Nobody gets that this is the SPANISH army playing both sides!

Rating: Null/10 (10 June 2001)

Ultra-realism in war films (esp. WWII war movies) has come and gone along the years, and "Patton" is middling in this regard. You see, that's the Spanish army on the screen (including the German Heinkel 111 bombers!)playing both the US and British forces and their enemy, the German Wehrmacht. Why Spain? Because they had allowed units of their airforce to be filmed as the German Luftwaffe in the 1968 movie "The Battle of Britain." Spain flew the Heinkel 111 (a licenced copy called the C.A.S.A 112) and the Me 109 single engined fighter (known as the "Buchon" in its Spanish incarnation) because of it's ties to Nazi Germany via the dictator of Spain, Fransisco Franco. After WW II Spain was considered a strategic ally of the US, and sent obsolete equipment for its military, which until that point had been equipped with German and Italian equipment, including the famed German "coalscuttle" helmet of WW II. That 1948 staff car was Spanish army property. You can bet that the producers and the director paid a good amount to use the Spanish troops. Quibbles: AT-6 training planes are used as US fighters (which is why you don't really see them), the CASA 112s lack the proper German identifaction codes on their fuselages (and the fin swastikas are too large), the Afrika Korps troops wear brown intead of the green uniforms the real ones wore, no real British tanks are used (we only see US M-24 Chaffee light tanks), and the newsreel tanks don't match the movie tanks because they are the real things! The underground GHQ for the Wehrmacht is impressive, though I don't think it's historically accurate.