[Milsurplus] Is Fiction Garbage ?

[Ray Fantini]

Come on, what kind of history do you expect to get from Safeway for $6.99? Or for that matter any of the movies produced back in the sixties and early seventies?  Next you be looking for inaccuracies in “The Dirty Dozen” or “Kelley’s Heroes” fictional war movies of that time were just entertainment. Movies that were loosely based or reality like “Bridge on the Rive Kwai”(1957), “The longest Day”(1962) and “Patton”(1970) all have mistakes and sometimes glaring errors, lot of controversy back around the Bridge movie being the real survivors of the Japanese camps complaining that the Japanese were portrayed as being to humane in there actions. Good web site is www.moviemistakes.com for seeing interesting little examples of errors in films. Some movies do better then others, Tora, Tora, Tora comes to mind with a good replica of a SCR-270 radar site unlike that stupid “Pearl Harbor” movie a couple years back with a more modern radar site located in a bunker using a PPI screen or the Wind talkers move where they tried to come up with a good looking set of props that resembled TBY transceivers, think there was also a TBX in one shot too. 
Don’t get me wrong, not trying to make any disparaging commentary on your original post but maybe just wanted to point out that almost any work produced for popular entertainment will assign low priority to historical accuracy. Being that history is a contentious and often debated matter to begin with trying to find truth in popular culture may be a lot to ask for.

RF