The Yangtse Incident is the saga of the Amethyst, a British vessel left stranded in China during the Communist takeover. The British government tries to reclaim the Amethyst, only to run up against a Great Wall of Red bureaucracy and propaganda. It is up to Lieutenant Commander Kearns (Richard Todd) and his valiant crew to pilot the Amethyst down the Yangtse, under cover of night, without arousing the suspicions of their Chinese "hosts". It is to Akim Tamiroff's credit that he makes the character of Chinese Colonel Peng a three-dimensional figure despite his villainous behavior. Released under a variety of the titles, Yangtse Incident is best known to American TV viewers as Battle Hell.

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This subtle, unadorned British war drama was the second collaboration between "The Archers," Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. Six British bomber crewmen are obliged to bail out over Holland. To escape detection from the Nazis, the crewmen accept the hospitality of several Hollanders, all dedicated to the freedom-fighting activities of the Underground. The film is constructed along the lines of the earlier Powell-Pressburger film The Invaders, except that the escapees are British rather than German and their Dutch contacts are willing rather than reluctant co-conspirators. The six male stars are Godfrey Tearle, Eric Portman, Hugh Williams, Bernard Miles, Hugh Burden, and Emrys Jones; among those who aid them in their flight to freedom are Googie Withers, Joyce Redman, and Peter Ustinov. The austere photography by Ronald Neame is complemented by the to-the-point editing of future director David Lean. Adding to the verisimilitude of One of Our Aircraft Is Missing is the utter absence of a musical score.

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The year is 1914, and as World War I continues to rage across the European countryside, four individuals stuck on the front lines find themselves faced with the unthinkable in director Christian Carion's Academy Award-nominated account of the true-life wartime event that would offer hope for peace in mankind's darkest hour. When the war machines began rolling in the summer of 1914, the devastation that it waged upon German, British, and French troops was palpable. As the winter winds began to blow and the soldiers sat huddled in their trenches awaiting the generous Christmas care packages sent by the families, the sounds of warfare took a momentary backseat to the yearning for brotherhood among all of mankind. It is here that the fate of a French lieutenant, a Scottish priest, a German tenor, and a Danish soprano's lives were about to be changed forever. On Christmas Eve of that year, the lonely souls of the front lines abandoned their arms to reach out to their enemies on the battlefield and greet them with not anger or hostility, but with the simple, kindly gesture of a much needed cigarette or a treasured piece of chocolate, and to put their differences aside long enough to wish their brothers a sincere "Merry Christmas!"

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Clive Brook heads the cast of this low-key British war film. Brook plays the skipper of a tiny English cruiser, performing convoy duty in the north seas. A German battleship targets the cruiser for a deadly game of cat and mouse. Just when it seems that Brook and his crew will be blown out of the water, a battle squadron comes to the rescue. One of the first World War II combat films, Convoy features future stars Stewart Granger and Michael Wilding in very minor roles.

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Arthur Hiller directed this exciting World War II drama starring Rock Hudson as Major Donald Craig of the British North African Army. In 1942, Craig is captured by the Vichy French, rescued by Palestinian Jews, and taken to the headquarters of Col. John Harker (Nigel Green). Harker explains that since Craig is an expert on the desert, he has been recruited to mount a suicidal raid upon the fuel bunkers at Rommel's key source of supplies at Tobruk. In order to get to Tobruk, a band of Palestinian Jews, commanded by Captain Kurt Bergman (George Peppard), will pose as German soldiers escorting a group of British prisoners. Making their way across the Libyan desert, the band endures a series of close calls until two Nazis spies are captured. When the spies suddenly escape, Harker and Craig realize someone in their group is a traitor. But by this point they have reached their destination and have to table the problem of the traitor as they battle the Germans around the fuel depot at Tobruk.

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Italo Bombolini (Anthony Quinn) is the mayor of the hillside village of Santa Vittorio. The wine-loving town leader erases a pro-Mussolini slogan when he hears of the fascist being killed and hanged from a meathook. His wife Rosa (Anna Magnani) throws him out of their wine shop when he and his friends celebrate and he gives away too much wine. When he hears the retreating Nazi Army will soon be in town, hundreds of villagers turn out to hide the wine in an old Roman cave. The people work day and night, hiding 1 million bottles just before the Nazis enter the town. SS officers threaten death to anyone who withholds the wine. Italo presents a single bottle to the irate general (Hardy Kruger), as the hapless Germans are powerless to force the villagers to produce the coveted bottles. Not even a pistol to the head of their beloved mayor is effective as the town stands by, watching in complete silence.

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Black Brigade is also known as Carters Army, which aired on January 27, 1970. The movie is a war drama. It starred a host of prominent African-American film actors including Richard Pryor, Rosie Grier, Robert Hooks, Billy Dee Williams and Moses Gun. A redneck officer (Stephen Boyd) is put in charge of a squad of all black troops charged with the mission of blowing up an important hydro dam in Nazi Germany. Their failure would delay the Allies advance into Germany, thus prolonging the war. These African-Americans are relegated to cleaning latrines and have little real military training, but Captain Beau Carter has no choice. He leads the rag tag unit to blow up the dam and they turn out to be heroic.

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If one is a subscriber to cable TV's American Movie Classics, it is virtually impossible to avoid seeing the John Wayne starrer Operation Pacific; judging by the frequency of its showings, the film must be someone's very special favorite down at AMC. Set during WW II, the film casts Wayne as Duke Gifford, two-fisted submarine commander. Patricia Neal co-stars as Mary Stuart, Duke's former wife. Duke's hopes of staging a reconciliation are constantly interrupted by a series of life-threatening circumstances, capped by the rescue of a group of orphans from a Japanese-held island. Featured in the cast are old John Wayne cronies Ward Bond and Jack Pennick, as well as TV's future Jim Bowie, Scott Forbes. Operation Pacific might prove a fascinating companion feature to 1964's In Harm's Way, which reteamed John Wayne and Patricia Neal in another WW II Navy yarn.

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The Adventures of Tartu--stars Robert Donat as a Rumanian-born British spy, dispatched to Czechoslovakia during World War II. Posing as an ineffectual milquetoast, Donat is hired as a chemist in a Nazi-controlled poison gas factory. Working in concert with the Underground, our hero spends his off-hours dismantling the Nazi operation. Then he has to figure a way to get out of Czechoslovakia as adroitly as he got in. Adventures of Tartu was filmed at MGM's British studios (it was Metro's first British production in two years), with an American director but with a full cadre of English acting talent: Donat, Valerie Hobson, Glynis Johns, etc. The Teutonic villain is played by Walter Rilla, whose son Wolf Rilla later became a prominent British director.

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This series chronicles the adventures--in the air and on the ground--of the men of the 918th Bombardment Group of the U.S. Eighth Air Force. First commanded by irascible General Frank Savage--and later by Colonel Joe Gallagher, the son of a Pentagon General--the Group is stationed in England, and flies long-range bombing missions into German-held Europe.

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Set in the French trenches, this WWI melodrama was cowritten by William Faulkner and directed by Howard Hawks. Hard-drinking Captain La Roche (Warner Baxter) delivers the same hollow speech to each wave of fresh soldiers assigned to his command, only to see them senselessly slaughtered by the Germans. La Roche's new officer is chipper Lieutenant Denet (Fredric March), who doesn't comprehend the futility of his assignment. Both men fall for beautiful nurse Monique La Coste (June Lang), who prefers Denet. La Roche's troops welcome "Private Moran" (Lionel Barrymore), the eldest private in the army and a grizzled veteran. In reality, Moran is La Roche's father. In a battle, La Roche is blinded. His father helps him direct artillery fire at the front, but both men are slain. Although he has won the girl and La Roche's command, Denet is forced to give the same pointless speech to his doomed recruits. Although Hawks had directed an earlier film of the same title, The Road to Glory (1936) was not a remake of that picture, but of a popular French war movie, Les Croix des Bois (1932), from which studio executives cannibalized combat footage for use in the new version.

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Robert Mitchum and Burgess Meredith star in this gripping World War II drama based on the newspaper columns of Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent Ernie Pyle.

Directed by legendary filmmaker William Wellman, The Story Of G.I. Joe depicts Ernie Pyle's (Burgess Meredith) experiences with the men of Company C of the 18th Infantry and their role in the invasion of Italy. The story begins as Pyle joins Captain Bill Walker (Robert Michem) and the men of Company C in the desert of North Africa and follows these gallant soldiers as they fight their way from the beaches of Sicily to the hills of sounthern Italy.

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