Famous WW11 film footage results?

M

mcshot

New member
We've all seen the original footage of our brave men exiting a landing craft on D-Day only to have the last brave soul drop from a round that you can see hit the water behind him. Does anyone know if he survived or was DRT? I've seen this footage more times than I can count and have long wondered if this fellow survived. Good "Whatever happened to" segment.

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"Keep shootin till they quit floppin"
The Wife 2/2000
 
I know, this has been bugging me for YEARS!
Every movie or tv show that anything remotely to do with WW2 uses this shot. I keep hoping some old VFW dude (yeah, I'm one too) will show up on Dateline or something and say "Oh yeah, that's me. I tripped and the krauts missed me." Hope it could be something like that but I fear that guy is the most watched death scene in history.
 
I wished some of these kids that think war is cool and want to go fight it would watch that video and remember that it could have been them on that beach, and their families who had noone come back. I think it's quite likely that he died that day, and perhaps he was one of the lucky ones for having it happen so soon rather than fighting halfway across Europe and starting to feel some hope of coming home.

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I twist the facts until they tell the truth. -Some intellectual sadist

The Bill of Rights is a document of brilliance, a document of wisdom, and it is the ultimate law, spoken or not, for the very concept of a society that holds liberty above the desire for ever greater power. -Me
 
My stomach still gets tight when that clip comes on. I find myself muttering "Come on, man, make it! " when you know damn well he won't.

The way he dropped like a stone, I think he was killed. If not, he and the guy in front of him (who was hit and tried to get up) probably drowned, as so many of them were that day.

They came in on a rising tide, which rose one inch per minute, and even more casualties were taken as the trapped survivors went back into that hailstorm of bullets and tried to pull the wounded forward.

Historians say that this was the only battle where you had to move the wounded towards the enemy to keep him alive.

Co. A, 116th Regt., 29th Div. started out with 230 guys and had 197 casualties there.
They sent in 14 "amphibious" Sherman tanks to back 'em up. 12 sank immediately in the rough water and drowned their crews. The other two became blazing infernos within minutes after landing. A Bad Scene if there ever was one.

Read Srephen Ambrose's "Citizen Soldier" and others in that series. Nothing but short narratives from the survivors.

I'd love to have a classroom of kids each stand up and read one of those passages. I suspect some of them just might get a clue.
 
A very similar clip is the one of the troops moving forward on the beach, either toward or just past a barbed wire row. The camera man is ahead of them, off at an angle.

As he's filming, one of the soldiers drops straight down, just completely crumples, as if he had been head shot. I've always wondered about him.

As I was growing up, I found out that my best friend's Grandfather is buried in one of the cemeteries near Normandy. He was killed in the initial invasion. I can't remember exactly, but his daughter (my best friend's mother) was either 3 weeks old, or 3 weeks from being born) when he was killed.

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Beware the man with the S&W .357 Mag.
Chances are he knows how to use it.
 
Being an aviator, I am mesmerized by the gun sight camera view of a B-17 getting hosed by a German fighter from behind and there is no apparent resistance by the B-17 crew. It is obvious the German pilot is confident the crew cannot resist because he is "parked" behind the B-17 and only gradually overtaking it.

A pilot I know, a former B-17 waist gunner who was shot down and became a POW, said he "bleeds" everytime he sees the same clip. He said his bomber was shot up like that before his crew abandoned it.
 
Yeah, Bruels, I know the one you're talking about. The ball turret is pointing down, and not traversing, the other guns IIRC are pointed obliquely up. It's either abandoned, or everyone on board is "hors de combat". I always shudder when I see the same M4 Sherman "brew up" in the hedgerow country as well.
 
Mike, That is the footage I was trying to describe. I've also watched the unresponsive bomber footage many times thinking about the poor souls that had obviously departed.
Oatka, Thanks for the info on "Citizen soldier". I will put it on my list with "Unintended Consequences" and Shipper's new book.
Mack

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"Keep shootin till they quit floppin"
The Wife 2/2000
 
To follow up on Oatka's post, among the other Ambrose books to get are Band of Brothers and D-Day.

Band of Brothers follows a part (regiment? battalion? too lazy to go downstairs and look) of the 101st Airborne (the Screaming Eagles) from pre-deployment training in the North Georgia mountains and through their campaign in the European Theatre of War. Great section on their role during D-Day, and covers their taking out a German artillery unit overlooking Utah that wasn't covered in D-Day. I think I read it in 2 or 3 sittings (couldn't put it down).
 
Anyone ever see the movie footage (you see the stills a lot) of the B-17 or B-24 sideslipping underneath the other one as the bombs are dropping?

1 500-lb bomb takes out one of the aerilons, and the plane almost immediately goes into a spinning dive. As I recall, no one got out of it.

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Beware the man with the S&W .357 Mag.
Chances are he knows how to use it.
 
Mike, a friend of mine was a B-17 bombardier in the war. He once told me about an attack where everyone got messed up in weather coming in, and they came over the target at all kinds of angles and altitudes. He said his stick of bombs all hit a 17 way below him, which detonated all their bombs. Says there were not even scraps left to fall. Seems that this happened more than a few times in Eupore.

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Tonkin Gulf Yacht Club
68-70
 
I think I read somewhere that that famous D-day footage showing the last guy dropping like a stone was researched as best as they could and the guy was KIA. I'm not sure, but I think he was Canadian and part of the Canadian landing beaches. (That factoid sticks in the gray matter somewhere....)

My uncle was a waist gunner in a B-17 back in Europe, WW2. He was on leave and his plane, with all his buddies, went down with no survivors. He didn't want to talk about the war much, even 40-odd years later (he died in '89).

My wife's uncle was in USAAF also in WW2, put in his first tour, then went back for a second. He was transferred into the infantry in late '44. After surviving the Bulge, he was KIA on April 2, 1945 -- just a couple of weeks before VE day.

The movie clip that I see most frequently is the one where the natural finish B-24 takes a direct flak hit in the starbord wing root and the thing just erupts into flame as the wing folds up. I'm sure there were no survivors from that one either.

I have that other movie clip of the German hosing the B-17 from the rear. You see the tracers go into the port side engine nacelles and also hit the port main gear tire. I always am thinking "...how come that tire doesn't blow to shreds?" Also, "...funny how there is absolutely no return fire from the B-17..." "..how come, with all those bullets going through the propeller arc, does it not get hit and fly apart from imbalance?"
 
Some recent research has led some people to conclude that that's how Glenn Miller died. He was on a small plane going to France and never arrived. They found a bomber crew that was dropping their unused bombs over the channel at the right place and time - the bombs may have taken out Miller's plane.
 
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