The tag for this movie is:
During World War II, 1.2 million African-Americans served in America's Armed Forces. Fully 125,000 served overseas. 708 were killed. Among these were The Wereth Eleven. Their story was lost to history. Until now.
Not really, though.
Near the end of World War II, the Army finally allowed some Black GIs to serve in combat units - still segregated from white combat units. (This was not done out of a sense of equality. We were short of men.) One such unit was the 333th Field Artillery Battalion, which served during the terrible Battle of the Bulge at the end of 1944 on the French-German border. From that unit eleven Black GIs were captured and held prisoner by a particularly sadistic group of German soldiers in a small farming community in Belgium, Wereth. Before killing them, the Germans evidently tortured them mercilessly and sadistically, and then left their mutilated bodies in a field, where they disappeared under the snow for the rest of the winter. That spring they were discovered, and American investigators were sent to record what happened. Nothing came of it, however; whether because they were Black or because the Army, under a great deal of pressure at that point, just lost the report this movie never tries to determine. (There appears to have been almost no real research behind the making of this movie, and that's one of its major problems.)
Though this movie is short - about 70 minutes - only two or three minutes are devoted to what happened at Wereth that night because, as you might guess, we don't know much. None of the eleven Black GIs survived their torture to tell us, and the movie makers do not seem to have made any effort to tract down the Germans who were there to get their version of what happened. By now, ten years later, when the German soldiers would have to be at least 95, the chances of finding them are probably close to non-existent.
So what is the take-away from this story, and this movie? That there were sadistic Germans in the SS? Yes, certainly. That comes as no surprise. The last part of the movie recounts some of their large massacres of civilians - Malmedy - to which Oradour sur glans and too many other sites could be added. Those mass killings dwarf the torture and slaughter of these eleven men, about whom we learn almost nothing. That is a problem, one that the book that came out several years later tries to remedy by devoting way too much time to reconstructing the lives of the eleven men.
This movie never figures out what it is trying to show, and that is a problem too.
Is it trying to show that the SS could be monsters? That's nothing new, of course, but I suppose it could have presented us with 70 minutes of their various massacres across Europe. I wouldn't/couldn't sit through it, but it might interest some viewers.
Is it trying to show that the SS could be racist? That's not new, either. The death camps across eastern Europe survive to remind us of that, as does every Holocaust memorial.
Is this movie trying to show us that the American Army didn't care as much about Black GIs as their white counterparts? We know that, too, but it's a point not taught in our schools and does bear repetition. In that case, however, research should have been done to explain why the Army seems to have forgotten about these eleven men when they commemorated the deaths of others who were killed, in combat or in torture, during the Battle of the Bulge. Were other Black GIs killed and commemorated? Or, if they were killed, were they forgotten too? This movie very desperately needed an analytical historian to think about WHY this story was worth telling - and I believe it was. But I believe this movie fails its story, badly.
But is the movie a total failure? No.
Far and away the best thing in this movie is George Schomo, a veteran of the 333rd Field Artillery Battalion, who gives us some idea of what it was like for Black GIs to go through basic training in what was basically a Jim Crow segregated army and then serve during the Battle of the Bulge. He is thoroughly engaging. I wish the director/script writer/producer, Robert Child, a fat white man in a World War II uniform, had sacrificed all his screen time so that we could have heard more from Mr. Schomo.
After him, it is interesting to hear from the sons of two of the men who served in that unit and came back alive. Again, I would have liked to hear more from them.
What would I have liked to see less of?
1. Child
2. All the staged fake documentary footage. Give me a break, guy. Show what you've got that's real, and then fill us in on what happened. Don't try to pass off staged footage as real archival footage.
3. the shots of how pretty Wereth is in the summer. Our men were there in a terrible winter. Why do I need to see what it looks like on a beautiful summer day?
In sum: It's only 70 minutes long. Only about two of those minutes tell us what happened to the Wereth Eleven. Now maybe someone will do real research and find out why their story was Forgotten.
