The 1965 movie “The Battle of the Bulge” is generally regarded by war movie buffs as the most inaccurate war film ever made. It stars the otherwise excellent Henry Fonda leading a large cast of fictional characters (though Fonda’s Lt. Col. Kiley was based on a real U.S. soldier).
The film was designed to be viewed on a curved Cinerama screen, utilizing three projectors. Therefore, watching it on DVD doesn’t provide the intended visual experience, which is particularly noticeable in the tank battle scenes, according to the film rating website Rotten Tomatoes.
There are so many inaccuracies in the film, it comes across as an interpretive movie rather than a dramatic one. In the film’s opening, a precursor to the errors to come, the narrator describes how Montgomery’s 8th Army was in northern Europe; they were actually in Italy. The inaccuracies don’t stop there.
The weather was so bad at the launch of the German offensive that it completely negated Allied air superiority and allowed the Nazi armies to move much further, much faster than they would have had the weather been clear. In the 1965 film, the weather is always clear. When the film does feature aircraft, the first one shown is a Cessna L-19 Bird Dog, a 1950s-era plane.
Despite the timeframe of the actual Battle of the Bulge, December 1944 to January 1945, and the well-documented struggles with ice and snow in the Ardennes at the time, the movie’s tank battle scenes are set in a snow-free environment. Also, there are few trees in the movie’s Ardennes Forest.
In an affront to the men who fought and won the battle, the film substitutes the M47 Patton tank for the Germans’ King Tiger tanks. The filmmakers show U.S. tanks being sacrificed to make the Tiger tank use their fuel so the Germans will run out. The U.S. didn’t need to use this tactic in the actual battle, as the Germans didn’t have the fuel to reach their objectives anyway.
Speaking of tactics, a German general in the film orders infantry to protect tanks by walking ahead of them after a Tiger hits a mine, which ignores the fact that a man’s weight is not enough to trigger an anti-tank mine, and therefore none of them would have exploded until the tanks hit them anyway.
Other inaccuracies include:
- The uniforms are all wrong.
- Jeeps in the film are models that were not yet developed during World War II.
- Salutes are fast, terrible, and often indoors.
- The bazookas used in the films are 1950s Spanish rocket launchers (the film was shot in Spain)
- American engineers use C-4, which wasn’t invented until 11 years after the war’s end.
- Soldiers read Playboy Magazine from 1964.
The technical advisor on the film was Col. Meinrad von Lauchert, who commanded tanks at the Bulge… for the Nazis. He commanded the 2nd Panzer Division, penetrating deeper into the American lines than any other German commander. Like the rest of the Nazis, he too ran out of fuel and drove his unit back to the Rhine. He swam over the river and then went home, giving up on a hopeless situation.
The reaction to the movie was swift: That same year, President Eisenhower came out of retirement to hold a press conference, denouncing the film for its historical inaccuracies.
