Posted on 03/11/2023 10:11:08 AM PST by nickcarraway
***But the thing that sticks with me is the rear supply Sergeant who insisted that the soldiers drawing additional ammunition had to settle down and cue up properly.****
True. And the ammo boxes were held together with SCREWS and there were not enough screw drivers to open them.
In looking at some old Fredrick Remington paintings of the Indian Wars he shows a supply Sgt opening ammo box containers using a hammer as those boxes were nailed together and not screwed.
The dualing singing watch between the Wales soldiers and the Zulu was worthy of an Oscar. Caines first major role and Stanley Baker was even better as the CO.( by one week, if I recall correctly)
Lieutenant John Chard: If it’s a miracle, Colour Sergeant, it’s a short chamber Boxer Henry point 45 caliber miracle.
A Man Call Horse, was also an episode of Wagon Train before Richard Harris starred in the movie. Wagon Train had some damn fine directors.
Hated one thing so much, I have never watched it again...
One of Cain's last lines was that he felt ashamed after winning the battle.
That was so implausible, so absurd, that after several days of savage fighting Cain was ashamed that he and a small group of his men were still alive.
Completely ruined the movie, in my opinion.
I always wondered who wrote that line and who insisted that it had to be retained in the movie.
The race of professional victims don’t like the movie because it shows how whites should defend themselves against hoards of angry out of control blacks.
Yes, that one i saw the Hugh Glass one I’ve only read about.
Agree 200% about Wagon Train directors. Back in the day when TV actually entertained.
Always felt they never awarded Ward Bond with an Emmy because of his stand on communism. Was president of actors guild during black listing.
“There are always some folks, in any kind of ‘cowboy vs Injun’, that will always get butthurt that the Injuns lost.”
100 and more British soldiers, in the hills and plains of Zulu territory, withstood an attack by 1000,s of Zulu warrors. That shows heroism on both sides where shields and assaguys met firearms with bayonets.
The British commander was informed of Zulu S.O.P., and thwarted them by refusing them the field, and raising bulwarks in a defensive stance to break their attacks as the surf on a rocky coast.
The Zulu chieftains, not unintelligible persons, adapted, but could not overcome the British.
They, then, so impressed, saluted them as warriors, and left them, peacably.
I have viewed this film several times. I find nothing to be butthurt about.
Lastly, I am of Mojave and white blood. If that does tweek you, woo woo woo woo!
I prefer this version.
They were always very well trained, but just much smaller than most of their continental competitors because Britain focused on its sea power. The Zulu wars and then the Boer War showed the limitations of that approach. In 1914 the Imperial General Staff already told the government that in any big European war the 100,000 men of the professional British army would be gone in a few months, and so it was.
And in the end...IIRC, the Zulus respected the British and allowed them a chance to retreat from the battlefield.
“””Don’t know anything about the guy but I always liked Michael Caine as an actor, he seems like an alright sorta guy from interviews.”””
Micklewhite (Michael Caine) was sent to the front along the Samichon River Valley, where he fought the Chinese and North Koreans in raids and patrols, often at night. In 1953, he contracted malaria and was sent home.
(snip)
In 1951, he was called up to serve in the British Army.
(snip)
Nothing, he says, could have prepared him for what happened during his first watch on guard duty during the absolute darkness of the Korean night.
From his trench, the night was split open by enemy flares lighting up the battlefield and by the hordes of the enemy charging toward him. The first time he heard a Chinese trumpet break the stillness, he barely had time to ask his buddy what that was before hundreds of trumpets joined in.
“There in front of us, a terrifying tableau was illuminated,” he recalls. “Thousands of Chinese advancing toward our positions, led by troops of demonic trumpet players. The artillery opened up but they still came on, marching toward our machine guns and certain death.”
Caine describes the minefield they’d constructed to defend themselves from such a human wave as “suddenly irrelevant.” Wave after wave of Chinese infantry committed suicide, throwing themselves onto barbed wire so their bodies could be used as a bridge.
“They were eventually beaten off,” the actor says of the Chinese soldiers. “But they were insanely brave.”
After getting sent to war so early in his life, Caine came to believe that war ages kids well beyond their years. He and his mates were approaching 20 years old when they went to the front lines of Korea. On the way back, they encountered the units who would be replacing them.
“They were 19-year-olds, as we had been when we went in,” Caine says. “I looked at them and I looked at us, and we looked 10 years older than they did.”
The actor recalls the closest he came to death during the war, on a nighttime patrol in no man’s land. It was a moment that he says still haunts him to this day.
Three British troops covered themselves in mud and mosquito repellant in order to make their way deeper into the valley, an area they had been fighting to take for weeks. They were headed for the Chinese lines to try to gather information. On their way back to their own lines, they suddenly smelled garlic in the air.
“The Chinese ate garlic like chewing gum,” Caine says. “We realized we were being followed.”
The fusiliers threw themselves on the ground as a unit of Chinese pursuers began searching the brush for them. Rather than die in the weeds, the trio charged the enemy, guns blazing.
This incident comes back to the actor when others try to attack him or bring him down. He thinks about what happened on that hill in Korea, and realizes that no one could ever make him feel hopeless again.
“I just think, as I did on that Korean hillside, ‘You cannot frighten me or do anything to me, and if you try, I’ll take as much or as many of you with me as I can.’”
Listen to Actor Michael Caine Talk About Fighting in Korea
https://www.military.com/history/listen-actor-michael-caine-talk-about-fighting-korea.html
The problem I have with ‘Zulu’ is that they just showed the part where the Brits just had an initial, temporary victory over the Zulus and intentionally didn’t show how moments later Wakanda supersonic aircraft arrived to wipe out the British.
Great flick
Actually, If anything I think they were quite respectful toward the Zulu in how they were portrayed in that film.
It’s a wonderful film, on my list of top twenty of all time.
Hah!
I just watched it for the first time last month after a FR post. Based on actual events. They hired locals. I think it was the locals that determined that people related to men that fought in the battle got first preference to be in the movie.
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