The story of the airplane is below, so please read on...
There seems to be a trend right now with independent films about both world wars of the last century that has been going on for seven or eight years. The half-dozen or so indie films that I have seen in the last few years about the First World War have been surprisingly high quality in every way, with strict attention to period detail and realism, great acting, and gripping stories. On the other hand, most indie films about World War II tend to have no attention to detail, bad scripts, poor direction, incorrect wardrobes, low-budget sets, and cast actors with below average acting ability. I don't know the reason for the trend, but since I'm not a professional film critic that gets paid to watch bad films, I'm almost getting to the point where I don't want to watch any more indie WWII films because I just don't enjoy them. In fact, the carelessness with which they portray such a monumental and calamitous period in world history is kind of offensive.
"Spoils of War" is no exception to the bad WWII film trend, though I have to say that at least with this film, I knew during the opening credits that it was going to be bad. The viewer is shown a timeline of events from the Nazi Party formation in 1921 through the Invasion of Normandy in 1944. During this timeline, a New York Times front page is shown with "HILTER MADE NAZI PARTY LEADER" superimposed by the filmmakers over the original headline (if you didn't notice what I'm referring to, Hitler's name is misspelled). Unlike news stories today on the Internet, news sources in the 20th century employed editors, so mistakes like that would not have made the front page of any newspaper.
The film takes place in October 1944 and starts with an U.S. Army Infantry colonel on a beach in Normandy (even though France had been liberated in August and all U.S. forces were fighting in Holland, Belgium, and the France-Germany border by October) ordering a five-man group to kidnap the head of a German counterfeiting operation near Salzburg, Austria. The viewer is not told that the group is part of the OSS (Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of today's CIA) until the end credits, but knowing that makes some of the plot elements even more ridiculous, so I want to point it out now. One of the men on this team is a British corporal, but we're not told why he is part of the American OSS. Maybe it's because (as we learn) that he's the only one that speaks German and they couldn't find an American that speaks German. That's logical, right? He can also determine the authenticity of British currency with the naked eye, as we learn during the mission briefing. We're also not told why the commander of an infantry regiment has the responsibility of tasking OSS personnel with neutralizing counterfeiting operations. I'm trying very hard to resist going off on a tangent about the absurdity of that concept.
After that assignment is made, we learn in the next scene that the corporal is very constipated, and then he becomes quite disgruntled that the team is not going to be given a day off as a reward for executing their last mission so well. I should emphasize at this point that the OSS was an elite, cohesive organization, and the agents in it were volunteers who were highly trained, disciplined, and motivated. The anger that the corporal develops over not getting a day off becomes a sub-plot in the film. I should also mention that we don't know he is a corporal until the end credits because only the two officers in the film wear rank insignia on their infantry uniforms. Apparently the wardrobe department doesn't supply enlisted uniforms with any rank or division insignia. The men are given a vague briefing on their objective and told to be at the plane ready to go at 0530 the following day.
The star of this film should have been the Junkers Ju-52 transport plane that flew the team from Normandy to the mountains near Salzburg. The distance of that flight is about 1,050 km (652 miles). After the team parachutes from the plane in German paratrooper uniforms, we see them walking away from the drop zone changed into German infantry uniforms, with the screen caption giving the time "0630". As I mentioned, they boarded the aircraft at 0530 hours. A normal Ju-52 had a range of 870 km (540 miles) and a maximum speed of 265 km/hr (165 mi/hr). This particular propeller-driven plane with a fixed landing gear (meaning that the wheels don't go up into the plane during flight) that was designed in 1931 went 650 miles, landing somewhere en route in enemy territory to refuel (or the fuel consumption was just as incredible as its airspeed), in less than one hour! The plane had to have been flying at about twice the speed of sound to do that, which I previously thought was not achieved until the 1970s, and only by jet fighter planes. That airplane should have its own feature film or television series!
That's an introduction to the plot. If you want to watch this film and don't want to know how the story develops before you see it, do not read any further.
After the team gets their man at a house where the counterfeit money is being stored and is making their way to the pickup point, they come across a German machine gun position. Why there is a random German machine gun position in a mountain forest of Austria several hundred kilometers from any Allied forces or active fighting is one of the many elements of the film that are not explained. Nor is there any reason given as to why they open fire on the Germans from a distance, even though they are wearing German uniforms and could have walked up and killed the Germans without engaging in a firefight. Nonetheless, that's exactly what they do. They survive the firefight, and although the captain incurs an abdominal wound, it only starts shooting blood when they reach a small, conveniently empty house and he removes his jacket. The sudden loss of a couple of ounces of blood causes him to lose consciousness.
This is what the corporal has been waiting for since before the firefight (apparently knowing that the captain was going to lose consciousness for some reason or another when they reached their destination) in order to execute his plan. He talks one of the other soldiers into going back to get some of the counterfeit money so they can be rich after the war as payback to the Army for not getting a day off after their previous mission. He tries to convince the sergeant also, but the sarge is against the idea. For those of you that may not know, a sergeant outranks a corporal, and the sergeant in this group is second-in-command, next to the captain. Evidently, this sergeant's leadership technique involves trying to convince the men under him that something they are doing wrong is a bad idea and trying to talk them out of it, instead of simply ordering them to stand down and shut up. The corporal will not be deterred, which is no surprise, considering the fact that earlier in the film he had already told the sergeant to "Go to Hell" and to "Put a sock in it" on their way to the first objective. Remember what I said about OSS personnel being cohesive and disciplined? These guys ostensibly missed that class during training.
It was not my intention to summarize the entire film, and I don't want to spoil the film for anyone that might still want to waste the time that it will take to watch it, so to wrap up this very long review, I will say that after this point in the story, it doesn't get any more ridiculous than what I've already described, except for the very last part of the mission: When Super Plane picks up the team to take them back, it makes a 180° turn in the forest clearing and accelerates about 12 meters (40 feet) and takes off.
I'm telling ya... That plane though!
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