Hand to hand combat

"When they were as close to each other as that it would have been impractical to use a rifle to shoot someone"

Are you kidding me? Just how far do you have to be for rifles to be effective, these aren't musket rifle they're using. You can still kill someone effectively at point blank, than if he was 100 yards away.

Game Over Man, Game Over!

ok i'm 61 and an old soldier, my dad was in the trenches in WW1
and yes this is the first film that shows warfare as it realy is,
up close and dirty. Hollywood make (safe) war movies (clean & tidy)
but this film comes closest to reality..

Nowadays, hand-to-hand combat is rare in modern war since most armies use airstrikes, artillery barages, or soldiers sniping at a great distance rather than close-quarters fighting. No doubt that most brutal trench fighting in Korea did happen between all armies involved, this movie somewhat egagerated it for brutal and dramatic affect. The war in Korea was a conventional war with front lines and trenches in the vein of World War I and II. In contrast, the Vietnam war, not to change the subject, was unconventional with no real front lines and close-quarters combat was very rare because most of the fighting involved enemy soldiers sniping at each other as well as dense jungle fighting. That is the current stage of almost every current war. Instead of two or more huge armies slugging it out in the open field, today's conflicts constist of small groups fighting at a distance, refusing to engage in close combat due to the modern and effective use of air power and artillery barages.

Sharpened trench-digging tools. #1 melee combat weapon (bayonets are inferior and unreliable), non-existing in this film.

It's pretty rare in the modern day because we just don't see the tight-quarters fighting we used to, a battle is generally fought by and large by pushing buttons and sending missiles to soften up a target then send some troops in to mop the rest up. The situation has become different because we can sit at home, push a button, and off thousands of people. At this time however, when you're dealing with bolt action rifles (and anyone who's fired a bolt action rifle knows they simply don't pump out shots fast, a person can get good with them, but they aren't semi-auto's)...so when you have 3000 people charging at you, you may manage to kill some while they're charging, but by the time you get 4 or 5 shots off you suddenly have people diving into your trench all around you, on top of you, over you...there's people firing rifles off to one side, and then gutting someone with heir bayonets before they can reload.

Real combat is fast...fast...FAST...and when the enemy is all over the wire and there's nowhere to fall back to, you just have to hope your knife is polished...

They try to avoid it now because the reality is, it's easier to kill people you can't see...to push a button and then be told you killed people 3000 miles away is tough, to look into a mans eyes and shove a bayonete into their guts to eviscerate them is traumatic beyond belief. That's why I always had such respect for ancient warriors who had to fight hand to hand all the time...that would break most of us psychologically today.

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*+_Charos_+*

"I have often laughed at weaklings
who thought themselves good because
they had no claws."

[deleted]

It's A OK for these morons to knife people in Call of Duty but it's completely unrealistic for trench warfare soldiers to do hand-to-hand? These people obviously don't know what they are talking about so I would take what they say with grain of salt.

The Korean War was one of the last warfare that still imitated the style of WWI and WWII. Primarily because the automatic assault rifles didn't exist yet. There were MGs and SMGs but their range wasn't as good as rifles. This meant a generally closer engagement in battle. If anything, Americans should know from history that a lot of Asian armies love to do a massive charge, and if theyg et close enough, to attack.

People are ignorant and assume Korean War should be the same as the Vietnam War... No it shouldn't. Vietnamese had AK-47s and the Americans had M16s. None of these type of weapons existed. The South Korean military were using the same exact military issued guns the US gave to their WWII soldiers and marines. If it's A OK to have hand-to-hand combat in WWII, why is it not realistic to have hand-to-hand combat in a country that's smaller than Texas battling it out for the lives of millions? This war was so brutal that parts of the land were literally destroyed.

THE ONLY UNREALISTIC thing about this film was its refusal to portray napalm. Mostly because it gave the perspective of the Koreans but the US dropped one million tons of napalm on North Korea. There haven't been significant napalm use since Okinawa and certainly not to the extent of the Korean War. But the only thing that comes as close to the horrors of napalm was in Vietnam when the first cavalry were pinned down and they dropped close to several millions to billions of dollars of explosives on a single field. We Were Soldiers depict this well but still not as good as Tae Guk Gi