400 FT High

In the decades since 1945, our interest in films about this period has never waned. The success and impact of Hacksaw Ridge and the other classic war films listed below proves both the continued relevance of the truth they contain and cinema’s unrivalled power for storytelling. It is one thing to know what happened on the ridge that day, but it is quite another to see humanity’s potential for courage embodied before our very eyes.

In 1950, Australian Second World War fighter pilot Paul Brickhill published a non-fiction, first-hand account of his experiences in a German PoW camp. The book was well-received, but it wasn’t until the release of the 1963 film that the story of a daring escape from Stalag Luft III became lodged in the popular consciousness - complete with its own instantly hummable theme tune.

The Great Escape exaggerates the involvement of American PoWs and changes the nationalities of the three successful escapees - in real life they were Dutch (Bram van der Stok) and Norwegian (Jens Müller & Per Bergsland) - but other aspects of production ensured authenticity. Several cast and crew members served in the military including Steve McQueen, Richard Attenborough and Charles Bronson. Former RAF wireless-operator Donald Pleasence even spent a year in the German PoW camp Stalag Luft I after his plane was shot down over northern France.

Like Hacksaw Ridge, Stephen Spielberg’s multiple Oscar-winning Second World War film was praised for the verisimilitude of its battle scenes, but there is also another significant truth at its heart. In the film, a squad led by United States Army Rangers Captain John H Miller (Tom Hanks) searches for a paratrooper on the direct orders of the US War Department. Having received word that three of the four sons of Margaret Ryan of Paton, Iowa, have been killed in action, General George Marshall orders that the last surviving brother, Private James Ryan (Matt Damon), be found and returned to his mother.

While the Ryan family is a fictional invention of screenwriter Robert Rodat, the Saving Private Ryan story was based on several real-life sibling soldiers whose families made huge sacrifices “upon the altar of freedom”, as Abraham Lincoln famously put it.

Around 13 November 1942, all five of the Sullivan brothers died when the USS Juneau (CL-52), on which they had served, was sunk by a Japanese torpedo. Two years later, four brothers of the Borgstrom family from Utah were killed in action in separate incidents over a six-month period. Their parents successfully petitioned for Boyd Borgstrom, the last-surviving serving brother, to be discharged by special order of the Marine Corps’ commandant.

It is the story of Sergeant Frederick 'Fritz' Niland, however, which most resembles that of Private Ryan. In the immediate aftermath of D-Day, Fritz was shipped back to the US to serve out the remainder of the war in safety, after all three of his brothers were presumed to have died in action. In fact, it later emerged that the eldest Niland brother, Edward, had been taken prisoner by the Japanese and survived until 1984, outliving Fritz by a few months.

In 1948 the ‘Sole Survivor Policy’ became official as DoD Directive 1315.15, designed to protect individuals from combat duty if they have already lost family members in military service.

It's true that Adolf Hitler had hoped to become a professional painter in his youth, as depicted in this thought-provoking counter-history set in Munich, immediately following the First World War. In his autobiography-cum-political-manifesto Mein Kampf, Hitler records how he applied twice to the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, but was rejected both times. A number of authenticated paintings by the Nazi dictator still exist today, either in private hands or kept from public view in the basement of Washington, DC’s Army Center of Military History.

What’s not true is that Hitler forged a friendship with a Jewish art dealer named Max Rothman, as played by John Cusack in the film. The fictional Rothman character instead allows the movie to examine the persuasive aesthetic power of Nazism and the banal origins of the evil which eventually led to the Holocaust. Could the greatest horror of the 20th century have been averted if only a young man named Adolf was a bit more talented with a paintbrush?

Tom Hanks, Geena Davies and Madonna starred in this girl power-pitching tale of how women stepped in to save America’s beloved ball game while the menfolk were away at war. In the film, the teammates of The Rockford Peaches learn the lessons of sisterhood, all while sporting uncomfortable uniforms and facing off fearsome opponents.

The details of this plot were fictional, but The All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL) was a real organisation set up in 1943 by chewing gum magnate Philip K Wrigley. The Rockford Peaches were also a real team, who won four championships between 1943 and 1954, when the league was disbanded. As in the film, the players were given makeovers, required to attend charm school classes and expected to wear lipstick at all times, in accordance with the league’s rules of conduct.

The film was an instant hit that not only ignited interest in the role woman played in the US’s war effort, but became an unofficial mascot piece for the real AAGPBL. In 2012, the film’s 20th-anniversary year, 47 former players reunited to watch a screening and celebrate their own time in the league. The event included a trip to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in New York, in a moving echo of the film’s final scene.

The facts of the Third Reich’s demise are a matter of much-studied historical record, but it was this astonishing, Oscar-nominated film by director Oliver Hirschbiegel that revealed what it would have actually felt like to be there, in the ‘Führerbunker’, in those fraught final days.

Upon the film’s release, critical controversy over the ethics of portraying Hilter’s human side soon subsided, leaving only consensus over the story’s historical importance. The authoritative German-language script drew on several sources, including the first-person accounts of Hitler’s youngest secretary Traudl Junge and the Nuremberg testimony of Nazi Minister Albert Speer, both of whom were present in the bunker.

Bruno Ganz’s mesmerising performance as Hitler stands out as particularly noteworthy. It was the result of many months of research, with particular focus on an 11-minute recording made of Hitler in conversation, which demonstrated his distinct Austrian dialect. The historian Ian Kershaw was among the film’s many admirers, saying: “Of all the screen depictions of the Führer… this is the only one which to me is compelling. Part of this is the voice. Ganz has Hitler's voice to near perfection. It is chillingly authentic.”

It sounds like hijinks from an episode of Goodnight Sweetheart, but actor M E Clifton James really did spend the last years of the war serving as a decoy for senior British Army officer General Montgomery and speaking loudly about made-up missions in the hope of misleading German spies.

After seeing action at the First World War Battle of the Somme, James took up acting and volunteered to serve as an entertainer when the Second World War broke out. He was instead posted to the rather less glamorous Royal Army Pay Corps in Leicester, until his resemblance to Montgomery was spotted by an officer involved in planning for D-Day.

In a further cinematic twist, it was the actor David Niven (star of A Matter of Life and Death, Around the World in 80 Days, and The Pink Panther) who recruited James. Niven was then serving as a lieutenant-colonel in the film unit and anecdotes about a first meeting with James was included in one of the Hollywood star’s biographies. In order to prepare for the greatest role of his career, James had to give up drinking and smoking (the real Monty did neither) and wear a prosthetic middle finger on his right hand, as he’d lost his own during the First World War. As depicted in the film, James was then sent to Gibraltar, a hot bed of spies at the time, to pose as Montgomery.

Despite James’s heroic involvement in the successful Operation Copperhead, the top secret nature of his mission meant he saw out the war in obscurity, and after being demobbed in 1945 was unable to find work. It was only with the well-regarded 1958 film version that James belatedly received some sort of recognition. He played both himself and Montgomery alongside John Mills and Cecil Parker as the British intelligence officers charged with leading the operation.