Matrix Games Forums

ORIGINAL: Cannonfodder

One little fact is also interesting to share. It is related to the script of the movie "a bridge to far". Frost says it is actually pretty accurate (which is nice to know) except for one part:

"I had only one adamant objection - to the treatment given to an incident when the Germans sent one of our own captured sappers back to me with a message to the effect that, as we were in such a hopeless position, would I personally meet the German commander, under a flag of truce, to discuss surrender. I said, Tell them to go to hell. Sergeant Halliwell, the sapper, replied Do I really have to go back to tell them? In answered, No it is up to you. If you would like to stay and continue fighting, they will get the message anyway. He stayed.

The film script, however, demanded that I (or rather the actor playing me) should actually meet the German general and tell him that I had no room for him or his soldiers as prisoners, and so he would have to continue fighting. Magnificent cinema, perhaps, but so divorced from reality that it was laughable.

In the end a very unsatisfactory and most unrealistic compromise was reached, in which one of 'my' officers sarcastically informed the Germans that 'we' could not accept their surrender. A few years later, when I asked Heinz Harmel, the G.O.C. of the 10th SS, what he and the Germans thought of the film, he mentioned this particular episode as being quite ridiculous."