But, do you think all Nazi officers were fluent in English??
Pre WW-2 Germany wasn’t occupied by Americans and Brits. You’re not making a valid comparison.
Modern Germany is very multilingual to support their economy. The Dutch are more so, but the Germans are very good. Prior to WW-2, few Germans needed to speak more than their native language.
Actually, Germans speak English because after WWII English language classes became part of the grade school curriculum. Everyone speaks English now, except for very old people that didn’t get it in grade school and those that lost it because they didn’t use it. All Mrs JT’s cousins and their spouses speak English except for one husband. His job doesn’t require English language and he lost his ability to speak English.
I may have missed this in the 60-plus replies, but I did some more research on the Steve McQueen motorcycle jump over the barbed wire fence in the movie “The Great Escape”
I thought I had read many, many years ago that Steve McQueen’s character, "Captain Virgil Hilts ‘The Cooler King’ ", who was regularly confined to isolation in the cooler who had a habit of bouncing a baseball against the cooler cell wall to entertain himself, as he planned his next escape, was actually supposed to jump the fences and actually escape. But due the filming the scene early in the morning with the dew still on the grass, his motorcycle lost traction and he slid out, crashing into the fence. Since the crash was so well filmed, they changed the script and made that part of the movie…
But alas, I was wrong… Below is from Wikipedia – “The Great Escape (film)” with all the appropriate footnotes, etc…
The motorcycle chase scenes with the barbed wire fences were shot on meadows outside Füssen, and the “barbed wire” that Hilts crashes into before being recaptured was simulated by strips of rubber tied around barbless wire, constructed by the cast and crew in their spare time. Insurance concerns prevented McQueen from performing the film’s notable motorcycle leap, which was done by his friend and fellow cycle enthusiast Bud Ekins, who resembled McQueen from a distance. When Johnny Carson later tried to congratulate McQueen for the jump during a broadcast of The Tonight Show, McQueen said, “It wasn’t me. That was Bud Ekins.” Other parts of the chase were done by McQueen, playing both Hilts and the soldiers chasing him, because of his skill on a motorcycle. The motorcycle was a Triumph TR6 Trophy which was painted to look like a German machine. The restored machine is currently on display at Triumph’s factory at Hinckley, England.
I’m so disappointed, so I guess Tom Cruise never flew a F-18 Super Hornet in the movie “Top Gun,” and what, Arnold Schwarzenegger never flew the Harrier Jump Jet in the movie “True Lies” either.
What’s next, the lone Ranger shot "silver plated’ bullets, Kryptonite is just shinny green glass, Lassie was really a boy (he was you know…)?
