![]() I’ve often felt that way watching old war footage. The ships and planes, the soldiers and bombs didn’t seem entirely real, because to my eyes they were part of an antiquated landscape that looked like it literally existed inside a newsreel. Yet I was also reacting to how distant, scratchy, and old-fashioned the stock images looked. After a few minutes, I would turn away, bored by a conflict that looked like it was taking place in some black-and-white netherworld from another century. When I was growing up, WWII documentaries were grainy, mottled affairs, often with a stentorian narrator, that I’d catch a snippet of on television, usually because my father watched them obsessively. (We see haunting footage of the bomb’s survivors, who are like mangled ghosts.) The documentary is also filled with the faces (and sometimes the dead bodies) of American soldiers, most of whom look eerily contemporary. As for the city of Hiroshima, filmed seven months after the atomic bomb was dropped there, it’s a flattened, debris-strewn hellscape of desolation that looks like it could have been filmed yesterday. On Okinawa, grenades burst into mounds of curling black smoke, and we see a Japanese woman on the Mariana Islands jump off a cliff rather than allow herself to be taken alive. We’re shown the bombing of Tokyo from a mile over the city, the bombs exploding like clusters of orange dots on the map-like green landscape below. And that footage hits us with the shock of the new.Īmerican soldiers blast their flamethrowers into caves, the oily fire whipping around like something out of a dragon’s mouth. HOME - CATALOG - REVIEWS - NEWS - ABOUT US - CONTACTĬOMBATREELS.In “ Apocalypse ’45,” we see images of World War II - the last six months of it, when our forces were engaged in a grisly death-throes battle with the Japanese in the Pacific - that are more colorful, raw, and deeply naturalistic than the images we’re used to seeing. No Myths, just truth.ĬONTACT - MILITARY WEBSITE LINKS - PRIVACY These movie films are great entertainment and we enjoy watching them ourselves but if you want to see real history, then you need to check out the world war II movies from CombatReels. In fact a lot of raw footage that has appeared in movies from wwi through the present day many times is not of the location, time, etc. Many people making these movies are not historians and many times they do not get good advice or review by specialists if they even use them at all. They may be based on some premises that are accurate, but there are thousands of historical inaccuracies in movies that have been produced. If it is not originally filmed in HD, then it's not real HD. Truth: There were no HD cameras in World War II, you cannot upsize so to speak with the resolution and turn 2D photography into high definition. Some are better than others with the flesh tones and uniforms. Look at the trees you may see and you cannot discern any leaves. What you see is computer enhancement / colorization. Truth: In Europe the majority of film that was shot and what has survived is black and white. Myth 2: Wow that's great color on that show. ![]() So if the film and if its sound quality are good, typical scenes are award ceremonies and similar events. When sound appears, the sound is typically done with a static microphone. ![]() The cameras of the day did not have sound built in, they required a second operator with a sound boom/mike to capture the sound. Truth: Most of the footage taken in combat situations was actually silent film. Myth 1: All the sound you hear is awesome!
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