Military Collection: Fiction and Films

Everything in 2034 is an imaginative extrapolation from present-day facts on the ground combined with the authors years working at the highest and most classified levels of national security. Sometimes it takes a brilliant work of fiction to illuminate the most dire of warnings: 2034 is all too close at hand, and this cautionary tale presents the reader a dark yet possible future that we must do all we can to avoid.

In the spring of 1863, as he faces a battle for the first time at Chancellorsville, Virginia, a young Union soldier matures to manhood and finds peace of mind as he comes to grips with his conflicting emotions about war.

*Winner of the Pulitzer Prize* A New York Times Book Review Top Ten Book* A National Book Award Finalist* From Anthony Doerr, the highly acclaimed, multiple award-winning author, the beautiful, stunningly ambitious instant New York Times bestseller about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II. Marie-Laure lives in Paris near the Museum of Natural History, where her father works. When she is twelve, the Nazis occupy Paris, and father and daughter flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo, where Marie-Laure's reclusive great uncle lives in a tall house by the sea. With them, they carry what might be the museum's most valuable and dangerous jewel. In a mining town in Germany, Werner Pfennig, an orphan, grows up with his younger sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find that brings them news and stories from places they have never seen or imagined. Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments and is enlisted to use his talent to track down the resistance. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, Doerr illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another. Doerr's "stunning sense of physical detail and gorgeous metaphors" (San Francisco Chronicle) are dazzling. Ten years in the writing, a National Book Award finalist, "All the Light We Cannot See" is a magnificent, deeply moving novel from a writer "whose sentences never fail to thrill" (Los Angeles Times).

The Sartoris family on its Mississippi plantation during the Civil war and the Reconstruction period.

This fictional recreation of the Battle of Shiloh in April 1862 is a stunning work of imaginative history, from Shelby Foote, a beloved historian of the Civil War. Shiloh conveys not only the bloody choreography of Union and Confederate troops through the woods near Pittsburg Landing, Tennessee but the inner movements of the combatants' hearts and minds. Through the eyes of officers and illiterate foot soldiers, heroes, and cowards, Shiloh creates a dramatic mosaic of a critical moment in the making of America, complete with the haze of gun smoke and the stunned expression in the eyes of dying men. "Shiloh" was hailed by The New York Times as “imaginative, powerful, filled with precise visual details...a brilliant book.”

One of the most acclaimed novels in recent memory, Charles Frazier's "Cold Mountain" is a masterpiece that is at once an enthralling adventure, a stirring love story, and a luminous evocation of a vanished American in all its savagery, solitude, and splendor. Sorely wounded and fatally disillusioned in the fighting at Petersburg, Inman, a Confederate soldier, decides to walk back to his home in the Blue Ridge Mountains and to Ada, the woman he loved there years before. His trek across the disintegrating South brings him into intimate and sometimes lethal converse with slaves and marauders, bounty hunters and witches, both helpful and malign. At the same time, Ada is trying to revive her father's derelict farm and learn to survive in a world where the old certainties have been swept away. As it interweaves their stories, "Cold Mountain" asserts itself as an authentic American Odyssey--hugely powerful, majestically lovely, and keenly moving.

Set during World War II, this grotesque, comic, satirical novel recounts the amazing adventures of a bomber squadron. Set in the closing months of World War II in an American bomber squadron off Italy, "Catch-22" is the story of a bombardier named Yossarian, who is frantic and furious because thousands of people he hasn't even met keep trying to kill him.

Tragic romance of an American ambulance driver who deserts the Italian army to join an English nurse in World War I.

Ernest Hemingway's masterpiece on war, love, loyalty, and honor tells the story of Robert Jordan, an antifascist American fighting in the Spanish Civil War. In 1937 Ernest Hemingway traveled to Spain to cover the civil war there for the North American Newspaper Alliance. Three years later he completed the greatest novel to emerge from "the good fight," and one of the foremost classics of war literature in history. Published in 1940, "For Whom the Bell Tolls" tells the story of Robert Jordan, a young American in the International Brigades attached to an antifascist guerilla unit in the mountains of Spain. In his portrayal of Jordan's love for the beautiful Maria and his superb account of El Sordo's last stand, in his brilliant travesty of La Pasionaria and his unwillingness to believe in blind faith, Hemingway surpasses his achievement in "The Sun Also Rises" and "A Farewell to Arms" to create a work at once rare and beautiful, strong and brutal, compassionate, moving, and wise. "If the function of a writer is to reveal reality," Maxwell Perkins wrote Hemingway after reading the manuscript, "no one ever so completely performed it." Greater in power, broader in scope, and more intensely emotional than any of the author's previous works, "For Whom the Bell Tolls" tells of loyalty and courage, love and defeat, and the tragic death of an ideal. When it was first published, The New York Times called it "a tremendous piece of work," and it still stands today as one of the best war novels of all time.

Intense, powerful, and compelling, Matterhorn is an epic war novel in the tradition of Norman Mailer's "The Naked and the Dead" and James Jones's "The Thin Red Line." It is the timeless story of a young Marine lieutenant, Waino Mellas, and his comrades in Bravo Company, who are dropped into the mountain jungle of Vietnam as boys and forced to fight their way into manhood. Standing in their way are not merely the North Vietnamese but also monsoon rain and mud, leeches and tigers, disease and malnutrition. Almost as daunting, it turns out, are the obstacles they discover between each other: racial tension, competing ambitions, and duplicitous superior officers. But when the company finds itself surrounded and outnumbered by a massive enemy regiment, the Marines are thrust into the raw and all-consuming terror of combat. The experience will change them forever.  Written by a highly decorated Marine veteran over the course of thirty years, Matterhorn is a spellbinding and unforgettable novel that brings to life an entire world--both its horrors and its thrills--and seems destined to become a classic of combat literature.

A symphonic novel of love and war, childhood and class, guilt and forgiveness that provides all the satisfaction of a brilliant narrative and the provocation we have come to expect from the acclaimed author. On a hot summer day in 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis witnesses a moment's flirtation between her older sister, Cecilia, and Robbie Turner, the son of a servant and Cecilia's childhood friend. But Briony' s incomplete grasp of adult motives--together with her precocious literary gifts--brings about a crime that will change all their lives. As it follows that crime's repercussions through the chaos and carnage of World War II and into the close of the twentieth century, Atonement engages the reader on every conceivable level, with an ease and authority that mark it as a genuine masterpiece.

"O'Brien has written a vital, important book--a book that matters not only to the reader interested in Vietnam, but to anyone interested in the craft of writing as well." -Michiko Kakutani, New York Times A classic work of American literature that has not stopped changing minds and lives since it burst onto the literary scene, "The Things They Carried" is a ground-breaking meditation on war, memory, imagination, and the redemptive power of storytelling. "The Things They Carried" depicts the men of Alpha Company: Jimmy Cross, Henry Dobbins, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Norman Bowker, Kiowa, and the character Tim O'Brien, who has survived his tour in Vietnam to become a father and writer at the age of forty-three. Taught everywhere--from high school classrooms to graduate seminars in creative writing--it has become required reading for any American and continues to challenge readers in their perceptions of fact and fiction, war and peace, courage and fear and longing. "The Things They Carried" won France's prestigious Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize; it was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

The timeless classic of World War I Germany that speaks to generation after generation. Considered by many the greatest war novel of all time, "All Quiet on the Western Front" is Erich Maria Remarque’s masterpiece of the German experience during World War I.

"A novel that reads like science fiction but bristles with rich detail about how the next World War could be fought." --Vice What Will World War III Look Like? "Ghost Fleet" is a page-turning imagining of a war set in the not-too-distant future. Navy captains battle through a modern-day Pearl Harbor; fighter pilots duel with stealthy drones; teenage hackers fight in digital playgrounds; Silicon Valley billionaires mobilize for cyber-war, and a serial killer carries out her own vendetta. Ultimately, victory will depend on who can best blend the lessons of the past with the weapons of the future. But what makes the story even more notable is that every trend and technology--no matter how sci-fi it may seem--is real. The debut novel by two leading experts on the cutting edge of national security, "Ghost Fleet" has drawn praise as a new kind of technothriller while also becoming the new "must-read" for military leaders around the world.

In his monumental narrative of the outbreak of the First World War and the ill-fated Russian offensive into East Prussia, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has written: "a dramatically new interpretation of Russian history" (Nina Krushcheva, The Nation). The assassination of the tsarist prime minister Pyotr Stolypin, a crucial event in the years leading up to the Revolution of 1917, is reconstructed from the alienating viewpoints of historical witnesses. The sole voice of reason among the advisers to Tsar Nikolai II, Stolypin died at the hands of the anarchist Mordko Bogrov, and with him, Russia's last hope for reform perished.
August 1914 is the first volume of Solzhenitsyn's epic, The Red Wheel; the second is November 1916. Each volume concentrates on a critical moment or "knot" in the history of the Russian Revolution.

The month of November 1916 in Russia was outwardly unmarked by seismic events, but beneath the surface, society, from the Tsar's bizarre & troubled court to the peasants, workers, & ill-led soldiers in the trenches, seethed fiercely. As no other could, the author makes us experience the whole bubbling cauldron. In Petrograd, luxury store windows are still brightly lit; the Duma debates stormily about the monarchy, the course of the war, & clashing paths to reform; the workers in the huge & miserable munitions factories veer increasingly toward sedition. At the front, all is stalemate except for sudden death's capricious visits, while in the countryside sullen anxiety among hard-pressed farmers is rapidly replacing patriotism. In Zurich, Lenin, with the smallest of all revolutionary groups, plots his sinister logistical miracle. With masterly & moving empathy, through the eyes of both historical & fictional protagonists, the author unforgettably transports us to that time & place-the last of pre-Soviet Russia. In terms of the effect he has had on history, this author is the dominant writer of the twentieth century.

"War and Peace" broadly focuses on Napoleon's invasion of Russia in 1812 and follows three of the most well-known characters in literature: Pierre Bezukhov, the illegitimate son of a count who is fighting for his inheritance and yearning for spiritual fulfillment; Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, who leaves his family behind to fight in the war against Napoleon; and Natasha Rostov, the beautiful young daughter of a nobleman who intrigues both men.

Kurt Vonnegut's masterpiece, "a desperate, painfully honest attempt to confront the monstrous crimes of the twentieth century." From Time.
Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time. "Slaughterhouse-Five," an American classic, is one of the world's great antiwar books. Centering on the infamous World War II firebombing of Dresden, the novel is the result of what Kurt Vonnegut described as a twenty-three-year struggle to write a book about what he had witnessed as an American prisoner of war. It combines historical fiction, science fiction, autobiography, and satire in an account of the life of Billy Pilgrim, a barber's son turned draftee turned optometrist turned alien abductee. As Vonnegut had, Billy experiences the destruction of Dresden as a POW. Unlike Vonnegut, he experiences time travel, or coming "unstuck in time." An instant bestseller, Slaughterhouse-Five made Kurt Vonnegut a cult hero in American literature, a reputation that only strengthened over time, despite his being banned and censored by some libraries and schools for content and language.

Contents: Harriet Beecher Stowe -- Calvin Stowe; Francis Grierson; The battle hymn of the republic; The union as religious mysticism -- Abraham Lincoln -- Northern soldiers: Ulysses S. Grant -- Northern soldiers: William T. Sherman -- Northerners in the South: Frederick L. Olmsted, John T. Trowbridge -- Northerners in the South: Charlotte Forten and Colonel Higginson -- Three Confederate ladies: Kate Stone, Sarah Morgan, Mary Chesnut -- Southern soldiers: Richard Taylor, John S. Mosby, Robert E. Lee -- Diversity of opinion in the South: William J. Grayson, George Fitzhugh, Hilton R. Helper -- Alexander H. Stephens -- The myth of the old South; Sidney Lanier; Poetry of the Civil War; Sut Lovingood -- Novelists of the post-war South: Albion Tourgée, George W. Cable, Kate Chopin, Thomas Nelson -- Ambrose Bierce on the Owl Creek Bridge -- The chastening of American prose style; John W. De Forest -- Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes.

Ernest Hemingway's most important writings on war--perhaps the author's greatest subject--are brought together in a single volume, introduced and edited by his grandson, Seán Hemingway, with a foreword by his son, Patrick Hemingway. Ernest Hemingway witnessed many of the seminal conflicts of the twentieth century--from his post as a Red Cross ambulance driver during World War I to his nearly twenty-five years as a war correspondent for The Toronto Star--and he recorded them with matchless power. This landmark volume brings together Hemingway's most important and timeless writings about the nature of human combat. Passages from his beloved World War I novel, A Farewell to Arms, and For Whom the Bell Tolls, about the Spanish Civil War, offer an unparalleled portrayal of the physical and psychological impact of war and its aftermath. Selections from Across the River and into the Trees vividly evoke an emotionally scarred career soldier in the twilight of life as he reflects on the nature of war. Classic short stories, such as "In Another Country" and "The Butterfly and the Tank," stand alongside excerpts from Hemingway's first book of short stories, In Our Time, and his only full-length play, The Fifth Column. With captivating selections from Hemingway's journalism--from his coverage of the Greco-Turkish War of 1919-22 to a legendary early interview with Mussolini to his jolting eyewitness account of the Allied invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944--Hemingway on War collects the author's most penetrating chronicles of perseverance and defeat, courage and fear, and love and loss in the midst of modern warfare.

This guide to film portrayals of U.S. armed services lists more than 1,000 features produced in the United States since 1898. It also includes movies that received military assistance, documentaries, foreign films depicting American servicemen, and movies made for television. Each feature film entry contains credit information, a list of major cast members, year of production, service represented, and a summary.

In the Battle of Thermopylae of 480 BC, an alliance of Greek city-states fought the invading Persian army in the mountain pass of Thermopylae. Vastly outnumbered, the Greeks held back the enemy in one of the most famous last stands of history. Persian King Xerxes lead an Army of well over 100,000 men to Greece and was confronted by 300 Spartans, 700 Thespians and other Slave soldiers. Xerxes waited many days for King Leonidas to surrender or withdraw. When the Greeks did not leave, Xerxes was left with no option and he moved forward. The battle lasted for about 3 days and after which all 300 Spartans were killed. The Spartan defeat would not have happened if not for a local shepherd, named Ephialtes, who defected to the Persians and informed Xerxes of a separate path through Thermopylae, which the Persians could use to outflank the Greeks.

In 1193 B.C., Prince Paris, the son of the King of Troy falls in love with Helen, the wife of the king of Sparta, and convinces her to follow him away from her husband, Menelaus. The result is an epic war in which the Greeks sail to Troy and lay siege. Achilles, the greatest warrior in all the world, is called in to fight against Troy and give Greece the upper hand. Hector, the eldest son of Priam, King of Troy, and the greatest Trojan warrior, embodies the hopes of the people of his city.

In the year 334 BC, a 20-year-old military commander from northern Greece set out to conquer what was then the known world. His name was King Alexander of Macedon. During the next 12 years, he led 40,000 troops more than 20,000 miles, defeating the most powerful ruler on Earth, King Darius of Persia, and conquering all of Asia. He died of a battle wound at the age of 32, but his conquests have been celebrated and studied for more than 2,000 years.

Oliver Stone's "Alexander Revisited" should stand as the definitive version of Stone's much-maligned epic about the great Asian conqueror. Following the DVD release of his previous Director's Cut, Stone offers a video introduction here, explaining why he felt a third and final attempt at refining his film was necessary. Essentially, he's using this opportunity to re-create the "road show" format of the Biblical epics of the 1950s and '60s, with a three-and-a-half-hour running time (with an intermission at the two-hour mark) including 45 minutes of previously unseen footage. Stone has also significantly restructured the film, resulting in substantial (if not exactly redemptive) improvements in its narrative flow. Alexander (played in a torrent of emotions by Colin Farrell) is dying as the film opens, his final moments serving to bookend the film's epic story, which incorporates flashback sequences to flesh out the Macedonian king's back story involving the turbulent battle of fate between his father, King Philip (Val Kilmer) and his scheming sorceress mother Olympia (Angelina Jolie, ridiculous accent and all), who insists that Alexander is literally a child of the gods.
In Stone's final cut, epic battles remain chaotic (although Alexander's strategy is somewhat easier to follow, with on-screen titles indicating left, right, and center during his army's greatest maneuvers) and the ultra-violent battles are more graphically gory than ever (hence their "unrated" status). The animalistic lovemaking of Alexander and his barbarian bride Roxana (Rosario Dawson) is slightly extended (with Dawson as ravishing as ever), and Stone's additional footage also improves the overall arc of Alexander's relationship with his closest generals and male companions, although his most intimate homosexual encounters remain mostly discreet. As Alexander Revisited makes clear, the film's weaknesses remain unavoidable, but Stone deserves credit for recognizing how a longer running time, and more disciplined narrative structure, would bring Alexander closer to the respect it never earned from critics and filmgoers alike. This is unquestionably a better film than it used to be, leaving us to wonder why it took three separate efforts to shape Alexander into its best possible presentation. - Jeff Shannon

The public and private lives of six key men who ruled the Roman Empire: Julius Caesar; Augustus; Nero; Hadrian; Constantine; and Justinian. Includes unequaled location footage; unseen images; and careful re-enactments bringing the series to life. The time period is from Caesar becoming emperor in 46 BCE and Justinian's death in 565.

Young King Henry of England asserts a hereditary claim to the throne of France, gathering an army and embarking on a course that will lead to one of England's greatest battlefield triumphs and forever changes the face of Europe. The events take place during the Hundred Years War, before and after the Battle of Agincourt in 1415.

An epic documentary bringing life to America's most destructive - and defining - conflict. Here is the saga of celebrated generals and the ordinary soldiers. A heroic and transcendent president and a country that had to divide itself in two in order to become one again.

Col. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain leaves behind a quiet life and a career as a college professor to fight for the Union. Native Virginian Gen. Robert E. Lee is forced to choose between his loyalty to the United States and his love of the Southern states where he was born and raised and leads the Confederate army. Gen. Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson -- a man of great religious faith -- believes in a higher authority leading him and his men to specific, pre-ordained fates, also serving in defense of the Confederacy. The film follows Chamberlain, Jackson, and Lee from the declaration of war through the battles at Manassas, Antietam, Fredericksburg, and Chancellorsville.

Civil War drama depicts the events and personal struggles of the Union and Confederate soldiers at the Battle of Gettysburg.

A wounded soldier is trying to return home after the Civil War to the woman he left behind. She has learned to survive and has found strength in an uncultured woman who came to help at their family farm. All will learn about hope, longing, and faith.

The Civil War explodes, air thick with musket fire, soil drenched with the blood of kinsmen, bodies piling up like cords of wood. In the madness and fury, a small group of Union soldiers fall into the hands of the Confederate army. Overnight, they find themselves herded aboard a prison train bound for the deepest regions of the South, to a slice of Hell carved out of the Georgia clay known as Andersonville. A moving drama that tells the most tragic tales ever to come out of the Civil War.

Scarlett O'Hara is the daughter of a wealthy southern plantation owner. Ashley is the love of her life, but he is going to marry his cousin Melanie Hamilton. At a barbecue at Twelve Oaks, Scarlett meets Rhett Butler. News of the Civil War starting arrives at the barbecue. As the war continues, Scarlett becomes a widow, all while still pining for Ashley. After the war, Scarlett travels to her family's plantation only to find it in ruins, with no food, animals and her mother dead. Later, Rhett courts Scarlett and they get married and have a daughter, Bonnie. When Bonnie dies, Rhett goes mad. Then Melanie dies. Rhett feels that Scarlett will go to Ashley to be with him. Not understanding Scarlett's intentions, Rhett walks out on Scarlett.

With an acceptable balance of strengths and weaknesses, HBO's revisionist rendition of "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee" can be recommended as a history lesson for viewers. It doesn't flinch from the harsh realities that were so passionately chronicled in author Dee Alexander Brown's enduring 1970 classic of Native American history, nor does it soften the brutality of violence between the U.S. federal forces and the doomed Native American tribes who fought to preserve their native territories, from the legendary battle of Little Big Horn in 1876 (depicted in the opening scenes) to the shameful slaughter of Sioux warriors at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, on December 29, 1890. Viewers get a sobering, noble, and heartbreaking tale of territorial injustice, with forced parallels to the war in Iraq, full of admirable performances yet riddled with clichés and anachronistic details.

Jack Crabb is 121 years old. And he's done it all. He's been a full-fledged Cheyenne, an Indian fighter, a snake oil merchant, master gunman, drinking buddy of wild Bill Hickok, colleague of Buffalo Bill, and is the only survivor of Custer's Last Stand. Crabb is either the Old West's most neglected hero or the biggest liar ever to cross the Mississippi. Little Big Man is Jack Crabb's story. This satire of the Old West conveys some important truths about Western expansion and the Indian wars.

An account of the United States' war with Spain beginning in 1898 eventually led to U.S. control of Cuba and the Philippines, and later resulted in the independence of those two countries. Explains the United States' experiment in imperialism, which it later decided against.

A story of how the irresistible lure of adventure and the unknown bring two young men together in the Australian army in 1915. They are sent to fight in the Gallipoli campaign in Turkey.

Based on the novel by Erich Maria Remarque. A group of young World War I German recruits pass from idealism to disillusionment with war.

Presents the story of T.E. Lawrence (Peter O'Toole), the heroic and troubled man who organized the Arab nations to fight the Turks in World War I and then, having reached a pinnacle of power in Mideast politics, retired to postwar military obscurity.

In Italy in World War I, a British nurse meets and falls in love with an American ambulance driver. Amidst the horrors of war, their love is true, but fragile and it's fateful ending is one of the most moving experiences ever portrayed on the big screen.

Story of a boy drafted into the military who begins his career as a pacifist and then soon sees the justification for fighting.

In 1940 set in London, the story is an ode to how women played a major role in boosting national morale during the Blitz of London in the second world war.

World War II Movies features three films: Hitler's SS: Portrait of Evil, Black Brigade, and Minesweeper. Hitler's SS: Portrait of Evil tells the tale of two brothers in Nazi Germany and stars Tony Randall and Jose Ferrer. The Black Brigade stars Richard Pryor, Robert Hooks, and Stephen Boyd and concerns an inexperienced all-black commando squad that takes on a suicide mission. Minesweeper is the story of a disgraced naval officer's redemption and stars Richard Arlen.

A World War II thriller about the evacuation of Allied troops from the French city of Dunkirk before Nazi forces can take hold.

A dramatization of the experiences of General George S. Patton during World War II.

This movie is set during WW II, from D-Day to fighting in France in 1944. Captain John Miller must take his men behind enemy lines to find Private Ryan, whose three brothers have been killed in combat. Faced with impossible odds, the men question their orders. Why are eight men risking their lives to save just one? Surrounded by the brutal realities of war, each man searches for his own answer and the strength to triumph over uncertain future with honor, decency and courage.

Tells the story of Easy Company, 506th Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division, U.S. Army, an elite rifle company that parachuted into France early on D-Day morning in 1944, fought in the Battle of the Bulge, captured Hitler's Eagle's Nest at Berchtesgaden, and suffered heavy casualties. Also includes a documentary about the soldiers in Easy Company.

Set in WW II in April 1945. As the Allies make their final push in the European Theatre, a battle-hardened army sergeant named Wardaddy commands a Sherman tank and her five-man crew on a deadly mission behind enemy lines. Outnumbered and outgunned, and with a rookie soldier thrust into their platoon, Wardaddy and his men face overwhelming odds in their heroic attempts to strike at the heart of Nazi Germany.

Based on a true story about the famous plane of World War II, the Flying Fortress, Memphis Belle is about the crew of one of the B-17s flying their last mission before they can go home to a hero's welcome.

Named for the insignia of the First Infantry Division, this World War II combat film follows a handful of young GIs and their sergeant as they battle their way from North Africa through Sicily, Omaha Beach, and Belgium to the ultimate horror of the concentration camp at Falkenau, Czechoslovakia.

Jack Perkins narrates this History Channel documentary series that relays the story WWII's Pacific Theater, from 1941 to 1945, when the USAF hit the waters in-between California and Japan and fought the imperialist Japanese. Billed as the most comprehensive chronicle of the Pacific Front ever assembled, the series utilizes a combination of incisive historical commentary, graphic combat footage, and detailed analysis of the battles and strategies enlisted to map out the events clearly and accurately.

"Rich" Richardson (Clark Gable) is a hard-driving, dedicated submarine officer with a single-mindedpurposeto seek out and smash the Japanese destroyer he believes sank his former ship. Given a new command, Richardson drills his men to the point of mutiny as he relentlessly trains them for the battle ahead. At last, word comes of the destroyer's position, and, disobeying orders, Richardson finally confronts his foe, unaware that an even greater enemy lurks nearby...one who's been targeting him for a watery grave. Co-starring Burt Lancaster as Gable's executive officer, this gripping WWII adventure-thriller set a new standard for submarine pictures. "Severely, nail-bitingly tense" (The New York Times), Run Silent, Run Deep is the most exciting film about the "silent service" ever made.

This edition of Tigers of the Sea covers the battle for the Pacific Ocean in World War II, from Pearl Harbor to Midway.

John Wayne, a tough Marine sergeant, takes recruits and makes them Marines. He does it with discipline and authority ... and with his fists when he has to. The men begin to understand when they see him in action and he earns their respect. The film follows a group of Marines from boot camp to the Battle of Iwo Jima in 1945 and contains a recreation of the scene on top of Mount Suribachi, the peak immortalized by the famous photograph of the American flag being raised, victorious, by a small group of soldiers.

In 1945, the United States and Japanese armies met on Iwo Jima. Decades later, hundreds of letters are unearthed from that stark island's soil. The letters give faces and voices to the men who fought there, as well as the extraordinary general who led them. Leading the defense is Lt. General Tadamichi Kuribayashi. With little defense other than sheer will and the volcanic rock of the island itself, Gen. Kuribayashi's unprecedented tactics transform what was predicted to be a quick and bloody defeat into nearly 40 days of heroic and resourceful combat.

A strikingly realistic film follows a devoted platoon of Marines through the terrors of war in the South Pacific during 1942. Poignantly narrated, and with soldiers battling disease, treacherous terrain, unrelenting weather, and a human enemy, it contains explosive action rooted in a solid historical context.

February 1945. Even as victory in Europe was finally within reach, the war in the Pacific raged on. One of the most crucial and bloodiest battles of the war was the struggle for the island of Iwo Jima, which culminated with what would become one of the most iconic images in history: five Marines and a Navy corpsman raising the American flag on Mount Suribachi.The inspiring photo capturing that moment became a symbol of victory to a nation that had grown weary of war and made instant heroes of the six American soldiers at the base of the flag, some of whom would die soon after, never knowing that they had been immortalized. But the surviving flag raisers had no interest in being held up as symbols and did not consider themselves heroes; they wanted only to stay on the front with their brothers in arms who were fighting and dying without fanfare or glory.

Based on the true story of American Rangers who rescue the survivors of the Bataan Death March from the Cabanatuan Prison Camp during WWII. When the Philippines fell to the Japanese, the remnants of Gen. MacArthur's Army were forced down the Bataan Penninsula where they were surrounded and cutoff with no hope of rescue. They were starving and dying of disease. Gen. Wainwright eventually surrendered and the troops were marched off to prison. Along the way thousands died or were murdered by the Japanese. They were taken to Camp O'Donnell and to Cabanatuan Prison Camps where they were starved and beaten. When MacArthur invaded the Philippines he made it a priority to rescue the remaining prisoners still alive in Japanese hands.

Drama about life in the Army in the days prior to World War II. Shows the effect of Army discipline on an individualistic former boxing champion who defies the attempts of officers and men to break him when he refuses to fight on the company's boxing team. Includes actual scenes of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

A dramatization of the development of the atomic bomb by the Manhattan Project, during World War II, with emphasis on the relationship between General Leslie Groves, the project director, and scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer.

Chronicles the events leading up to Emperor Hirohito's momentous speech, the historic renunciation of his divine status, and his meetings with General Douglas MacArthur, the commander-in-chief of the occupying American forces, who advises his own president not to declare the Japanese leader a war criminal.

Olympian and war hero Louis Zamperini survived in a raft for 47 days after a near-fatal plane crash in WWII, only to be caught by the Japanese Navy and sent to a prisoner-of-war camp.

When the war ended in 1945, his battle began. Based on Laura Hillenbrand's bestselling book, this begins where Unbroken ends, sharing the next amazing chapter of Olympian and World War II hero Louis Zamperini's powerful true story of forgiveness, redemption, and amazing grace.

At the end of World War II, a mysterious, horribly burned man who claims not to remember his name, known only as the "English patient, " lies near death in an Italian villa. He is cared for by a quietly desperate young nurse, Hana, herself a victim of the war. With her at the villa are Kip, a young Sikh bomb-disposal expert, and a shadowy thief with bandaged hands named Caravaggio. The key to the burned man's past may lie in his commonplace book, a volume of Herodotus, and its intimations of the sacred whirlwind of a great, mysterious, passionate, and tragically doomed love, which trapped two unsuspecting people, forever.

In 1935, thirteen-year-old fledgling writer Briony Tallis and her family live a life of wealth and privilege in their enormous mansion. On the warmest day of the year, the country estate takes on an unsettling hothouse atmosphere, stoking Briony's vivid imagination. Robbie Turner, the educated son of the family's housekeeper, carries a torch for Briony's headstrong older sister Cecilia. He hopes that Cecilia has comparable feelings. All it will take is one spark for this relationship to combust. When it does, Briony - who has a crush on Robbie, is compelled to interfere. She goes so far as to accuse Robbie of a crime he did not commit. Cecilia and Robbie declare their love for each other, but, ultimately, he is arrested. Briony bears false witness and the course of three lives is changed forever. As Briony grows older, she continues to seek forgiveness for her childhood misdeed. Through a terrible and courageous act of imagination, she finds the path to her uncertain atonement, and to an understanding of the power of enduring love.

Tells the story of ordinary people in four quintessentially American towns - Waterbury, Connecticut; Mobile, Alabama; Sacramento, California; and Luverne, Minnesota - and examines the ways in which the Second World War touched the lives of every family on every street in every town in America.

An unlikely World War II platoon has been tasked by FDR with going into Germany to rescue artistic masterpieces from Nazi thieves and returning them to their rightful owners. With the art trapped behind enemy lines, and with the German army under orders to destroy everything as the Reich fell, how could they possibly succeed? But as the Monuments Men, as they were called, found themselves in a race against time, they would risk their lives to protect mankind's greatest achievements.

Based on the true story of WWII Russian hero Vassili Zaitsev whose fame thrust him into a personal war with the Nazis best sharpshooter, Major Erwin Konig.

Three Korean War (1950-1953) Army surgeons adopt a hilarious, lunatic lifestyle as an antidote to the tragedies of their Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, and in the process infuriate army bureaucrats.

In an immersive narrative, Burns and Novick tell the epic story of the Vietnam War as it has never before been told on film. Features testimony from nearly 100 witnesses, including many Americans who fought in the war and others who opposed it, as well as Vietnamese combatants and civilians from both the winning and losing sides.

Based loosely on Joseph Conrad's "The Heart Of Darkness," Coppola's Vietnam War epic follows Sheen up the Mekong River into Cambodia to find Brando, an officer who has gone mad in the jungle and is running his own empire.

A young soldier in Vietnam experiences a moral crisis when confronted with the horrors of war and the complexities of human nature. Winner of Best Picture at the Oscars.

Born and nurtured in war, America grew in strength and power and now, in the 21st century, it is the foremost military power in the world. George Kennedy takes us on this three-hundred-year saga of United States wars.

This documentary chronicles the deployment of a platoon of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan's Korengal Valley, starting in 2007. The movie focuses on a remote 15-man outpost, Restrepo, named after a platoon medic who was killed in action. It was considered one of the most dangerous postings in the U.S. military. This is an entirely experiential film: the cameras never leave the valley; there are no interviews with generals or diplomats.

On Nov. 19, 2005, Iraqi insurgents bombed a convoy of U.S. Marines in Haditha, Iraq. This results in the death of the company's most popular officer. Enraged by their loss, his comrades carry out a brutal retaliation. This massacre leaves 24 men, women and children dead in Haditha, Iraq. Follows the story of the U.S. Marine Kilo Company, an Iraqi family, and the insurgents who plant the roadside bomb.

U.S. Navy SEAL Chris Kyle is sent to the Iraq War (2003-2011) with only one mission: to protect his brothers-in-arms. His pinpoint accuracy saves countless lives on the battlefield. However, his reputation is also growing behind enemy lines, putting a price on his head and making him a prime target of insurgents. He is also facing a different kind of battle on the home front: striving to be a good husband and father from halfway around the world.

US Army Staff Sergeant Will James, Sergeant J.T. Sanborn and Specialist Owen Eldridge comprise the Bravo Company's bomb disposal unit stationed in Baghdad, Iraq (2003-2011). James is the tech team leader. When he arrives on the scene, Bravo Company has thirty-nine days left on its current deployment, and it will be a long thirty-nine days for Sanborn and Eldridge whose styles do not mesh with that of their new leader. James' thrill of the dismantlement seems to be the ultimate goal regardless of the safety of his fellow team members, others on the scene or himself. On the other hand, Sanborn is by the book: he knows his place and duty and trusts others in the army to carry out theirs as well as he. Eldridge is an insecure soldier who is constantly worried that an error or misjudgment on his part will lead to the death of an innocent civilian or a military colleague. While the three members face their own internal issues, they have to be aware of any person at the bomb sites, some of whom may be bombers.

A group of U.S. soldiers returning from Iraq struggles to integrate back into family and civilian life, while living with the memory of a war that threatens to destroy them long after they've left the battlefield.

A unique inside look into the Oklahoma 45th National Guard Brigade, better known as the "Thunderbirds." Sgt. Eran Harrill represents the members of the Thunderbirds well. He is a hero, a devoted single father, and a proud member of the Oklahoma National Guard. Set in one of the most dangerous parts of Afghanistan at the height of the surge, it is a heart-pounding, heartfelt grunts' eye-view of the war. The film is as close to experiencing war on the front lines of fighting without actually being there.

A year after the fact, a followup report on the U.S.-led coalition's March 2003 invasion of Iraq.

An emotionally charged story of two brothers who struggle to find their place within their family after one of them is sent to the war in Afghanistan. The responsible brother at war is missing in action and presumed dead. His less responsible brother gravitates toward his brother's presumed widow and cares for her. When the older brother returns from prison camp with post traumatic stress problems his role and his brother's shift.

The story of four Navy SEALs sent on an ill-fated covert mission to neutralize a high-level Taliban operative. They are ambushed by enemy forces in the Hindu Kush region of Afghanistan. Based on The New York Times bestseller.