When Eagles Dared by Howard Hughes

Author:Howard Hughes [Hughes, Howard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, Entertainment, Film, History & Criticism, History, Military, World War II
ISBN: 9780857732248
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2012-01-30T05:00:00+00:00

German poster advertising Josef Vilsmaier’s Stalingrad (1992), starring, left to right, Dominique Horwitz, Sebastian Rudolph, Thomas Kretschmann and Jochen Nickel. visuals, convincing performances and strong story. It was praised at the time for its unheroic, human depiction of the war on the Eastern Front and remains an unsettling viewing experience.

Two Russian productions re-enacted the engagement: Friedrich Ermler’s The Great Turning Point (1946 – The Turning Point) and Vladimir Petrov’s The Battle of Stalingrad (1950). Frank Wisbar’s Battle Inferno (1959 – Stalingrad) – starring Peter Carsten, Horst Frank, Wolfgang Preiss and Joachim Hansen – presented the German view of the battle. Jean-Jacques Annaud’s Enemy at the Gates (2001) used the rubble of Stalingrad as a backdrop to a battle of wits between two ace snipers: Russian Vasily Zaitsav (Jude Law) and German Major König (Ed Harris).

As the Germans fought in Poland and Russia, specialist killing squads shadowed the army, slaughtering the civilian population in its wake. These Einsatzgruppen squads shot or burned their victims, or gassed them in specially adapted trucks. This genocide was depicted in Elem Klimov’s Come and See (1985 – Idi i smotri), a Russian production presented by Mosfilm. In Byelorussia in 1943, teenage Russian Fliora (Alexei Kravchenko) wanders a muddy, wintry landscape which gradually becomes more hellish as his full realisation of the Germans’ activities blurs into focus. Fliora joins the partisans and is left behind in camp when they move off to engage the enemy. He witnesses a German parachute drop, is temporarily deafened by a German artillery barrage and finds himself trapped in a peasant village which is surrounded by Einsatzgruppen.

Klimov’s film, the last he directed, conveys the randomness and savagery of the war on the Russian civilian population. The atmosphere is edgy, menacing, as it would be in a horror film. Fleeting moments of beauty – a burnished sunset or a showery rainbow – are hollow images amid such savagery. Fliora returns home with young partisan Glasha (Olga Mironova), to hide out with his mother and sister. The village is sinisterly deserted and buzzing flies proliferate. Fliora and Glasha eat a meal, which they find still warm in his mother’s oven, and as they leave we see a grisly pile of slaughtered villagers’ corpses piled against the house. Come and See is filled with troubling imagery and strange moments, such as a perpetually patrolling German plane, which at one point disperses propaganda leaflets (‘Kill the Bolshevik kikes; smash a brick in their ugly mugs’), or the unsettling stork stalking the deserted partisans’ camp. Fliora joins a group of starving peasants sheltering on an island in a swamp and later goes in search of food for them. He finds a cow, but when the animal is killed in the crossfire of a night-time firefight, Fliora attempts to steal a farmer’s hay cart, to transport his booty.

Come and See builds to a sickening climax, as Fliora realises that he’s behind enemy lines. From the chilly morning fog, the spectral SS killing squads emerge. On a speeding

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