Von Ryan's Express stars Frank Sinatra as a POW colonel who leads a daring escape from WWII Italy by taking over a freight train, but he has to win over the British soldiers he finds himself commanding.
North Africa, World War II. British soldiers on the brink of collapse push beyond endurance to struggle up a brutal incline. It's not a military objective. It's The Hill, a manmade instrument of torture, a tower of sand seared by a white-hot sun. And the troops' tormentors are not the enemy, but their own comrades-at-arms.
Charlie Anderson, a farmer in Shenandoah, Virginia, finds himself and his family in the middle of the Civil War he wants nothing to do with. When his youngest boy is taken prisoner by the North, the Civil War is forced upon him.
In the First World War, when Paris is expected to fall to the Germans, the attractive widow, Princesse de Bormes, organises a convoy of cars to evacuate the wounded from the front, and bring them back to her villa in Paris to recuperate. The authorities will not give them passes until an innocent 16-year-old boy, Guillaume Thomas de Fontenoy, joins them and is mistaken as the nephew of the popular General de Fontenoy. The Princess is enraptured by Thomas and her daughter, Henriette, falls in love with him. However Thomas feels impelled to see more of the action of the war.
Volkhov Front in 1942. The young political instructor of the counter-propaganda department of the headquarters of the division Rusanov is torn to the forefront. Together with an experienced warrior — captain Shaternikov — the hero gets to the forefront and transmits from the sound transmission programs addressed to German soldiers. And in the hours of calm passes several kilometers in order to see Katya, the signal woman of a neighboring sector of the front.
During World War II, оld Georgian peasant wine-grower Georgy leaves his Georgian village and goes off to the front line, hoping to find his son. George should see and transfer a lot of things, he becomes a soldier and only in the last days of war finds the son...
October 20, 1944, Belgrade was liberated by Red Army and Tito's partisans. But the capital of Yugoslavia is still fraught with danger - retreating aggressor mined the city . A special partisan squad goes into underground maze of tunnels to find and disarm explosives which are still guarded by SS special forces.
Germany, January 1939: a day in a concentration camp. Subjected to harsh military discipline the hungry prisoners are digging a huge hole and filling it up again. Several are tortured, die of exhaustion, in the electric fence, or are shot.
Allied agents infiltrate the Nazi rocket complex at Peenemunde in order to obtain their secrets and sabotage the plant. The film alternates between German developments of the V-1 missile and V-2 rocket (with a German cast speaking their own language) and discovery by British Intelligence of the weapon.
In Laos, 1954, eight days before the french defeat in the Indochina war, the 317th platoon – four french soldiers and 41 laotian combatants – has been ordered to leave its outpost and to retreat for the plains of Diên Biên Phu, where the french army is getting stucked. Led by the inexperienced and idealistic sous-lieutenant Torrens, fresh out of the military academy, and by adjutant Willsdorf, a WWII veteran of the Werhmacht, the group must cross 150 kilometers of jungle. But dripping rainwater, hostile nature, and the Viêt-minh ambushes expose them to constant danger.
In the midst of the Japanese occupation of the Philippines, a group of five disgraced and imprisoned Filipino soldiers, led by Sergeant Sanchez, are offered a pardon in exchange for a near-suicidal mission. They must intentionally get captured and sent to a brutal Japanese prison camp to rescue two American officers who hold a vital, secret message from General MacArthur. Once inside, they discover the camp is run by the cunning Major Hayashi and that a traitor among the Filipino prisoners is feeding him information, foiling all escape attempts. Realizing their own plan to tunnel out is compromised, Sanchez and his allies devise a new, more audacious strategy: to tunnel directly into the commander's office. The mission culminates in a violent and desperate breakout, where they must secure the message, capture the enemy commander, and fight for their freedom and honor.