Everyone watch IKE on A&E

["Sixhits"]

I just it at a screening at it was awesome. Tom Selleck did an amazing job as the Supreme General - and I only remember him from Magnum P.I.

It was a brilliantly done, heart touching piece on the 90 days before D-Day and the loniness of command. Brillant.



And for you right wingers out there, the writer and exec-producer is a HARD right-wing nut. If you look closely you'll hear the drums of war (in Iraq) being beaten.


The show opens on Memorial Day.

[BTs_GhostSniper]

I plan on watching (if I can find a T.V. in North Carolina!).  I just can't for the life of me picture Tom Selleck as playing Dwight D. Eisenhower!  Maybe it will seem better after seeing it, but in the previews I saw I was just sitting there going "why in the world is Magnum playing Ike?"  lol

I hope it is really good as this is the part of military history I have studied the most (World War II).  I just remember when they had Alec Baldwin play Jimmy Doolittle in the movie Pearl Harbor and how totally innacurate that part was played (besides the whole movie being innacurate....I think the only part they really got right was that Pearl Harbor was, in fact, bombed by the Japanese!).

I really hope they did a good job on historical accuracy.  Are you much of a historian Sixhits?  I mean, did you spot any technical errors?  If they were trying to make it accurate, then I tend to watch movies like that as documentaries.  If not, then I just watch them for entertainment value (the category I would put Pearl Harbor in).

-GhostSniper Out.

[seth]

yeah i see what you mean GS. In every Tom Selleck movie i saw, i was like Magnum in another context.
Selleck was great in that serie, and thats what makes it so weird when he plays other roles.

["Sixhits"]

I just can't for the life of me picture Tom Selleck as playing Dwight D. Eisenhower!

He actually does an excellent job. I never thought he had it in him.

And I am a big history buff, almost exclusively modern 20th C history.

They did an good job, but they don't go into much depth on the details. It's all about the character of Ike and the stress, the decsions, the politics, the players of that inner cirlce that planed and executed the D-Day invasion. Even knowing the outcome it was an intense movie.

The only Big Thing they didn't play up was the crossword puzzle in America that had OVERLORD, UTAH, and I think GOLD as three of the answers.

[Ssickboy]

Just watched it.  Best memorial day tribute i've seen today.  As corny as it may sound, this show and Call of Duty (the game) sets a nice big appreciation for those that served and died in WW2.  If you haven't played the game yet, you should.  It gives about as real a VisuaL impression as ever without actually being there.  Remember when you first watched Saving Private Ryan? The game is about intense as that.  For those of you who played to the the Russian level, Holy Shit Stains, right?.  The show, Ike, is mainly focused on emotional tension, war philosphy, and effective leadership.  Good show, catch it if you can, it's repeating right now and probably into the week.  Then get the game and airborne drop over France.  

[c| Lone-Wolf]

 the players of that inner cirlce

Dont you remeber Sixhits? There WAS, there IS, no inner circle, "its just the people who are going to live, and the people who are going to die"

You idjit! Now you have to get shipped back to the U.S.
Oh wait, youre already in the U.S.  I guess we have to cart you off to...uhm...er...somewhere you dont want to go, so get outta here.

(For those of you who didnt see the movie, dont try to understand what im talking about, its very movie specific) (And if youre still confused, and you -DID- see the movie, remember what Ike said to the good friend of his when he told him he was getting shipped back to the states)

~Lone

PS - Great movie, cant wait to tape the rest of them (finals this week, and i dont think ill be getting enough time off to watch the other three when they air)

PSS - This being Memorial Day (actually an hour and a half after it was over, 1:30 in the AM) im still plugging away on a web site that deals with The First World War.  Ill post the link to it when its all set up on the school's server, but here is something to make people appreciate war, and this one in particular...  (quotes from the First Person Accounts section)

My company had to take a trench. We had been told it was at seventymeters: it was more than two hundred. It was necessary to crawl and keep still: all the world was up and screaming. My half platoon held the left. I had six men around when I reached the German wire, between eight and nine o'clock in the evening.

I stepped over their bodies, the next morning, about four o'clock.

I found the first pantless, as if claws had scratched his trousers off. His buttocks exposed, cut back and forth as though by a butcher's knife. The second hung whole on a bush, his head balancing on the end of the highest branch, like the head of a dead sparrow. The others were rolled into a porridge of mud and blood. I didn't look at them. I returned on all fours, my blanket around my neck and my packs under my chest. When i caught sight of the stones of our trenches, I straightened up and cried out. I was pulled in by the legs and was given cold coffee and rum to drink. The slopes were covered in haze.
What have we done? We have gone ahead under the shrapnel, lost, decimated, from the very first hundred meters. All officers down.

-Sergent Paul Crazin, 1915, assault on the heights between Saint-Mihiel and Apremount.

In tiny little attacks, partial attacks, attacks made solely for the communiqu?s, three or four hundred thousand men were lost...Hartmannswillerkopf cost us, without a meter of trench being taken, fifteen thousand men.

-Abel Ferry, 1915

I go like an animal driven to the abbatoir...we meet the wounded, all BCA...in an uninterrupted procession, with haggard faces.
"Ah! You go down there too," they say. "A beautiful slaughter-house!"
Such are the encouragements that follow us in our descent, while already some shells come to flay the woods...

-Sergeant Bernardin, 1915, Hartmannswillerkopf

Two steps farther, a wounded man, nearly naked to his waist, sits in the frozen rain, "I am cold!" he moans through chattering teeth...As we go up, cadavers make themselves more numerous. On a section of barbed wire that has been cut by hand, I count a cluster of ten dead. While approaching the top, two captains of the 14th BCA, recognizeable by their beautiful black tunics trimmed in gold...

Everywhere are the dead, and even some injured, most of the cadavers have been covered with canvas until the stretcher bearers have time to collect and bury them. One of these sad packets lies on the parapet in front of where we take up our position. However here the canvas quivers and emits a plaintive cry.
"But he isnt dead!" I say to a soldier who watches from across the gap.
"Not yet. But the Major said it was useless to evacuate him, he was f---. He's been like that for forty-eight hours..."

-French Soldier, Sixty-Sixth Alpine Division (Elite)1915 Hartmannswillerkopf.

This one truely made me feel sick to my stomach.

We set to work to bury poeple. We pushed them into the sides of the trenches but bits of them kept getting uncovered and sticking out, like people in a badly made bed. Hands were the worst; they would escape from the sand, pointing, begging - even waving! There was one which we all shook when we passed, saying, "Good morning," in a posh voice. Everybody did it. The bottom of the trench was springy like a mattress because of all the bodies underneath...

-Leonard Thompson - quoted in Ronald Blythe, Akenfield

Not necessarily because of what it contained, it was the straw that broke the camel's back, me, being the camel, having worked for three straight days on this and the entire time having my mind consumed by these kinds of images and thoughts, it really changes you.  Now imagine this in first person, when you cant look away, and when the people who are lying there on the ground blown open are your friends.  I hope this makes everybody really appreciate what every combat soldier experiences on a day to day basis.

So, good on ya to all the people in this community who are in the armed services of any country, or have been at one point or another.

Ok, back to work for me.

[crypt]

I saw this last night, great piece of work.

[BTs_Lee.Harvey]

I wanted to see it but had to work last night... and one know when it will air again. I have been lookinbg for it on the normal torrent site just so i can see it.

[crypt]

Tonight at 10 MB? I think so yes.

[alaric]

Great show. I really enjoyed it. Helped me understand some of the pressures, uncertainties they faced. Amazing really... I can't imagine what it must have been like to live during that time.

[BTs_Lee.Harvey]

bah.. I have to work tonight too...

[BTs_GhostSniper]

I think they should have taken some poetic license and let Ike tell General de Gaulle to go fuck himself.  Man that would have been funny!