code and the British stole the credit is just that, a myth. Despite the early work by the Poles, there was still a lot that had to be done before Enigma was routinely breakable. The Polish team was part of that story, and an important part, but far from the only part. Without British innovations in both Cryptography and technology based upon Polish discoveries the more complex machines would never have been broken. I do agree though that the Polish do not get the credit they are due though. Just saying that while they are due credit, it was not all them, not by a long way.
"Based on a true story / Based on historical events" is basically a meme at this point 🤷🏻♀️ A well deserved meme. The amount of BS they get away with under this "classification" is funny, as well as staggering 😅
@@mattt233 Yeah well, at some point you diverge so much from the actual events, that you might as well don't bother and go fully fictional. If you wanna make Fast and the Furious or Expendables, then just go and make them. Whats even the point? Marketing?
@@mattt233 There is a difference between artistic license and complete fabrication. I don't mind artistic license to condense a story to fit a 2-hour movie or to raise the stakes, but some film makers overdo it too much that it more resembles a fairy tale than a historical film.
A common theme with WW2 movies (and other movies too, but it’s particularly egregious with war movies) is the US being the heroes in events they were never involved in. Because lord forbid other allied nations get the showing they actually were involved in, lol.
I get this all the time with people talking about Saving Private Ryan as the D-Day movie, as if The Longest Day which mentions the French resistance and British (no Canadians, sorry) and shows the German POV doesn't exist.
Interestingly the BRITISH 1952 movie 'The Sound Barrier' shows the Breaking of said barrier to have been a BRITISH achievement....despite the American Chuck Yeager having ACTUALLY risked his life and done it in 1947....five years before the brit film.
You mean like the British and the Russians did…..Every nation has a tendency to showcase their own accomplishments. But the truth remains, that without the US’s entry into WWII the defeat of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan would likely have not occurred or at a minimum resulted in a desultory armistice of some sort in which the map of Europe would have been drastically altered.
@@EvilGav They also wanted to move the dog's grave lest it upset tourists. The thing is, there is nothing racist about it. Gibson was privately educated at "good" private schools and studied the classics and did Greek and Latin, he was also a bit pompous about it and apparently a bit of a difficult person to work with. To Guy "nigger" was simply the the "correct" word for Black. Also, it was not an uncommon name for a black dog in the UK, particularly in the military. The term "nigger" was not regarded as offensive in the UK until the end of the 1940s and early 1950s. IE AFTER WW2 when the UK had the pleasure of the US military attitude to non-white soldiers. Indeed, the segregated US military caused problems in the UK, where the British refused to have any colour bar in pubs and bars when the US military asked for it. When it became a problem, it was more often the white (racist) US troops were told to drink elsewhere. There were similar problems in Australia. So in short, the use of the name Nigger for Guy Gibson's dog was not in any way derogatory in the UK (until we came into contact with US racism)
Black gay American pilots doing "your mama is so fat.." jokes and blasting none stop machine guns at the 25 planes they take down each time they enter a cockpit
Thing re Enigma was that its main selling point was that it would remain secret even if the machine itself and cyphers for the day were captured (at least from the date those daily codes ran out). However the british codebreakers used computers fed with daily cyphers to basically predict the daily settings, something thought impossible by the germans who simply assumed that the raw computing power to do so was impossible. In Germany this was a case of too many stakeholders ignoring obvious signs that the code was broken because they had staked their careers on Enigma.
The naval Enigmas had 4 rotors rather than 3. This was well understood. Also, the Navy code books were for several months at a time. It is difficult to get a new sent to submarines and ships in mid-Atlantic. So capturing their code books gave from a week to 3 months of codes. The code books were on paper that would disintegrate in water, and the SOP's called for the code books to go overboard. 15 times in WW2 (that is 1939-46) the codebooks were captured, so most times they were lost. Hence, the belief in German that things were OK. Also, the sailors who captured the codebooks had no idea the significance of the books. These were ULTRA classification which was above top Secret and was also Need To Know basis as well. Most of the Intelligence services and top military had no idea about Enigma. In face when I was at the private Official r(re) Opening of Bletchley Park where they invited many who worked there, it became clear those who worked in one Hut had no idea about what happened in any other Hut. They never spoke of it for the next 50 years.
I remember going to some big name Civil War movie (maybe Gettysberg?) that got a big opening, and there were re-creationists paid to attend in uniform. The movie was long enough to have an intermission, and during that it was really fun to talk to these guys about the inaccuracies. Neat to learn something, even if it's not from the movie itself.
I did not realize how much the inaccuracies in the movie U571 traumatized me until a year later one of the young workers on my work crew was telling me how great it was. When I first watched it, I just thought if they were going to depart from reality so much they might as well have made a better movie and more completely embraced fantasy. I was shocked to find some people would think it was real and accurate.
The original DVD release of U571 contains an interview that the director conducted with one of the sailors from the HMS Bulldog. The sailor was part of the boarding party that recovered the Enigma device. IIRC, the sailor stated that at first they thought they had recovered a really fancy typewriter with its case. The interview is the only reason to buy the DVD.
@@gumpyoldbugger6944 I can't remember where I saw it, but that was effectively the general consensus. These servicemen and servicewomen have interesting stories to tell. It's a shame when their voices are used by others to save a bit of face.
I absolutely loathe the phrases “based on…” and “inspired by a true story”, because neither objectively imply factual accuracy, due to how arbitrary the definitions are, but at the same time I feel like many of us see “true story” and tend to focus more on that, be it sub- or unconsciously. As an adult though, I never trust either phrase as a rule of thumb.
Just to clarify, Cocaine Bear was and still is a cinematic masterpiece. I have no doubt the accuracy of what happened was reproduced with the utmost attention to detail. To even suggest anything else is ludicrous.
"Papillion" was an amalgam of many convicts' stories. ''The Way Back'' was fiction, even the author's wife said he got out of the gulag and came home on a train. "The Sound of Music'' was a lie cut from whole cloth. The youngest Von Trapp child said in an interview with Terry Gross (NPR) ''We sent the servants ahead before we left in order for them to get our house ready in Switzerland. Then we got up, walked across the plaza onto a waiting train. We had a train car to ourselves of course.'' T.E. Lawrence admits to some hyperbole and misdirection in The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Daniel Defoe used Selkirk's story to create Robinson Crusoe and sprinkled it liberally with bits of fantasy. You might think that James Rowe in ''Five Years to Freedom'' was accurate in his tale but he wrote a very different account of what actually happened for public release. (It is illegal according to the Geneva Convention to kill a prison guard in order to escape.) BAT-21 was a reasonably honest account of that guy's struggle to get home, but he sure as heck killed a couple of civilians getting out of the jungle alive. We have to take his word for it that they would have alerted the VC if he'd let them live. (see above, it is against the Geneva Convention to harm civilians when trying to evade capture.) Jeremiah Johnson (Liver eating Johnson to his friends) wasn't exactly the Robert Redford romantic icon we saw on screen. And every western outlaw has a mile of fiction heaped on his name. Some of them were back stabbers, and rapists and white washed their bad deeds by becoming small town sheriffs.
Cant disagree with anything you said. A lot of great films who obviously took license & from that perspective alone David Lean should get a pass just for capturing such beauty. Prob also 1st on the list for a remake due to its cultural impact, although that would only enhance the original
BAT-21. As the movie tells it, the civilian was trying to kill him. I did like that they were honest about Glover's character bring a composite of a collection of pilots doing the job, and giving credit to the group. It was a reasonable simplification. With a little reflection, it also does a better job of representing to the audience how tireless and dedicated those pilots were, vs seeing a rotation of pilots tasking turns.
@@elizabethsullivan7176 "And every American history book" Case-in-point... In American history books, those events are re-titled: - American aggressive expansion into Native and Mexican territory = Manifest Destiny; - The great Lakota and Cheyenne tribe's victory at Little Big Horn = Custer's Last Stand; - Civil War triggered by southern states wanting to keep exploiting slaves = The Lost Cause; - The American defeat in the Battle of Quebec = Not even in American history books; - All major American defeats in the Korean and Vietnam wars = Not even in American history books I think i've made your point, lol
I have always loved watching U-571. I served on a 1945 U.S. Submarine during my time in the Navy. There are only 2 submarine movies that I have ever seen that actually were technically correct as far as commands and operations. The first, of course, was Das Boot. U-571 was the other. About the only challenge I had was with how quickly the Americans were able to master the controls of the boat. I'm not sure I could have done that, though I was qualified in submarines. Harvey Keitel's role as a senior chief was masterful. I served with grizzled old chiefs near the end of their careers that had begun in the WW-2 boats. Whoever wrote that script nailed it. I have always been aware that the British were the first to capture the code machine, so I just enjoyed the movie because it took me back to the wildest time of my life. Almost nothing worked anymore on that old boat...but we still went on patrol against the Soviets. I also served on the early "boomers". The difference was striking...thank you, Admiral Rickover!
To everyone who says "it's just a movie" why even bother making it in first place? Why waste hundreds of millions of dollars just to misrepresent and in many instances blatantly lie about real historical events? Why disrespect the ancestors of those events and their descendants? Just make a fantasy story...
Why is it a waste of money if they make profit? And films are made to be entertaining, Braveheart is probably in my top 20 movies, i don't care how inaccurate it is.
But sadly, the masses buy into it, in their millions! And as such, total bollocks is perceived as historical fact......by the shockingly apathetic masses.
It also fails to show that US troops killed very many civilians. In reality there was none of the care for civilians as suggested by the film and the whole operation was a cock up from start to finish.
Thank you for bringing up Argo. The movie itself is good, however every time I see anything about it, my anger level raises. As a Canadian it just underscores how Americans like to take credit for everything they can even when it’s not theirs to take.
I know, right? No-one who has ever paid the slightest attention to our little country's values could honestly think we would do anything but help out as best we can!
My personal pet peeve of "lies" in a historical movie about "Midway" the most recent one with Woody Harrelson playing Admiral Nimitz. While I could deal with the average to mediocre acting in the picture, the historical distortions drive me crazy. For example, in a scene where an SBD is chased by two or three Zeros, the gunner shoots them down with relative ease. In reality, the rear gunner in a dive bomber or torpedo bomber was almost useless, The best they could hope was maybe a minor hit or throwing off the enemy's aim. The American fighter squadrons from Enterprise, Hornet, and Yorktown were not depicted in the movie. Neither were the marine fighters defending Midway. It's unfortunate because they protected their carriers and also helped to cover the dive bombers going in.
It was the US Fighters that diverted the Japanese CAP fighters covering the Carriers. Not the torpedo bombers as claimed. As the book Shattered Sword points out, the Torpedo bombers went in half an hour to 45 minutes before the dive bombers showed up. In other words plenty of time for the Japanese CAP fighters to have slaughtered them, then climbed back to altitude. Does not take an AM6 Zero half an hour to climb to CAP Altitude! For some reason though the Japanese fighters got fixated by the US fighters, which led to those US fighter jocks having some 'interesting times', but left the way almost clear of Japanese fighters for the Dive Bombers. And they took advantage of that by essentially killing three Japanese Carriers in less than twenty minutes!
Ben Affleck himself has conceded an inaccuracy in the film Argo. The protestors outside the embassy were students, in their late teens and early twenties. However, they couldn't get extras that age so they went with who was available and that was the older people you see in the film.
I hope you do another one of these, Black Hawk Down is one I can't watch anymore after finding out that apparently soldiers in that one did at one point use civilians as human shields, and one of the soldiers (did not get named though in-movie) was jailed for child sex abuse IIRC.
Yeah, it’s one thing to fictionalise a piece of “historically inspired”entertainment to target your largest audience. It’s quite another to unfairly denigrate the real parties involved.
There's also a bit of meta historical revisionism that has arisen around Braveheart... people pretending that they didn't like the movie when it came out in 1995, or that they always knew the history was bogus. It was extremely popular, and at the time, you couldn't just do a quick web search to fact check the movie. I remember I had to look up information on the Scottish War of Independence at a university library to learn more.
I still find it an entertaining movie and when I see it pop up as a "suggested" on a streaming service I watch it, just for the hell of it. If you haven't seen it yet, Outlaw King on Netflix is a good romp of that time period as well.
@@PJWestfield Outlaw King is more accurate although still some major inaccuracies (Edward II wasn't involved in the Battle of Loudon Hill for example) but it looks more period appropriateband gets the politics much better. Also as a wee boy I loved the stories of the Black Douglas so still got a thrill seeing him on screen
At the time it seemed to be the first movie to show battle scenes like that. The closest runner up at the time was the much earlier Excalibur, and from our perspective this blew it out of the water. Also at the time none of us had the faintest idea what the actual history had been. When I later learned how different it was I laughed, like I laughed at some of Mel Gibson's antics since then. But the movie was still entertaining to watch, both before and after knowing it's BS.
My friend and I, both from the Highlands, were visiting some English friends and went to Coventry to watch Braveheart. We were the only 2 cheering on the Scots in the battles. At one point a loud whisper was heard from somewhere at the back "But there's 2 of them!", this caused a general outburst of laughing and the English folks got over themselves and enjoyed the rest of the film.
They only recover the code books not the machines. They had plenty of the Enigma machines. It also cost the movie makers $40,000 for a sculpture commemorating the event. IT is in Tamworth, the home of AB Colin Grazier who lost his life recovering the code books. th-cam.com/video/aUEnn4ZyYnU/w-d-xo.htmlsi=M7wYl1QpOXLJMDV1
@@JAmediaUK Well, Wikipedia disagrees, although what you say may make sense. How did the British figure out the details of the four rotor Enigma? I thought that was through some capture. Maybe of a weather ship rather than a U-boat though.
@@TomFarrell-p9z Second word in your sentence there removes all credibility from anything you say. Wikipedia is not a reliable source, its a tool to be used to help guide you in a direction to research, however is known to be full of ****.
@@TomFarrell-p9z Wikipedia is very unreliable as a source. The British had the 3 rotor systems before the war. (it was a commercially available system) They had already acquired the 4 rotor system, though all that was needed was the code books. Knowing there were 4 rotors rather than three for the navy was enough. The code books give the settings for the rotors and the stegle(sp?) Panel. Unlike the army and air force, the navy could not be easily re-supplied with code books. SO theirs covered weeks or months at a time. Getting a set of navy code books would give you all the settings for anything between a week to 3 months. The Germans had no way of updating the books early. Though, they would assume the books had been destroyed. The code books were recovered 15 times in WW2 13 times by the Brits and twice by the US (late in the war) BTW the BIG secret at Bletchley wasn't so much Enigma (though the UK sold Enigma as "unbreakable" to most of the Commonwealth countries for 30 years after the war) but Lorenz. That is a much deeper secret that only started to come to light in the last decade.
A tragedy to be sure, but that was war back then. Even nation have civilian ships and liners sunk by lurking submarines and their torpedo's. The Soviets sunk the German liner Wilhelm Gustloff during the German retreat from Russia and she was laden with refuges, women and children along with military members. The US and RN subs sunk many Axis civilian ships, especially Japanese. Sadly none of the major nations Navy's that fought in that war have clean hands.
Another disappointing "true story" movie was "The Blindside" - a movie I really liked...until Michael Ohr said he didn't like it because it basically lied and made stuff up.
They do this with a lot of films about African Americans because they need a white savior. The film Hidden Figures does the same thing which is really stupid because there were white men who stood up for the women computers but they also did a lot of standing up for themselves.
One of the inaccuracies of "Braveheart" that was edited out was when right in the middle of a scene, Mel Gibson had a meltdown and started "channeling" Hitler......
I watched U571 while in the RAF. We were taking part in an exercise in Canada at the time and the cinema was roughly evenly split between RAF, RCAF and USAF. At the end there was a chorus of boos from all the Brits and Canucks while the Americans quietly snuck out.
Yeah that movie U-571 pissed me off my father was in the ROYAL Navy In Ww2 , we knew a British destroyer was who captured a U-Boat , that accomplished the fear
They weren’t the only ones… BTW the real U-571 was sunk by an RAAF Sunderland from 461 Squadron off Ireland and lost with all hands on 28th of January 1944… When it entered service in 1941 the British were already reading a substantial number of enigma messages…
It made me mad too. I have always been very interested in researching history and I've spent a lot of time learning about WW1 and WW2. I was a teenager when U-571 came out in theaters and I was extremely excited to go see it even though I only knew a fraction of what I know now about history. I often broke down into tears while researching WW1 and WW2, envisioning what living through those horrific events would have been like and trying to understand the perceptions of people who's lives were spent living in constant terror. My excitement of wanting to see the movie turned into disgust really fast when I saw they rewrote what actually happened in history to once again paint the Americans as hero's when they weren't even participating in the war at that time. I'm Canadian and I thought the insult to the Royal Navy sailors by giving the credit to the Americans was unacceptable, so I can't imagine how upsetting it must have been for you.
My father had to visit Iran several times in the '80s because he worked in the oil industry. The queues at the airport in Tehran are very short in the movie but were hours long in reality.
So Bravehearts historicity is similar to that of Jesus? (main source was written decades after death by someone clearly biased and not in line/ mentioned by other contemporary historians)
It's worse. The four canonical Gospels were written by people who were there at the time, or people who spoke extensively with people who were there at the time. Four contemporary accounts is about as good as it gets for ancient history, and they are backed up by other records. As the narrator records, the writing on which BH was claimed to have been based, was not contemporary and was regarded as BS when it was written.
@@peterwebb8732 1. the gospels were written in a language that none of the people featured in them spoke: ancient Greek 2. Historians and theologians agree that Mark is likely the oldest, written roughly 50 yrs after Jesus supposed death, the others are another ~100yrs younger and copied a lot from Mark, but added more superhero content to their fanfiction. 3. Mark was likely written to appeal to a Roman audience, so it was biased.
@@stthcnths 1. Wrong. Greek was the common “working” language of a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual society. 2. Speculation without evidence or reason. There is no evidence to claim “copying” when the narrative for each is derived from the recollections of eye-witnesses. There is no evidence for “additions”, when -again- we are discussing eye-witness accounts. Eye-witnesses are notorious for differing on detail because each individual views from different perspectives, is impressed by different aspects and remembers different details. 3. Duh! Each account covers those details and aspects that are particularly relevant to the intended audience. They are not meant to be exhaustive, encyclopaedic records of every moment of the life of Jesus of Nazareth. We have far less detail concerning the majority of historic personalities.
@@peterwebb8732 1. Okay, I admit, that some of the apostles must have known conversational Greek. But I doubt that arameic fisherman knew it. 2. You're derailing. It is historical and theological consensus that Mark is the oldest and has at least a 40yr gap between Jesus' supposed death and it being written. That's a hell of a lot of time for eye witness becoming unreliable. Also it is fact that Jesus is more a teacher in Mark than a miracle worker, which he becomes in the younger gospels. I know of the whole "source Q" debate so maybe mark was not the sole source - but if you treat the gospels from a historical or literature-Analysis viewpoint and leave of your believe-tinted glasses it is evident how the text turned more mystical. 3. ... or factually true. They have to be a good story. Finding truth in religion is hard, if you apply only the tools of a historian.
@@stthcnths 1. Oh? You think they didn’t SELL fish, to anyone with the money to pay, in the markets where everyone spoke Greek? The idea that they could not have, is speculation on your part, not history. 2. The dating of the Gospels is more speculation, and very inexact speculation at that. The Gospels themselves are probably the best available time regarding their time of origin and authorship. 3. My friend, if you are going to talk about history, then you must account for the best evidence available…. not ignore it with the excuse that it is “religious”. Being written in Greek is entirely plausible, even if somebody acted as scribe and translator for the authors, because the early Christian Church was explicitly multicultural. The speculation regarding later authorship is entirely that. SPECULATIVE. Inconsistency is EXPECTED, because eye-witnesses normally are, and accounts written for different audiences will favour those points of relevance to the audience. Amongst the most compelling evidence of a conspiracy to write fiction would be complete consistency. Conspirators care about such things. Eye-witnesses are more likely to vary between “No shit, there I was….” and “Your Honour, I witnessed the accused…….”.
It was a little strange to me in the movie that as soon as he hopped out of the sub he joined his band mates on a stage and began to sing Living On A Prayer while all of the American soldiers were rocking out. I had always assumed Bon Jovi sang Dead or Alive on that historic day.
Thanks for that last part involving Argo. I read up on the Canadian side and got more and more annoyed at how the US govt seemed to ‘let’ Canada take credit for the whole affair. There’re even some tv movies about the Canadian Caper that portray it in a more accurate light. Then again, drama is essentially lying for entertainment. Side note: IMBW, but the Canadian parliament held a secret session granting the Americans Canadian passports in order for them to leave Iran legally, something that hadn’t been done since WW2 for Jewish refugees trying to leave Europe.
"300" and "Gladiator" never professed to be historically accurate. "300" came from a graphic novel and was a lot of fantasy while "Gladiator" openingly said that it was a fictional story. 'Braveheart" on the other hand said it was based on historical events and was anything but. In fact the only thing accurate in the movie is that William Wallace once lived.
True. I see 300 as a campsite story told the night before a battle to men to fire them up before a big war. As seen at the closing scenes with the Spartans facing the Persians again. Taken in that aspect - soldier tales and dits - means exaggeration and license allows for these extremes.
@@BRH0587 I think the only "true" event from 300 was the Spartans killed the Persian emissaries. The Spartans apparently later sent an embassy to Persia to apologise and seek forgiveness from the Persians for this gross breach of divinely sanctioned manners. The Persians just laughed.
You should do an episode about movies that need an epilogue or sequel that tells what happened after the movie that knocked the wind out of the sails of said movie. Like Changeling (2008) and that the kid who testified against his serial killer uncle, was an unwilling accomplice, and led police to numerous shallow graves, was later allegedly a suspect in a murder case at 48 when one of his next door neighbors disappeared for two weeks and was eventually found in a shallow grave not far away.
With respect to the Battle of Sterling Bridge, it was exactly the same tactical problem at the Battle of Antetam in the American Civil War. With, unsurprisingly, the same outcome.
Still, there is a captured former German submarine at Chicago, that serves as a tourist attraction. British submarines were captured, but they all sank. The US managed to take the submarine under tow, and successfully recovered it.
The UK captured at least one U boat early in the war, using it in anti submarine warfare development, and in operations. U-570 was reused as HMS Graph (pun intended).
I'm Ametican, and having grown up knee deep in punk rock since the late '70s, "our" persistent exceptionalism makes me fkng furious. And it just seems to be getting more and more ubiquitous and egregious. It's embarrassing.
Fiction - based on 'true events'. The only problem is being so badly informed that there is no discrimination between fiction and fact. Except that more money is spent making fiction appear real.
As a Brit I just got used to the whole "America won the war" thing. Remembering that Hollywood never gave two hoots about history. Even America's own history. I would suggest watching Errol Flynn as Custer in "They Died With Their Boots on" as a prime example of that. Although, that line from the RAF Squadron Leader to Ben Afleck in "Pearl Harbor", "God help any country that goes to war with America", just makes me want to throw up! And just WHY is Ben Afleck the ONLY American in the ALL AMERICAN "Eagle Squadron" in the first place?
Actually the much derided 10 000 BC movie is not bad at all IF you don’t perceive it as a historic movie. I don’t know where anyone claimed it was historic or accurate, so the most common criticism I heard is that “oh it’s so inaccurate this is not how things were 12 000 years ago!”. I think it was always meant to be a fantasy set in a fantasy “pre historic” times.
Look into the movie Hacksaw Ridge. The story I saw was that the director had to remove or leave out scenes because they were so unbelievable that he thought audiences wouldn't take the subject matter seriously. The director was Mel Gibson
It was hilarious in the second season of Fargo TV series that right after the phrase “out of respect for the victims, events are depicted exactly as they occurred” disappeared from the screen, the UFO shows up.
The Dutch actualy had an Enigma like machine in the 1920's as the German Enigma has further encryption by adding more dials when going from commerce to naval use. The Polish mathematicians handed over their findings yet the French took it and the Brits being complete sphinctors declined at first 😅
The only decent things with Braveheart were the music and Brendan Gleeson's beard. Oh, and the car parked up as the English (probably mostly Irish, since it was filmed there) were charging the Scots at the Not Battle of Stirling Bridge!!
The subtlety lost on 300 is that it is meant to be a "propaganda story" told by the only survivor of the battle (the guy with the eye patch) and is based on a comic and not the original story. Unlike these 3 films, it doesn't misrepresent itself anywhere near as much unless you miss the obvious exaggeration.
From 1943 461 Squadron RAAF was based at Pembroke Dock, Pembrokeshire, Wales, the U.K. had no bases on the West Coast of Ireland as the entire West Coast of Ireland was neutral. 461 Squadron was formed at RAF Mountbatten, Plymouth, in 1942, then moved to Harmworthy in Dorset, then onto West Wales, not the West Coast of Ireland
@@zelts the original comment was the Sunderland was based in the west of Ireland, I know thatU571 was sunk off the West coast of Ireland, but 461 squadron was based in the West of Wales
@@davidharris4062 Howdy, I made three points in my post. 1) U571 was sunk. 2) It was sunk by an Australian Sunderland. 3) It was sunk west of Ireland. I made no mention of the 461 Squadron being based in Ireland. Cheers.
I’ve got this great idea for a t.v series. There's this bunch of British battleships and carriers in the Pacific and they have a long distance battle with the Japanese near a place called Midway. The heroes would be the pilots who would have jolly hocky stick personalities with moustaches and say things like ''Wizard Prang'' and ''Tallyo'' and they drink tea all the time and have flasks of it in their cockpits on the way to the target. Some could be eccentric like one Simon D'eath whose ancestor was one of the few in the Charge of The Light Brigade he's nicknamed Errol after Flynn who starred in the authentic film version - of course the one set in India and not the fake one from the Crimea. Anyway Errol refuses to take off unless he's got his ancestor's lance in the cockpit with him - it sticks out the back still flaunting the flag of the 9th Hussars. If our yank cousins object we'll just plead artistic licence.
U-571 was hilarious. I watched it with my Grandfather, a merchant navy radio operator in WWII. He bounced signals for the allies, telling them where to find any enemy ship or sub they spotted. He said this movie was full to the brim of BS and laughed himself silly. That's not how things happened.
The real battle of Sterling Bridge would have been much better on the big screen. A visit to Sterling Scotland will give you a much more exhaustive story of the battle. Just, please Sterling, remove the ugly statue of Gibson as Wallace and replace it with a truer depiction of the Scottish heri.
being picky as i go to Stirling once a week at least to visit family and friends, it is spelt Stirling not Sterling. there is Sterling Homes near by in Tillicoultry which is a furniture store or pound Sterling which is our currency.
A visit to _Stirling_ Scotland will reveal the statue hasn't been there since 2008, and is now on display in Brechin. Unless it got carried away by the flooding...
One criticism of U 571 I never hear: I found it completly ridiculous, that the crew could master an absolutly foreign type of U-boot in about 3 days. They even made a small point of not being able to read teh labels, yet still, a handfull of hours laters they pulled of feats, which only NS-Propaghanda would dare to depict.
If I can recall most of the interwar period American Submarines did have a similar design basis to the ww1 German u-boats to the layouts could be nearly identical enough that it is possible to operate a captured German U-boat. It would also depend on if the crew does understand the German language that is.
When will these video writers/presenters stop saying THE HMS whatever ...... in this video HMS Bulldog was mentioned. HMS is an abbreviation of His Majesty's Ship, therefore to say 'The His Majesty's Ship Bulldog ' makes no grammatical sense. Either call the vessel 'The Bulldog' or 'HMS Bulldog'
If you do a sequel I hope you’ll include the 1989 movie Glory. Brilliant movie, excellent cast, but only Col. Shaw, played by Matthew Broderick, was an actual historical figure. And the scene with the colors at the end isn’t how history records it happening.
You made me look up your claim. If you do a search "were there american POWs in the Stalag Luft III camp for the Great Escape" you will find links to a number of sites that show that you are completely incorrect. Shalom
@politicsuncensored5617 yes, there were US personnel in the camp but they were in a different compound, having been moved some time before the escape. I should have said "in that part of the POW camp". Therefore, there were no Americans in the escape attempt as was depicted in the film.
@@redguern If there had been no big American actors in the movie it would have been just another B movie about WW2. The stars made this movie a hit worldwide back then. Shalom
Quick second here. You said that the Pole's were able to "reverse engineer an ENIGMA machine based on the intelligence that they had gathered." My understanding was that an ENIMGA machine was sent to the German Embassy in Poland but that Polish Intelligence intercepted the machine. They were then able to quickly study it, copy it, put the original back together and back to the German Embassy. This was I believe 1939, just prior to the invasion. After 01 September 1939 the Pole's were able to smuggle the ENIGMA machine and their code cracking intelligence data out of Poland and the the British. All of that saved the British YEARS of time.
The Enigma machines were commercially available before WW2. The Poles did get them and get them to the UK. Along with a load of very able Polish mathematicians and code breakers. Their achievements at Bletchley are not celebrated widely enough.
@@JAmediaUK No doubt. What Bletchley Park did has been in several movies and multitudes of documentaries but it is still UNDER APPRECIATED. Yeah, I had forgotten that ENIGMA was based on...basically a corporate design...based on.
@@MartinW-e5q To be honest, Enigma was a side show at Bletchley. Their real achievements were inventing the modern computer and cracking Lorenz, that both lead to many other things that are still classified to this day. Captain Roberts did a book and a documentary in his late 80s, early 90s on Lorenz that were only released after he died in 2017. See www.waterstones.com/book/lorenz/jerry-roberts/9780750987707 One thing I do know is there was a fully working (and improved) Colossus computer that had been rebuilt in the 1960s That I only found out a few years ago but it put a whole load of other things from my childhood into context.
On 25/26 July 1939, just outside Warsaw, the Poles shared their full knowledge of and progress in decrypting Enigma with the British and French. While they still could. I feel this single act contributed at least as much to Britain's survival, and to the ultimate allied victory, as almost any other one single act. I am glad that the Polish contribution to the survival of Britain, and ultimately to winning the war, has become more widely appreciated here in Britain and elsewhere in recent years. Not just Enigma, but the highly skilled pilots, destroyer crews who goaded and attacked the Bismark in the epic chase, and so much more. And the shameful way the government, trying to avoid antagonising Stalin, treated those same Polish veterans just after the war ended.
@@adriangoodrich4306 Never mind July 1939, there was a LOT of Polish support in Bletchley throughout the war of code breaking, not to mention the Polish squadrons in the RAF and Polish Military units in exile that were attached to the British Army. IT wasn't just for the survival of Britain as much as the survival of Europe. Sadly, much of that knowledge in this post Brexit Britain is fading.
I envisioned an American submarine crew walking into British Intelligence, 'Look ... we captured an Enigma machine.'
'Good show... put it with the others,' Waves at a pile of Enigma machines.
The British Naval Intelligence teams collected about a dozen…(along with the code books).
Ian Fleming (yes the James Bond author) had a couple of teams who did it repeatedly…
The U.S. did capture a set with U505 (currently on display in Chicago) on June 4, 1944 (late but useful).
By that time 1942 they had already broken the enigma machine and were ready the Nazis mail for a couple years already (which the Americans knew as well). So the whole premise of the movie was just a complete joke. It would make just as much sense if UK came to us with Japanese equivalent (red machine if my memory is correct right now) at that time as we had broken their codes. Pretty good movie though.
🤣🤣🤣
A note that there's not just one Enigma, there are a few versions. The story stolen by U-571 for example wasn't just Operation Primrose, but also a separate unnamed event where the crew of HMS Petard (G56) boarded U-559 and captured not the machine, but settings for a more complicated 4-rotor Enigma. While it's often said that the Enigma was long broken, this 4-rotor version had caused an information blackout on U-boat operations for 10 whole months.
@@nathansheldahl apart from 'damn, all the dials are in german!'
In high school one of our history teachers showed us Braveheart and thought it was historically accurate depiction of the war. But our teacher also had the misfortune that year of having two students by the name of James and Sara in the class; they were twins that had just immigrated to Canada from Scotland since their stepdad was Canadian. James basically spent the entire time we watched the movie making fun of how inaccurate it was. This was probably one of the funniest moments I ever saw of a teacher getting personally offended by a student, our teacher tried to claim James was "mocking historical events and the suffering of the Scottish people" to which James reminded the teacher that he was actually Scottish and the teacher wasn't. James then went on to explain not only are these events taught as standard history lessons in Scotland, but his late father was obsessed with that era of Scottish History something James shared with him before his passing; which shut the teacher up very quickly.
James may have been bluffing a bit. I was at school in Scotland when Braveheart came out, and not once had a history lesson on the Wars of Scottish Independence.
What became of the teacher afterwards? I mean, resorting to Hollywood movies as a formal curriculum material is one thing, but fully believing them to be these factual accurate beacon of truth and getting offended on their behalf is a whole another thing loooool Please tell me there were reprimands. US students already suffer heavily from Us-centric skewed history lessons, and to have clowns like that as our children's teachers is just outrageous
@@trentitybrehm5105that’s all well and good, what do you think of the subject at hand tho? I fail to see how your comment connects to the discussion you’ve posted a reply in.
Braveheart is a great movie, but very poor history as most film depictions for entertainment are. Gibson did no better with The Patriot or Apocalypto.
Apparently Mel Gibson said the bridge got in the way of the battle scene. The Scots responded wt "aye the English found the same thing"
Thank you for mentioning Argo. I am Canadian and I was a teenager at the time of the hostage crisis in Iran and the rescue of the 6. I was so pissed off at the movie because I remembered following the story and the movie was nothing like that.
I was in college and remember that whole episode well. It was entirely thought of by us in the United States as a Canadian operation.
Blazing Saddles is more historically accurate than Braveheart
Now you’re talking!xx😂
...especially the beans-at-the-campfire scene and "The French Mistake."
Where are the white women at?
😂😂😂 lol u made me snort-laugh at 5am
And a better movie
Braveheart and The Patriot basically boil down to Mel Gibson not liking the English.
Well, the English DID kill Jesus. . . .
If you take a good look at the history of England... you really can't blame Mel Gibson...
@@lbnoronha The pot calling the kettle black.
@@JakeKilka The US cannot admit that they are the children of Great Britain that most closely resembles the parent.
@@lbnoronha Yeah, because Australia never persecuted its native people. Mel forgot that one.
Having a degree in history, I would vastly prefer if the visual entertainment media started off their films with the superimposed title: "The movie you are about to see is utter bollocks and any resemblance to factual events or real persons is laughable considering how high we were when made this, so eat your popcorn and shut up."
and the unusual preface for Master and Commander 'This one is reasonably accurate except it was an american privateer not a frenchy, but we do so love the american box office proceeds'
works for me.
when you watch a movie it is a given that the story is BS made up by Hollywood morons
They do this on The Great, a series about Catherine the Great, saying it is occasionally based on history.
This only true for movies where American Exceptionalism is the underlined theme of the movie, like Argo or Pearl Harbor... Movies like "Tora, Tora, Tora" don't need this title... And weed is not the reason, American Jingoism is...
Thanks for setting the record straight on Argo. As a Canadian, I'm used to our roles in nearly everything being downplayed when it comes to films. You can do an entire video on how Canada's significant contribution to DDay was almost completely ignored in the Longest Day, as an example. Same for the Great Escape.
American stars == Box office $$$ The big problem the Canadians had in WW2 was a shortage of high calibre, rapid firing film studios.... 🙂 The UK suffered the same way. To get most WW2 films made a major part had to be created for a US actor. For example Bridge over the River Kwai
@@JAmediaUK Absolutely. Hence Gregory Peck playing a Brit Capt in Guns of Navarone. It still rankles how, beyond the somewhat fake insertion of American stars, how the Canadian contribution to the war almost always is pushed aside.
@@JAmediaUK yes basic economics, 633 squadron comes to mind.
Americans just can't stand the possibility that there are other countries in the world who might be better than them.
The limo driver in”Die Hard?”
Das Boot, the original German miniseries from 1981. Masterpiece.
The only time I felt sad the death of a submarine!
Great movie!! It portrayed the boredom and fear of the U-boat service!
One of the best war films ever made for sure. 👍
erm.. that wasn't mentioned in this video .. point being??
The longest day is a pretty good representation of what happened, the only thing that lets it down is the equipment the vehicles the germans used..
There are 2 types of "historical" movie. Those that are fictional stories set within a historical context, and those that claim to be a depiction of historical events.
Gladiator, IMO falls into the former category; at no point does it claim to be "based on a true story" and, while some of the characters are loosely based on historical figures, the central character is entirely fictitious.
Braveheart, however, presents itself as an account of actual history, which makes it's crimes against accuracy and authenticity all the greater.
Agora is a fictional story in a historical context that claims that is based on historical fact despite being historically accurate as Braveheart
@@stephenmalovski313 ok, so it goes in the latter category 💁
There's an argument to be made that the former makes for a more reliably "better" film. It's easier to have character growth occur in the film's runtime if that person isn't real and you're basically making them piecemeal from people who actually existed. "The Last Samurai" fits in with that category, it's hard to fit the entirety of the Meiji Restoration and it's context and have a historically accurate film - so it crimps a bit on the accuracy (the winning any battles part) to deliver a lot regarding the context of what's happening at the time.
@@smalltime0 I completely agree. Accuracy shouldn't necessarily be the primary objective when making a film in a historic context, I consider authenticity far more important.
But *IF* one is going to make a film that claims to depict history as it happened, then one is obliged to be as accurate as possible.
HEY!
Braveheart wasn't that bad. It was slightly more historically accurate than "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter".
Thanks for hitting hard on Argo As a Canuk of a certain vintage it pissed me off to no end..
As a fellow Canadian ya it kind of pissed me off as well. But then again it’s Hollywood, what do you expect? I’m surprised in Braveheart they didn’t have the Marines charging in and rescuing the airports from the dastardly Red Coats😂😂😂😂🇨🇦🇨🇦🇨🇦
There is a very good reason why the Canadians were involved. The location of their embassy compared to the location of the UK Embassy The other embassy involved was the New Zealand one. The British Ambassador in Tehran was VERY scathing of Argo (after he retired). What will probably never come out is the reality of how the US staff who were not in any way field operatives got out and to the UK Embassy in the first place. There were some Pilgrims knocking about who got them to the UK Embassy, Due to the location they were moved to another Comomwealth/5-Eyes embassy that was not in the middle of things. It was the Brits and Canadians who got the US people out and safe for 80 days. As the UK SF were staying in country (for many months longer) they did not want to be known about and as with most British stuff like this it is kept quiet. In fact they were still hanging around near the US Embassy when the abortive raid went in 1980. I remember the fuss (I was on a joint UK/USA base at the time) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Eagle_Claw
Fellow Canuck here. Canada's role I'm anything like these representations are always grossly underrepresented. Credit where credit is due. Just look at many stories and books regarding the Battle of Monte Cassino, or D-Day, not to mention a large number of other battles over the course of history that paint the US as the saviors when they truly only played a part in the entirety of an operation/operations.
As I read more and more about the actual events, i rolled my eyes at how bad the movie painted the Canadian part of the whole affair. I did see an excellent documentary where Ken Taylor is interviewed, as well as others in the gov’t during that time.
The sad reality is most Americans are unlikely to go see a movie that isn’t about them.
When it comes to historical accuracy from the movie industry you do not need a grain of salt, most of the time one needs a barrel.
A fifty-five gallon drum, more like it.
And a fish, to put in the barrel..
And a gun
@@zaneandre6387 fistbump
Using Hollywood for accurate history is............ ridiculous.
Many of the Hollywood WWII movies made after the war were in fact based on actual events. But.... yeah.
Those two bridges in the clip are in Stirling Scotland. (I've been there.) But they are not THE Stirling Bridge of the battle. They aren't even in the same location. So why even show them?
Breaking the Enigma Code began when the Poles figured out it was possible. As soon as it was introduced in the mid 1930s, they started working on the problem. Their first important insight came after stealing a machine in pre War Berlin. However many millions of iterations the Germans thought they had, Polish mathematicians almost immediately figured out it was half that number. This becomes a theme in cracking the code. All messages started with repeating the same thing twice, and on Hitler's Birthday, acknowledging this is always at the beginning. Another critcal factor in all of this is the German assumption Enigma Codes could not be broken. As Poland was overrun, they first brought all of their work to France and then to England. During the war Germans added more code wheels and connections, massively complicating the task.
British code breakers, especially Alan Turing were brilliant at cracking it ( The Imitation Game is about as stupid an example of a bad history movie as there could be. All the deadlines in the movie are ridiculous.) The Brits invented the first electronic computer to decode messages.
The one question remains, and is worthy of discussion (but not an uniformed internet pissing match) is, Would the Brits have started on this task had not the Poles already figured out it was possible? The real importance of addressing a question like this is not Who gets the glory? but what other things might we succeed at if we identify them and begin working?
I think the Poles got the ball rolling, but without the level of resources and work at Bletchley Park, the Poles would've been stymied as the rotors were added.
Another way of looking at this type of thinking is. If you can think of the United States as an extension of England, what then was it the Americans did that ultimately made the U.S. so much wealthier than the UK?
Sometimes the most important step is deciding to tackle a problem or pursue an idea. I remember when someone criticized me for not making enough money. Well, I'm the problem solver of last resort, so..... Once I looked at this as just another problem....
The importance of accuracy even in fiction is that it informs us as to what actually happened and how it happened, and how it might inform the present and the future. One of the most important aspects of historiography over the past hundred years or so is What were all those people who weren't kings and queens, or rich, or popes doing that changed history?
Even the title “Braveheart” should rightly refer to Robert the Bruce rather than William Wallace, and that after Bruce's death.
Ha! Came to the comments to say this. Jolly good, carry on.
you tellin' me an Australian alcoholic isn't a historian by default?
@@tripsaplenty1227 well, he is a far right nutter who supports Trump, so naturally he thinks he is an expert on everything. IF he wasn't a movie "star*" he would be on social media trolling and "owning the libs."
Yea but the movie told me Robert the Bruce was a punk so a punk he shall remain
@@jejbsh2191 ... ... ... riiiiiiight... exactly my point (internally)
So it's not true that William Wallace stole an Enigma machine and used the codes to engineer the escape from Iran?
I know, truly sad.xx
No, not true at all. He put the machine on top of the Stone of Scone. And then, centuries later, the thieving English stole it to break the French and Spanish codes at the Battle of Trafalgar.
@@adriangoodrich4306 Those bastards. I always knew the English cheated
I heard a story about Mel Gibson being asked about the Bridge by a Scotsman, Mel said the Bridge was in the way, and the Scotsman said, "that was also what the English found out".
I'm still waiting for the Hollywood version of Dunkirk, where the intrepid American boat owners leave Nantucket and sail across the Atlantic (fighting off a strange white whale in the process) to rescue the British army from France and deliver them safely to Number 10 Downing Street and a grateful Winston Churchill, who then gives them all an OBE each and the thanks of the British people.
You mean that isn't what happened? 🙂
You forgot the event where they were haunted by aliens but managed to drive them back launching a homemade explosive made with nitroglycerine, old newspapers and chewing gum using a potato cannon.
I like "Churchill The Hollywood Years" which claims the real Winston Churchill was an American GI. The person we recognise as Churchill was an actor named Roy Bubbles.
Of course it's actually a satire of American films where they take credit for stuff they didn't actually do.
@@Psyk60 Actually, Winston's Mother was American.... en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Randolph_Churchill Which is all Hollywood needs to create a story "based on Real Events" 🙂
@@Psyk60 Wasn't Churchill played by Christian Slater? I like that film, it just takes the p!ss out of the whole Hollywood thing 😂
Ironic, isn’t it? How often Poland is downplayed in the Second World War. . . . . And yet, they create and reverse engineered so much!!! GO POLAND 🇵🇱
They also liberated part of my country. Thank you Poland ❤
@@marktg98 you referring to France? Benelux?
@@thetankcommander3838 🇳🇱
Wotjek alone is worth remembering. The right to arm bears matters.
@@Adelina-293 Hahaha I see what you did there. 🤣
I love the "safe-ified" "mokeyfightin snakes and this mondaytofriday plane!" rofls!
Samuel (Censored) Jackson will never not be funny
Yeah that cracked me up as well, wasn't expecting it! 🤣🤣🤣
I understood Monkeyfried couldn't get the second
Anyone learning English is gonna be really confused hearing those phrases. Well, at least until they get to the curses.
*stares mondaytofriday-ly*
The line "you make take our lives, but you'll never take our freedom", was actually close to what Wallace actually said. They used the word "freedom" instead of " Nintendo Game Boys" as the producers believed that no-one would believe that William Wallace would not be a fan of Playstation........ True Story.
Inaccurate historical movies could be a weekly feature and Sideprojects would never run out of material.
Especially if they just stuck to US made films.
I was involved in an actual "snakes on a plane" situation in 1977. Air Wisconsin was transporting a crate of non-poisonous snakes when at least one got out. Upon taking off from O'Hare Airport in Chicago, the Captain saw it poke its head out under the instrument panel.
When I, a mechanic, came into work that night, I was told to open up the inspection panels in the floor, "and look for anything unusual." I was told afterwards what I should have been looking for (and didn't find.)
Hahaha OMG. You could have been bitten in the face, what would their excuse have been?.
@@highcountrydelatitepeople don't learn the difference between venomous and poisonous
@@highcountrydelatite a. I didn't say anything about it one way or another..
b. I lived in the country with the most deadly snakes there are, and played golf on a course where there were Brown snakes
that were as thick as a girls thigh. YOUR most venomous snake has a little rattle, and curls up in a ball and tells you off. Brown snakes leave you alone and sit tight, unless they get upset, in which case they will chase you about and you better hop.
c. No one asked your opinion, chump.
I'm a New Zealander and I remembered being quite surprised by the surprising swing thrown at us by Argo for no good reason.
Thank you for giving the Polish cryptographers credit... a story in itself.
The Poles were brilliant at it! Before the invasion the Germans sent an enigma machine to their embassy in Warsaw - by parcel post! It arrived at the sorting office on Friday giving the Polish Intelligence two full days to strip it down, photograph every part and then rebuild it before delivering it to the Germans the following Monday!
And the Poles delivered it to British Intelligence, who played that down..and virtually didn't acknowledge them or even allow them to participate in code breaking...
@@thomaslawry5238 Erm, that entire Polish team was part of the codebreaking. I don't know where you got THAT information from but its false.
And while its important to remember the Polish contribution, its also important not to overplay it. The Poles broke the pre war Enigma machines, Even by 1939 the machines had been made far more complex, and the Poles while trying were simply unable to break Enigma after those changes.
Not really a lack of ability, but a lack of resources.
So yes, the Polish contribution was important, but this myth that the Poles broke the Enigma code and the British stole the credit is just that, a myth. Despite the early work by the Poles, there was still a lot that had to be done before Enigma was routinely breakable. The Polish team was part of that story, and an important part, but far from the only part.
Without British innovations in both Cryptography and technology based upon Polish discoveries the more complex machines would never have been broken.
I do agree though that the Polish do not get the credit they are due though. Just saying that while they are due credit, it was not all them, not by a long way.
Poles, Brits, Sovjets: Accomplish things in WW2.
American movie: No you didn’t it’s all us haha
You forgot the Canucks......Juno beach anyone?......or the liberation of Holland?
"Based on a true story / Based on historical events" is basically a meme at this point 🤷🏻♀️
A well deserved meme. The amount of BS they get away with under this "classification" is funny, as well as staggering 😅
The keyword is "Based" not meaning exactly what happened.
@@mattt233 Yeah well, at some point you diverge so much from the actual events, that you might as well don't bother and go fully fictional.
If you wanna make Fast and the Furious or Expendables, then just go and make them.
Whats even the point? Marketing?
@@thepax2621 EXACTLY!!! You want to make fiction-MAKE Fiction-You want to claim some Historical Tie-In-Make a realistic documentary!
The ultimate admission of falsehood is, "Inspired by true events."
@@mattt233 There is a difference between artistic license and complete fabrication. I don't mind artistic license to condense a story to fit a 2-hour movie or to raise the stakes, but some film makers overdo it too much that it more resembles a fairy tale than a historical film.
"Based on true events." It gave us an idea and we made the entire thing up.
Still a higher bar than "inspired by true events".
Amityville Horror Case In Point And Over 30+ Films Later Hollywood Still Buys Into It😂
A common theme with WW2 movies (and other movies too, but it’s particularly egregious with war movies) is the US being the heroes in events they were never involved in. Because lord forbid other allied nations get the showing they actually were involved in, lol.
It's not just WW2 movies. Contributions of other nations regularly get downplayed even in movies on modern events.
Then those allied nations shoukd make their own movies
I get this all the time with people talking about Saving Private Ryan as the D-Day movie, as if The Longest Day which mentions the French resistance and British (no Canadians, sorry) and shows the German POV doesn't exist.
Interestingly the BRITISH 1952 movie 'The Sound Barrier' shows the Breaking of said barrier to have been a BRITISH achievement....despite the American Chuck Yeager having ACTUALLY risked his life and done it in 1947....five years before the brit film.
You mean like the British and the Russians did…..Every nation has a tendency to showcase their own accomplishments. But the truth remains, that without the US’s entry into WWII the defeat of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan would likely have not occurred or at a minimum resulted in a desultory armistice of some sort in which the map of Europe would have been drastically altered.
I’m dreading the day that Hollywood decides that ‘The Battle of Britain’ needs a remake. 😂😂
With Tom Cruise as Douglas Bader in his P38.....
They were talking about remaking the Dam Busters, but they seemed to have an issue getting past the dogs name . . .
@@EvilGav They also wanted to move the dog's grave lest it upset tourists. The thing is, there is nothing racist about it. Gibson was privately educated at "good" private schools and studied the classics and did Greek and Latin, he was also a bit pompous about it and apparently a bit of a difficult person to work with. To Guy "nigger" was simply the the "correct" word for Black. Also, it was not an uncommon name for a black dog in the UK, particularly in the military. The term "nigger" was not regarded as offensive in the UK until the end of the 1940s and early 1950s. IE AFTER WW2 when the UK had the pleasure of the US military attitude to non-white soldiers. Indeed, the segregated US military caused problems in the UK, where the British refused to have any colour bar in pubs and bars when the US military asked for it. When it became a problem, it was more often the white (racist) US troops were told to drink elsewhere. There were similar problems in Australia. So in short, the use of the name Nigger for Guy Gibson's dog was not in any way derogatory in the UK (until we came into contact with US racism)
Hell No
Black gay American pilots doing "your mama is so fat.." jokes and blasting none stop machine guns at the 25 planes they take down each time they enter a cockpit
Thing re Enigma was that its main selling point was that it would remain secret even if the machine itself and cyphers for the day were captured (at least from the date those daily codes ran out). However the british codebreakers used computers fed with daily cyphers to basically predict the daily settings, something thought impossible by the germans who simply assumed that the raw computing power to do so was impossible. In Germany this was a case of too many stakeholders ignoring obvious signs that the code was broken because they had staked their careers on Enigma.
The naval Enigmas had 4 rotors rather than 3. This was well understood. Also, the Navy code books were for several months at a time. It is difficult to get a new sent to submarines and ships in mid-Atlantic. So capturing their code books gave from a week to 3 months of codes. The code books were on paper that would disintegrate in water, and the SOP's called for the code books to go overboard. 15 times in WW2 (that is 1939-46) the codebooks were captured, so most times they were lost. Hence, the belief in German that things were OK. Also, the sailors who captured the codebooks had no idea the significance of the books. These were ULTRA classification which was above top Secret and was also Need To Know basis as well. Most of the Intelligence services and top military had no idea about Enigma. In face when I was at the private Official r(re) Opening of Bletchley Park where they invited many who worked there, it became clear those who worked in one Hut had no idea about what happened in any other Hut. They never spoke of it for the next 50 years.
@@JAmediaUK You mean, Bletchley Park.
@@musicbruv Effing autocorrect... Thanks for that. I will fix it
I remember going to some big name Civil War movie (maybe Gettysberg?) that got a big opening, and there were re-creationists paid to attend in uniform.
The movie was long enough to have an intermission, and during that it was really fun to talk to these guys about the inaccuracies. Neat to learn something, even if it's not from the movie itself.
I did not realize how much the inaccuracies in the movie U571 traumatized me until a year later one of the young workers on my work crew was telling me how great it was. When I first watched it, I just thought if they were going to depart from reality so much they might as well have made a better movie and more completely embraced fantasy. I was shocked to find some people would think it was real and accurate.
The whole movie is pure fantasy.
Bet those people have the Stars and Stripes tattoo'ed on their arses.
The original DVD release of U571 contains an interview that the director conducted with one of the sailors from the HMS Bulldog. The sailor was part of the boarding party that recovered the Enigma device. IIRC, the sailor stated that at first they thought they had recovered a really fancy typewriter with its case. The interview is the only reason to buy the DVD.
@@CarlSmith-p2c Sounds like the director was engaging in a bit of what the navy calls "Damage Control" with the DVD release.
@@gumpyoldbugger6944 I can't remember where I saw it, but that was effectively the general consensus. These servicemen and servicewomen have interesting stories to tell. It's a shame when their voices are used by others to save a bit of face.
I absolutely loathe the phrases “based on…” and “inspired by a true story”, because neither objectively imply factual accuracy, due to how arbitrary the definitions are, but at the same time I feel like many of us see “true story” and tend to focus more on that, be it sub- or unconsciously. As an adult though, I never trust either phrase as a rule of thumb.
Just to clarify, Cocaine Bear was and still is a cinematic masterpiece. I have no doubt the accuracy of what happened was reproduced with the utmost attention to detail. To even suggest anything else is ludicrous.
😂
I was going to mention that the real cocaine bear ate the cocaine and immediately died. But I like your/this comment better.
"Papillion" was an amalgam of many convicts' stories. ''The Way Back'' was fiction, even the author's wife said he got out of the gulag and came home on a train. "The Sound of Music'' was a lie cut from whole cloth. The youngest Von Trapp child said in an interview with Terry Gross (NPR) ''We sent the servants ahead before we left in order for them to get our house ready in Switzerland. Then we got up, walked across the plaza onto a waiting train. We had a train car to ourselves of course.''
T.E. Lawrence admits to some hyperbole and misdirection in The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Daniel Defoe used Selkirk's story to create Robinson Crusoe and sprinkled it liberally with bits of fantasy.
You might think that James Rowe in ''Five Years to Freedom'' was accurate in his tale but he wrote a very different account of what actually happened for public release. (It is illegal according to the Geneva Convention to kill a prison guard in order to escape.)
BAT-21 was a reasonably honest account of that guy's struggle to get home, but he sure as heck killed a couple of civilians getting out of the jungle alive. We have to take his word for it that they would have alerted the VC if he'd let them live. (see above, it is against the Geneva Convention to harm civilians when trying to evade capture.)
Jeremiah Johnson (Liver eating Johnson to his friends) wasn't exactly the Robert Redford romantic icon we saw on screen.
And every western outlaw has a mile of fiction heaped on his name. Some of them were back stabbers, and rapists and white washed their bad deeds by becoming small town sheriffs.
Hey - I've been on Selkirk Island! Nice place, wouldn't want to be marooned there for 4 years with goats for company.
Cant disagree with anything you said. A lot of great films who obviously took license & from that perspective alone David Lean should get a pass just for capturing such beauty. Prob also 1st on the list for a remake due to its cultural impact, although that would only enhance the original
BAT-21. As the movie tells it, the civilian was trying to kill him. I did like that they were honest about Glover's character bring a composite of a collection of pilots doing the job, and giving credit to the group. It was a reasonable simplification. With a little reflection, it also does a better job of representing to the audience how tireless and dedicated those pilots were, vs seeing a rotation of pilots tasking turns.
Crow Killer is an enlightening book.
As one of my professors once said, "Most history is propoganda with bits of truth here and there."
It is if Churchill wrote it.
@@patrickporter1864 And every American history book 😄
@@elizabethsullivan7176 "And every American history book"
Case-in-point... In American history books, those events are re-titled:
- American aggressive expansion into Native and Mexican territory = Manifest Destiny;
- The great Lakota and Cheyenne tribe's victory at Little Big Horn = Custer's Last Stand;
- Civil War triggered by southern states wanting to keep exploiting slaves = The Lost Cause;
- The American defeat in the Battle of Quebec = Not even in American history books;
- All major American defeats in the Korean and Vietnam wars = Not even in American history books
I think i've made your point, lol
All the numpty's saying it was "just entertainment' (mostly from across the Atlantic) like that justifies anything 🙄
Nobody watches an American movie and thinks, yup, that's how it reaaaaaly was.
Americans do.
@@cweaver4080Lolol, very true 😂
Unless of course you’re a yank. Where do you think they learn their history.
the amount of blacks who think Hidden figures is fact.
I have always loved watching U-571. I served on a 1945 U.S. Submarine during my time in the Navy. There are only 2 submarine movies that I have ever seen that actually were technically correct as far as commands and operations. The first, of course, was Das Boot. U-571 was the other. About the only challenge I had was with how quickly the Americans were able to master the controls of the boat. I'm not sure I could have done that, though I was qualified in submarines. Harvey Keitel's role as a senior chief was masterful. I served with grizzled old chiefs near the end of their careers that had begun in the WW-2 boats. Whoever wrote that script nailed it.
I have always been aware that the British were the first to capture the code machine, so I just enjoyed the movie because it took me back to the wildest time of my life. Almost nothing worked anymore on that old boat...but we still went on patrol against the Soviets. I also served on the early "boomers". The difference was striking...thank you, Admiral Rickover!
To everyone who says "it's just a movie" why even bother making it in first place? Why waste hundreds of millions of dollars just to misrepresent and in many instances blatantly lie about real historical events? Why disrespect the ancestors of those events and their descendants? Just make a fantasy story...
Why is it a waste of money if they make profit? And films are made to be entertaining, Braveheart is probably in my top 20 movies, i don't care how inaccurate it is.
@@vincentmcbride6210 So long as you know it's inaccurate.
Hollywood is really good at distorting history to the point of beeing unintentionally hilarious 😅
Misinfotainment.
But sadly, the masses buy into it, in their millions! And as such, total bollocks is perceived as historical fact......by the shockingly apathetic masses.
Black Hawk Down was depicted as if it was only an American battle. In reality, many different nations had troops in Mogadishu at the time.
It also fails to show that US troops killed very many civilians. In reality there was none of the care for civilians as suggested by the film and the whole operation was a cock up from start to finish.
Aren't all battles depicted as US only. . . According to most films and documentaries, they won WW1 and WW2 single-handed. .
Nope it centered mainly around the troops trapped in the city which were Americans
Thank you for bringing up Argo. The movie itself is good, however every time I see anything about it, my anger level raises. As a Canadian it just underscores how Americans like to take credit for everything they can even when it’s not theirs to take.
As a Kiwi, I'd forgotten how New Zealand was made out to be so unhelpful in Argo 😡😄
I know, right? No-one who has ever paid the slightest attention to our little country's values could honestly think we would do anything but help out as best we can!
One thing that "Based on..." movies do it encourage me to read about what actually happened.
Right 👍 Yes As I Say To Sum People, Research Make Friends With It 😊
Next, Simon is going to tell me The Lord Of The Rings was made up 😞
😂
Nonsense I tell you, I've met elf veterans who helped defeat Morgoth. Great chaps all of them.
@richardsteer3549 now I know The Rings Of Power is make believe but Lord Of The Rings?😢
Or Harry Potter
The film’s do have a few departures from the Red Book of Westmark.
My personal pet peeve of "lies" in a historical movie about "Midway" the most recent one with Woody Harrelson playing Admiral Nimitz. While I could deal with the average to mediocre acting in the picture, the historical distortions drive me crazy. For example, in a scene where an SBD is chased by two or three Zeros, the gunner shoots them down with relative ease. In reality, the rear gunner in a dive bomber or torpedo bomber was almost useless, The best they could hope was maybe a minor hit or throwing off the enemy's aim. The American fighter squadrons from Enterprise, Hornet, and Yorktown were not depicted in the movie. Neither were the marine fighters defending Midway. It's unfortunate because they protected their carriers and also helped to cover the dive bombers going in.
It was the US Fighters that diverted the Japanese CAP fighters covering the Carriers. Not the torpedo bombers as claimed. As the book Shattered Sword points out, the Torpedo bombers went in half an hour to 45 minutes before the dive bombers showed up. In other words plenty of time for the Japanese CAP fighters to have slaughtered them, then climbed back to altitude.
Does not take an AM6 Zero half an hour to climb to CAP Altitude!
For some reason though the Japanese fighters got fixated by the US fighters, which led to those US fighter jocks having some 'interesting times', but left the way almost clear of Japanese fighters for the Dive Bombers. And they took advantage of that by essentially killing three Japanese Carriers in less than twenty minutes!
Ben Affleck himself has conceded an inaccuracy in the film Argo. The protestors outside the embassy were students, in their late teens and early twenties. However, they couldn't get extras that age so they went with who was available and that was the older people you see in the film.
The komiteh didn't go pell mell down the runway in battered old cars either.
I hope you do another one of these, Black Hawk Down is one I can't watch anymore after finding out that apparently soldiers in that one did at one point use civilians as human shields, and one of the soldiers (did not get named though in-movie) was jailed for child sex abuse IIRC.
Yeah, it’s one thing to fictionalise a piece of “historically inspired”entertainment to target your largest audience. It’s quite another to unfairly denigrate the real parties involved.
There's also a bit of meta historical revisionism that has arisen around Braveheart... people pretending that they didn't like the movie when it came out in 1995, or that they always knew the history was bogus. It was extremely popular, and at the time, you couldn't just do a quick web search to fact check the movie. I remember I had to look up information on the Scottish War of Independence at a university library to learn more.
I still find it an entertaining movie and when I see it pop up as a "suggested" on a streaming service I watch it, just for the hell of it. If you haven't seen it yet, Outlaw King on Netflix is a good romp of that time period as well.
@@PJWestfield Outlaw King is more accurate although still some major inaccuracies (Edward II wasn't involved in the Battle of Loudon Hill for example) but it looks more period appropriateband gets the politics much better. Also as a wee boy I loved the stories of the Black Douglas so still got a thrill seeing him on screen
At the time it seemed to be the first movie to show battle scenes like that. The closest runner up at the time was the much earlier Excalibur, and from our perspective this blew it out of the water.
Also at the time none of us had the faintest idea what the actual history had been. When I later learned how different it was I laughed, like I laughed at some of Mel Gibson's antics since then. But the movie was still entertaining to watch, both before and after knowing it's BS.
Yes, at the time I thought it was a great movie. As a work of fiction it still is and I don't mean that in bad way either.
My friend and I, both from the Highlands, were visiting some English friends and went to Coventry to watch Braveheart. We were the only 2 cheering on the Scots in the battles. At one point a loud whisper was heard from somewhere at the back "But there's 2 of them!", this caused a general outburst of laughing and the English folks got over themselves and enjoyed the rest of the film.
Small quibble: I believe the Enigma machine in U-110 *was* bolted down. The British crew took screw drivers on board for just that situation.
They only recover the code books not the machines. They had plenty of the Enigma machines. It also cost the movie makers $40,000 for a sculpture commemorating the event. IT is in Tamworth, the home of AB Colin Grazier who lost his life recovering the code books. th-cam.com/video/aUEnn4ZyYnU/w-d-xo.htmlsi=M7wYl1QpOXLJMDV1
@@JAmediaUK Well, Wikipedia disagrees, although what you say may make sense. How did the British figure out the details of the four rotor Enigma? I thought that was through some capture. Maybe of a weather ship rather than a U-boat though.
@@TomFarrell-p9z Second word in your sentence there removes all credibility from anything you say. Wikipedia is not a reliable source, its a tool to be used to help guide you in a direction to research, however is known to be full of ****.
@@tristint.4857Wikipedia is more accurate than most encyclopaedias…
The Wikipedia being full of errors is an academic meme and is itself an error.
@@TomFarrell-p9z Wikipedia is very unreliable as a source. The British had the 3 rotor systems before the war. (it was a commercially available system) They had already acquired the 4 rotor system, though all that was needed was the code books. Knowing there were 4 rotors rather than three for the navy was enough. The code books give the settings for the rotors and the stegle(sp?) Panel. Unlike the army and air force, the navy could not be easily re-supplied with code books. SO theirs covered weeks or months at a time. Getting a set of navy code books would give you all the settings for anything between a week to 3 months. The Germans had no way of updating the books early. Though, they would assume the books had been destroyed. The code books were recovered 15 times in WW2 13 times by the Brits and twice by the US (late in the war) BTW the BIG secret at Bletchley wasn't so much Enigma (though the UK sold Enigma as "unbreakable" to most of the Commonwealth countries for 30 years after the war) but Lorenz. That is a much deeper secret that only started to come to light in the last decade.
The Captain on the U-110 was Fritz-Julius Lemp, who also torpedoed the civilian passenger liner SS Athenia in 1939.
Civilian.
@@letitiajeavons6333 I guess you understood it anyway.
A tragedy to be sure, but that was war back then. Even nation have civilian ships and liners sunk by lurking submarines and their torpedo's. The Soviets sunk the German liner Wilhelm Gustloff during the German retreat from Russia and she was laden with refuges, women and children along with military members. The US and RN subs sunk many Axis civilian ships, especially Japanese.
Sadly none of the major nations Navy's that fought in that war have clean hands.
Another disappointing "true story" movie was "The Blindside" - a movie I really liked...until Michael Ohr said he didn't like it because it basically lied and made stuff up.
They do this with a lot of films about African Americans because they need a white savior. The film Hidden Figures does the same thing which is really stupid because there were white men who stood up for the women computers but they also did a lot of standing up for themselves.
Michael Oher is almost definitely lying and attempting to extort money from the Tuohys (he claims they were paid millions in royalties).
It didn't lie about Sandy Bullock being fine as hell though.
Argo - I lived through that. It. Was. The. Canadians. Who. Did. The. Extraction.
William Wallace and Gromit would be fun to watch.
malevolent english penguins charging the brave scots sheep with lances
One of the inaccuracies of "Braveheart" that was edited out was when right in the middle of a scene, Mel Gibson had a meltdown and started "channeling" Hitler......
Yet they failed to edit it out the car driving by during the main battle sceen......
I watched U571 while in the RAF. We were taking part in an exercise in Canada at the time and the cinema was roughly evenly split between RAF, RCAF and USAF. At the end there was a chorus of boos from all the Brits and Canucks while the Americans quietly snuck out.
Yeah that movie U-571 pissed me off my father was in the ROYAL Navy In Ww2 , we knew a British destroyer was who captured a U-Boat , that accomplished the fear
They weren’t the only ones…
BTW the real U-571 was sunk by an RAAF Sunderland from 461 Squadron off Ireland and lost with all hands on 28th of January 1944… When it entered service in 1941 the British were already reading a substantial number of enigma messages…
It made me mad too. I have always been very interested in researching history and I've spent a lot of time learning about WW1 and WW2. I was a teenager when U-571 came out in theaters and I was extremely excited to go see it even though I only knew a fraction of what I know now about history. I often broke down into tears while researching WW1 and WW2, envisioning what living through those horrific events would have been like and trying to understand the perceptions of people who's lives were spent living in constant terror. My excitement of wanting to see the movie turned into disgust really fast when I saw they rewrote what actually happened in history to once again paint the Americans as hero's when they weren't even participating in the war at that time. I'm Canadian and I thought the insult to the Royal Navy sailors by giving the credit to the Americans was unacceptable, so I can't imagine how upsetting it must have been for you.
My father had to visit Iran several times in the '80s because he worked in the oil industry. The queues at the airport in Tehran are very short in the movie but were hours long in reality.
So Bravehearts historicity is similar to that of Jesus? (main source was written decades after death by someone clearly biased and not in line/ mentioned by other contemporary historians)
It's worse.
The four canonical Gospels were written by people who were there at the time, or people who spoke extensively with people who were there at the time.
Four contemporary accounts is about as good as it gets for ancient history, and they are backed up by other records.
As the narrator records, the writing on which BH was claimed to have been based, was not contemporary and was regarded as BS when it was written.
@@peterwebb8732 1. the gospels were written in a language that none of the people featured in them spoke: ancient Greek 2. Historians and theologians agree that Mark is likely the oldest, written roughly 50 yrs after Jesus supposed death, the others are another ~100yrs younger and copied a lot from Mark, but added more superhero content to their fanfiction. 3. Mark was likely written to appeal to a Roman audience, so it was biased.
@@stthcnths 1. Wrong. Greek was the common “working” language of a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual society.
2. Speculation without evidence or reason. There is no evidence to claim “copying” when the narrative for each is derived from the recollections of eye-witnesses. There is no evidence for “additions”, when -again- we are discussing eye-witness accounts. Eye-witnesses are notorious for differing on detail because each individual views from different perspectives, is impressed by different aspects and remembers different details.
3. Duh! Each account covers those details and aspects that are particularly relevant to the intended audience. They are not meant to be exhaustive, encyclopaedic records of every moment of the life of Jesus of Nazareth.
We have far less detail concerning the majority of historic personalities.
@@peterwebb8732 1. Okay, I admit, that some of the apostles must have known conversational Greek. But I doubt that arameic fisherman knew it. 2. You're derailing. It is historical and theological consensus that Mark is the oldest and has at least a 40yr gap between Jesus' supposed death and it being written. That's a hell of a lot of time for eye witness becoming unreliable. Also it is fact that Jesus is more a teacher in Mark than a miracle worker, which he becomes in the younger gospels. I know of the whole "source Q" debate so maybe mark was not the sole source - but if you treat the gospels from a historical or literature-Analysis viewpoint and leave of your believe-tinted glasses it is evident how the text turned more mystical. 3. ... or factually true. They have to be a good story. Finding truth in religion is hard, if you apply only the tools of a historian.
@@stthcnths 1. Oh? You think they didn’t SELL fish, to anyone with the money to pay, in the markets where everyone spoke Greek? The idea that they could not have, is speculation on your part, not history.
2. The dating of the Gospels is more speculation, and very inexact speculation at that. The Gospels themselves are probably the best available time regarding their time of origin and authorship.
3. My friend, if you are going to talk about history, then you must account for the best evidence available…. not ignore it with the excuse that it is “religious”. Being written in Greek is entirely plausible, even if somebody acted as scribe and translator for the authors, because the early Christian Church was explicitly multicultural. The speculation regarding later authorship is entirely that. SPECULATIVE. Inconsistency is EXPECTED, because eye-witnesses normally are, and accounts written for different audiences will favour those points of relevance to the audience.
Amongst the most compelling evidence of a conspiracy to write fiction would be complete consistency. Conspirators care about such things. Eye-witnesses are more likely to vary between “No shit, there I was….” and “Your Honour, I witnessed the accused…….”.
The Polish did the groundwork in cracking the Enigma code in the 30s & passed on everything they knew to the British when war broke out
You mean, Bon Jovi didn't save allied forces and won WW2? I'm shocked
How dare you
😂
It was Bruce Springsteen who defeated the Italians and Chuck Norris ended Japan.
His inspiration for Slippery When Wet
It was a little strange to me in the movie that as soon as he hopped out of the sub he joined his band mates on a stage and began to sing Living On A Prayer while all of the American soldiers were rocking out.
I had always assumed Bon Jovi sang Dead or Alive on that historic day.
His name is John Bongiovi. Bon Jovi is the name of the band.
Thanks for that last part involving Argo. I read up on the Canadian side and got more and more annoyed at how the US govt seemed to ‘let’ Canada take credit for the whole affair. There’re even some tv movies about the Canadian Caper that portray it in a more accurate light. Then again, drama is essentially lying for entertainment.
Side note: IMBW, but the Canadian parliament held a secret session granting the Americans Canadian passports in order for them to leave Iran legally, something that hadn’t been done since WW2 for Jewish refugees trying to leave Europe.
"300" and "Gladiator" never professed to be historically accurate. "300" came from a graphic novel and was a lot of fantasy while "Gladiator" openingly said that it was a fictional story. 'Braveheart" on the other hand said it was based on historical events and was anything but. In fact the only thing accurate in the movie is that William Wallace once lived.
True. I see 300 as a campsite story told the night before a battle to men to fire them up before a big war. As seen at the closing scenes with the Spartans facing the Persians again.
Taken in that aspect - soldier tales and dits - means exaggeration and license allows for these extremes.
@@BRH0587 I think the only "true" event from 300 was the Spartans killed the Persian emissaries. The Spartans apparently later sent an embassy to Persia to apologise and seek forgiveness from the Persians for this gross breach of divinely sanctioned manners. The Persians just laughed.
You should do an episode about movies that need an epilogue or sequel that tells what happened after the movie that knocked the wind out of the sails of said movie. Like Changeling (2008) and that the kid who testified against his serial killer uncle, was an unwilling accomplice, and led police to numerous shallow graves, was later allegedly a suspect in a murder case at 48 when one of his next door neighbors disappeared for two weeks and was eventually found in a shallow grave not far away.
Oh thank you for getting the Enigma story mostly right!!
With respect to the Battle of Sterling Bridge, it was exactly the same tactical problem at the Battle of Antetam in the American Civil War. With, unsurprisingly, the same outcome.
What!!! Snakes on a Plane wasn't accurate?? So bummed!
Sam Jackson colourful language daytime version 😅
I hate when snakes burn my money.
Still, there is a captured former German submarine at Chicago, that serves as a tourist attraction. British submarines were captured, but they all sank. The US managed to take the submarine under tow, and successfully recovered it.
The UK captured at least one U boat early in the war, using it in anti submarine warfare development, and in operations. U-570 was reused as HMS Graph (pun intended).
The "Americanization" of history, especially in movies, is part & parcel of American "Exceptionalism".
I'm Ametican, and having grown up knee deep in punk rock since the late '70s, "our" persistent exceptionalism makes me fkng furious. And it just seems to be getting more and more ubiquitous and egregious. It's embarrassing.
Fiction - based on 'true events'. The only problem is being so badly informed that there is no discrimination between fiction and fact. Except that more money is spent making fiction appear real.
If you get your history lesson from a movie you are ill-informed
Nice work Simon. Way to deliver the facts without taking any gloss off some great films.
As a Brit I just got used to the whole "America won the war" thing. Remembering that Hollywood never gave two hoots about history. Even America's own history. I would suggest watching Errol Flynn as Custer in "They Died With Their Boots on" as a prime example of that. Although, that line from the RAF Squadron Leader to Ben Afleck in "Pearl Harbor", "God help any country that goes to war with America", just makes me want to throw up! And just WHY is Ben Afleck the ONLY American in the ALL AMERICAN "Eagle Squadron" in the first place?
And the all American hero who flew with the RAF and defeated the Luftwaffe before going back to the US so he could give it to the Japs.
As a Canadian, thank you for mentioning "Argo."
We are inappropriately enraged by that movie! :p
Nothing inappropriate about it. 😡
U571: why didn't they do the real story of the U505?
I agree. That would be a great story. Semi comedic because VADM Gallery was a very funny guy.
I'd have never expected a clip of Piers Morgan to appear in a video about 'the biggest lies...'.
Actually the much derided 10 000 BC movie is not bad at all IF you don’t perceive it as a historic movie. I don’t know where anyone claimed it was historic or accurate, so the most common criticism I heard is that “oh it’s so inaccurate this is not how things were 12 000 years ago!”. I think it was always meant to be a fantasy set in a fantasy “pre historic” times.
Look into the movie Hacksaw Ridge. The story I saw was that the director had to remove or leave out scenes because they were so unbelievable that he thought audiences wouldn't take the subject matter seriously.
The director was Mel Gibson
Damn. Now I want to see Aardman do "William Wallace and Gromit."
It was hilarious in the second season of Fargo TV series that right after the phrase “out of respect for the victims, events are depicted exactly as they occurred” disappeared from the screen, the UFO shows up.
The Dutch actualy had an Enigma like machine in the 1920's as the German Enigma has further encryption by adding more dials when going from commerce to naval use. The Polish mathematicians handed over their findings yet the French took it and the Brits being complete sphinctors declined at first 😅
Great video.
Interesting how many people find movie inaccuracy insulting.
The only decent things with Braveheart were the music and Brendan Gleeson's beard. Oh, and the car parked up as the English (probably mostly Irish, since it was filmed there) were charging the Scots at the Not Battle of Stirling Bridge!!
The subtlety lost on 300 is that it is meant to be a "propaganda story" told by the only survivor of the battle (the guy with the eye patch) and is based on a comic and not the original story. Unlike these 3 films, it doesn't misrepresent itself anywhere near as much unless you miss the obvious exaggeration.
Hollywood is obssessed with making a fantastically profitable movie. That is why there are so many versions of the shootout at the OK Corral.
I suspect it's also why there are comparatively few new ideas for films
Don't forget about Great Expectations, Little Women,Treasure Island & A Star is Born
1:05 - Chapter 1 - U571
5:10 - Chapter 2 - Braveheart
10:30 - Chapter 3 - Argo
The real U571 was sunk by an Australian Sunderland aircraft from 461 Squadron RAAF west of Ireland. None of the U571 crew survived.
From 1943 461 Squadron RAAF was based at Pembroke Dock, Pembrokeshire, Wales, the U.K. had no bases on the West Coast of Ireland as the entire West Coast of Ireland was neutral. 461 Squadron was formed at RAF Mountbatten, Plymouth, in 1942, then moved to Harmworthy in Dorset, then onto West Wales, not the West Coast of Ireland
@@davidharris4062The place where U571 was sunk lays 'west of Ireland'.
@@zelts the original comment was the Sunderland was based in the west of Ireland, I know thatU571 was sunk off the West coast of Ireland, but 461 squadron was based in the West of Wales
@@davidharris4062 Howdy, I made three points in my post. 1) U571 was sunk. 2) It was sunk by an Australian Sunderland. 3) It was sunk west of Ireland. I made no mention of the 461 Squadron being based in Ireland. Cheers.
@@coorparootoo5142 must have read it wrong,
"The Great Escape" and "Objective, Burma!" are another two films where American film makers rewrote history.
I’ve got this great idea for a t.v series. There's this bunch of British battleships and carriers in the Pacific and they have a long distance battle with the Japanese near a place called Midway. The heroes would be the pilots who would have jolly hocky stick personalities with moustaches and say things like ''Wizard Prang'' and ''Tallyo'' and they drink tea all the time and have flasks of it in their cockpits on the way to the target. Some could be eccentric like one Simon D'eath whose ancestor was one of the few in the Charge of The Light Brigade he's nicknamed Errol after Flynn who starred in the authentic film version - of course the one set in India and not the fake one from the Crimea. Anyway Errol refuses to take off unless he's got his ancestor's lance in the cockpit with him - it sticks out the back still flaunting the flag of the 9th Hussars. If our yank cousins object we'll just plead artistic licence.
You can only do this if Long way to Tipperary and Heart of Oak, classic American songs are in the soundtrack.
Royal Marines rasing the Union Flag over Iwo Jima would make a great based on a true story"
I have an even better idea. A modern US aircraft carrier time travels back to WW2 for the battle of Midway and launches its F-18s
Britain has already made a movie in which a British pilot becomes the first to break the sound barrier so thank you already.
@@DavidHowells-d9p It was James Bigglesworth
U-571 was hilarious. I watched it with my Grandfather, a merchant navy radio operator in WWII. He bounced signals for the allies, telling them where to find any enemy ship or sub they spotted. He said this movie was full to the brim of BS and laughed himself silly. That's not how things happened.
The real battle of Sterling Bridge would have been much better on the big screen. A visit to Sterling Scotland will give you a much more exhaustive story of the battle. Just, please Sterling, remove the ugly statue of Gibson as Wallace and replace it with a truer depiction of the Scottish heri.
being picky as i go to Stirling once a week at least to visit family and friends, it is spelt Stirling not Sterling. there is Sterling Homes near by in Tillicoultry which is a furniture store or pound Sterling which is our currency.
@@douglasreid699Thank you!
You manged to mispel Stirling 3 times
A visit to _Stirling_ Scotland will reveal the statue hasn't been there since 2008, and is now on display in Brechin. Unless it got carried away by the flooding...
@@douglasreid699 My family are from Tilli and Coalsnaughton! Rare to see it mentioned.
One criticism of U 571 I never hear: I found it completly ridiculous, that the crew could master an absolutly foreign type of U-boot in about 3 days. They even made a small point of not being able to read teh labels, yet still, a handfull of hours laters they pulled of feats, which only NS-Propaghanda would dare to depict.
If I can recall most of the interwar period American Submarines did have a similar design basis to the ww1 German u-boats to the layouts could be nearly identical enough that it is possible to operate a captured German U-boat. It would also depend on if the crew does understand the German language that is.
When will these video writers/presenters stop saying THE HMS whatever ...... in this video HMS Bulldog was mentioned. HMS is an abbreviation of His Majesty's Ship, therefore to say 'The His Majesty's Ship Bulldog ' makes no grammatical sense.
Either call the vessel 'The Bulldog' or 'HMS Bulldog'
Why did you leave out Monty Python's movies, Monty Python and the Holy Grail and the Life of Brian?
Could've made them all Mel Gibson, honestly, but I'll pick The Patriot as even more inaccurate than Braveheart.
0:18 That was the best part of any Sideprojects or Megaprojects video. Ever.
George Hannibal Smith Peppard single handedly halting the Nazi rockets in Operation Crossbow.
Assisted by that Italian
turncoat Sophia Loren
If you do a sequel I hope you’ll include the 1989 movie Glory. Brilliant movie, excellent cast, but only Col. Shaw, played by Matthew Broderick, was an actual historical figure. And the scene with the colors at the end isn’t how history records it happening.
The Great Escape…. there were no Americans in that POW camp!
You made me look up your claim. If you do a search "were there american POWs in the Stalag Luft III camp for the Great Escape" you will find links to a number of sites that show that you are completely incorrect. Shalom
Yeah there were no Americans in the north compound. Only British commonwealth forces personnel.
@politicsuncensored5617 yes, there were US personnel in the camp but they were in a different compound, having been moved some time before the escape. I should have said "in that part of the POW camp". Therefore, there were no Americans in the escape attempt as was depicted in the film.
@@redguern If there had been no big American actors in the movie it would have been just another B movie about WW2. The stars made this movie a hit worldwide back then. Shalom
@@politicsuncensored5617 There were a lot of stars in the film. What you meant was US stars... Salam
Quick second here. You said that the Pole's were able to "reverse engineer an ENIGMA machine based on the intelligence that they had gathered." My understanding was that an ENIMGA machine was sent to the German Embassy in Poland but that Polish Intelligence intercepted the machine. They were then able to quickly study it, copy it, put the original back together and back to the German Embassy. This was I believe 1939, just prior to the invasion. After 01 September 1939 the Pole's were able to smuggle the ENIGMA machine and their code cracking intelligence data out of Poland and the the British. All of that saved the British YEARS of time.
The Enigma machines were commercially available before WW2. The Poles did get them and get them to the UK. Along with a load of very able Polish mathematicians and code breakers. Their achievements at Bletchley are not celebrated widely enough.
@@JAmediaUK No doubt. What Bletchley Park did has been in several movies and multitudes of documentaries but it is still UNDER APPRECIATED. Yeah, I had forgotten that ENIGMA was based on...basically a corporate design...based on.
@@MartinW-e5q To be honest, Enigma was a side show at Bletchley. Their real achievements were inventing the modern computer and cracking Lorenz, that both lead to many other things that are still classified to this day. Captain Roberts did a book and a documentary in his late 80s, early 90s on Lorenz that were only released after he died in 2017. See www.waterstones.com/book/lorenz/jerry-roberts/9780750987707 One thing I do know is there was a fully working (and improved) Colossus computer that had been rebuilt in the 1960s That I only found out a few years ago but it put a whole load of other things from my childhood into context.
On 25/26 July 1939, just outside Warsaw, the Poles shared their full knowledge of and progress in decrypting Enigma with the British and French. While they still could. I feel this single act contributed at least as much to Britain's survival, and to the ultimate allied victory, as almost any other one single act.
I am glad that the Polish contribution to the survival of Britain, and ultimately to winning the war, has become more widely appreciated here in Britain and elsewhere in recent years. Not just Enigma, but the highly skilled pilots, destroyer crews who goaded and attacked the Bismark in the epic chase, and so much more. And the shameful way the government, trying to avoid antagonising Stalin, treated those same Polish veterans just after the war ended.
@@adriangoodrich4306 Never mind July 1939, there was a LOT of Polish support in Bletchley throughout the war of code breaking, not to mention the Polish squadrons in the RAF and Polish Military units in exile that were attached to the British Army. IT wasn't just for the survival of Britain as much as the survival of Europe. Sadly, much of that knowledge in this post Brexit Britain is fading.