Normandy’s Shadow Cast Over Stalingrad

By Reynaldo Cruz Díaz / reynaldo@ahora.cu / Monday, 08 February 2010 16:42

It was very real. As a matter of fact, it actually seemed as if I was in the combat myself and gunfire was whistling past me. I was really happy that it was only one scene of a movie, in which the horrors of the war were very well-displayed. The ally troops’ landing in Normandy was, without question, a heroic action in which the US soldiers played a defining role. This World War II action, masterfully recreated by Steven Spielberg’s film Saving Private Ryan, was highly risky and many lives were lost in it. On the early hours of the so-called “D-Day” the airborne divisions jumped onto German-occupied France to support the sea landing on Omaha Beach. In the morning, saluted by the German MG-42s, the allies entered Normandy.

Saving Private Ryan is not the only Hollywood production made to highlight the true value of the British, French and American soldiers in the war against the Adolph Hitler’s army. The attitude of the allied troops against the worst enemy of the human race is undeniable. Yet, the celluloid multimillion-dollar productions have apparently “forgotten” other greater heroes in that epic story. Other excellent works of art come along Ryan: Schindler’s List, The Empire of the Sun, by Steven Spielberg himself, plus Les Femmes à l’ombre, Shining Through, and even Valkyre in which the hero is no other than Claus von Stauffenberg, a German officer who led a plot to kill the Führer.

The Cold War left a perpetual anticommunism influence in TV, movies, literature and comic books, going from Superman fighting the Soviets, to the latest Indiana Jones production (produced by Spielberg himself), in which Indy’s enemies switch from Nazi German to Soviet Russians. Nevertheless the most negative impact of the Cold War has not been that, but the total “suppression” of the events that took place during the Great Patriotic War.

Hollywood has seen history-based productions honoring Alexander the Great, the Spartans, William Wallace; but has not yet seen one that pays homage to Georgi Zhukov, the great Russian tactician who shattered the German troops. The American film companies that once honored Joan of Arc have not yet put a single photogram in memory of Soya and Shura, or those Russian soldiers who stopped the German tanks at the very gates of Moscow. The Stalingrad battle has not been put in the scene by US filmmakers.

A sign of the possible end of this phenomenon was Enemy at the Gates, starring Jude Law and Ed Harris, in which the adventures of Vasili Saitzev, a Russian sniper who terrified the invaders in the war against fascism are told. There seems to be more mantra than reality around the feats of the shooter; however, since he was one man in a complicated environment he was easy to sell, and Vasili, from Soviet soldier, almost became the “typical American hero”. Meanwhile, the veil of Normandy spreads once again over the heads of those pairs of Soviet soldiers, one with the rifle and the other with the bullets, who ran past Nazi flying bullets during the bloody battle of Stalingrad.

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