WWII Movies on the Antenna

The other night while surfing through my antenna channels I found one of my favorite movies of all time. In one of those rare moments of quiet, I was actually able to watch it all the way through. With our current busy schedule at work and home, it is not often that I get the opportunity to sit down and watch an entire movie. However, working hard to get customers high quality, low cost TV and internet means that occasionally watching TV is part of my job. 🙂

When I sit down to watch, I always search the antenna channels first. Why? Because I sometimes like the unexpected. I have been watching TV for 36 of my 46 years. Prior to the age of ten I had barely seen TV. We lived in the far north of Scotland on a small farm with limited electricity and no TV service. The first real moving picture entertainment I saw was Raiders of the Lost Arc when I came back to the United States. I will admit that it scared me, especially at the end.

Since then, I have seen a lot of movies. I worked in a VHS rental store for four years, long before streaming was even an idea. I watched everything you can imagine and then some. But I did not just watch the modern movies. My father, a Scotsman, who grew up listening to Nazi bombs turned me onto movies about World War II.  He taught me the history of WW 2 with books, personal stories and movies. I love these movies, even the Ronald Reagan Army Training Films.  Some of the antenna channels feature these kind of movies and they are worth watching.

My favorite WW 2 movie is by far The Longest Day. Saving Private Ryan ranks up there as does The Thin Red Line, The Young Lions, Schindler’s List and Mister Roberts. My father would never forgive me if I did not mention The Bridge Over the River Kwai, The Great Escape, Patton and Stalag 17. If you have not seen The Longest Day, clocking in at 178 minutes, then you owe it to yourself and your country to do so. Many of the most famous male movie stars the world has ever known is in this film…Google it.

The movie chronicles D-DAY, the Allied invasion of Nazi held France on June 6th, 1944. Many will contented that Saving Private Ryan conveyed a greater sense of D-DAY’s brutality, but The Longest Day more effectively conveys the scale of the undertaking. D-DAY was the single largest amphibious assault in the history of mankind. To rid the world of Evil, the Allies planned for years. They ran countless secret spy missions and created phony air force bases, all the while building up a massive flotilla of man and machine. I have read countless books about D-DAY from all perspectives and my mind is only now beginning to appreciate the scale of the endeavor. It is extraordinary and ranks at the top of all logistical and strategic achievements. And The Longest Day is the movie that does the best job of capturing it.

For someone like me, who appreciates WW 2 movies, the antenna offers me more than Netflix and Amazon Prime combined. I am older now, with children of my own, so war films no longer hold the appeal they once did; therefore, these films don’t show up in my streaming recommendations. However, on the antenna I easily stumble across most of the movies mentioned above. I could set up my DVR to record these but I enjoy these moments of random discovery.