Latest news with #Burma
Fox News
4 days ago
- General
- Fox News
WWII hero's remains finally coming home after 80-year mystery is solved through military dedication
Nearly eight decades after he disappeared in a World War II plane crash over Burma, the remains of a Pennsylvania airman have been identified, paving the way for the hero's long-awaited burial at Arlington National Cemetery. In the summer of 1943, U.S. Army Air Forces 1st Lt. Henry J. Carlin, a 27-year-old from Philadelphia, was among six crew members aboard a B-25C "Mitchell" bomber that went down during a low-altitude raid in Meiktila, Burma. Carlin's remains and those of three others on board were not recovered after the war, and they were declared missing in action. The other two surviving crew members were captured by Japanese forces, according to the report. It is unclear if they returned home. The four heroes' remains were buried in a common grave near Kyunpobin, Burma, without identification, and later recovered by the American Grave Registration Service in 1947. Witnesses only described them as being from an "American crash," complicating the identification process. The bodies, listed as "unknowns" in Honolulu's National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, were exhumed in 2022, after the Department of Defense approved the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency's (DPAA) disinterment request. To identify Carlin's remains, scientists from DPAA used dental, anthropological and radio isotope analysis. The Armed Forces Medical Examiner System also used mitochondrial DNA analysis to make a positive ID, which was confirmed April 16. Bringing closure to a mystery that spanned generations, Carlin's remains will be buried in Arlington National Cemetery in May 2026. Carlin's name is recorded on the Walls of the Missing at the Manila American Cemetery and Memorial, an American Battle Monuments Commission site in the Philippines, along with the others missing from WWII, according to the DPAA. A rosette will be placed next to his name to indicate he has been accounted for. Carlin served as a navigator and was a member of the 22nd Bombardment Squadron (Medium), 341st Bombardment Group (Medium), 10th Air Force.
Times
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Times
The 10 best prisoner-of-war dramas, from Stalag 17 to Colditz
Being a prisoner of war is a fate no one could wish for and films and TV dramas won't let us forget that. Whether in the bleak chilliness of central Europe or the steaming jungles of Burma, the plight of the PoW on-screen is one of torture and sadism at the hands of their military captors. The Narrow Road to the Deep North, showing on BBC1/iPlayer and based on Richard Flanagan's searing novel, is just the latest example. But there's often light in the dark — gallows humour and no shortage of British pluck — as this list below shows. 10. Escape to Victory (1981) It still sounds absurd: Sylvester Stallone in goal, Michael Caine at left back, Bobby Moore at centre half, Pele up front, all taking on a Nazi team. But come on, this bank holiday matinee favourite is highly enjoyable. The plot isn't so far-fetched either, being inspired by a real story: the 'death match' between the Ukrainian team and a Nazi German side in 1942 in occupied Kyiv. The Ukrainians won 5-3. Rent Tenko 9. Tenko (1981-84) The travails of the malnourished women internees as they were roasted in an Asian internment camp after the fall of Singapore in 1942 were popular in the 1980s (about 15 million viewers). It wasn't so much the sight of boils, scorpion bites and torturous labour that kept us glued to it, more the intimate interplay between the women. U 8. Colditz (1972-74) The 1955 film The Colditz Story was the fourth most popular at the British box office that year. Yet it was in the early 1970s that escape from Colditz-mania really took off thanks to the TV series starring David McCallum, Robert Wagner and Edward Hardwicke. Most affecting is Michael Bryant as Wing Commander George Marsh, who feigns madness to get repatriated. It works, except it leads to a genuine psychosis and he is committed to a mental hospital. DVD 7. Empire of the Sun (1987) Christian Bale was impressive on screen even at the age of 13. In Steven Spielberg's take on JG Ballard's semi-fictional memoir — about his boyhood internment during the Japanese invasion of China — some of the best moments come when Bale's expat finds himself bonding with John Malkovich's brash American Basie in the camp (and look out for a young Ben Stiller). It's worth revisiting. Bale would later turn PoW again in Werner Herzog's 2006 jungle-survival film Rescue Dawn, also pretty good. Rent 6. Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence (1983) A cult classic more for its musical connections — a blond David Bowie on the poster and Ryuichi Sakamoto's celebrated synth soundtrack. Yet there's still much curiosity in a tale of Bowie's eccentric English free spirit defying the strict, code-bound cruelties of Captain Yonoi (Sakamoto). An oddity, but Akira Kurosawa and Christopher Nolan put this among their favourite films, so who am I to argue? Rent 5. The Deer Hunter (1978) Michael Cimino's portrait of a Pennsylvania community wrecked by a war far away slowly builds a sense of dread before exploding into its famed central sequence in Vietnam. No matter how many times you see it, when Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken and John Savage's characters — taken captive by the Viet Cong — are forced to play Russian roulette, your heart is in your mouth. StudioCanal Comedy leavens the suffering in Stalag 17 ALAMY 4. Stalag 17 (1953) The original Second World War PoW film set the template for others, but it still has a feel of its own. The director Billy Wilder's sharp eye for comedy means there's a knockabout fun to the scenes inside Barrack Four as the American prisoners try to keep up morale — 'I'll get you a date with Betty Grable!' Even the camp commandant is played by Otto Preminger as a twinkly-eyed buffoon. There is grit undercutting the humour, of course. Rent 3. The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) Long before The Narrow Road to the Deep North depicted Burma's Death Railway we had Alec Guinness's stiff-upper-lipped English colonel leading a battalion of British PoWs as they toil away at a bridge. His stubborn national pride in the face of gruelling sadism means the Brits build a better bridge than their captors could. The face-offs between Guinness's Colonel Nicholson and his nemesis Colonel Saito, played by Sessue Hayakawa, are what endure. Sky/Now 2. La Grande Illusion (1937) Jean Renoir's classic is like a Great Escape from a more civilised age. Erich von Stroheim is unforgettable as the stiff-backed German aristocrat who treats his imprisoned French counterpart Captain De Boieldieu with gentlemanly respect. There's a great clip on YouTube of Orson Welles telling Dick Cavett that this film would be on his ark if he could save only two. The other? 'Something else,' he says. DVD 1. The Great Escape (1963) How true to life was the most loved PoW epic of all? Apparently by March 1944, when 76 men tunnelled out, the German guards knew the war was nearly over and were happy to be bribed with cigarettes. And in the tunnels the men's poor diet meant that their bowels were so loose they often had to go to the loo right there and then, which I don't recall happening to Charles Bronson. No matter, Steve McQueen on a motorbike is immortal and that theme tune became the whistled soundtrack to every great escape since. Sky/Now
Irish Times
21-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
The Narrow Road to the Deep North review: Unflinchingly savage war tale starring Ciarán Hinds is a gruelling watch
There are war movies and there are movies about war, and The Narrow Road to the Deep North ( BBC One, Sunday nights, 9pm), Justin Kurzel's adaptation of Richard Flanagan's Booker -winning novel about the forced construction of the Burma-Thai Railway by Australian prisoners of war (POWs), falls unambiguously into the latter category. This is Kurzel's first foray into television, but he gives short shrift to the conventions of the medium, essentially making a five-hour film of unflinching savagery and darkness. The darkness is both figurative and literal. The Narrow Road is a gruelling watch. It is also a strain on the eyes, with much of the action shrouded in shadow, making it often difficult to discern what is going on. That is perhaps a mercy. Much like the book, the series is a rebuttal to cinema's historic tendency to portray the second World War as a jolly jaunt in distant climes. The moral centre of the piece is Belfast actor Ciarán Hinds . He plays the older version of Dorrigo Evans, a surgeon from Tasmania captured by the Japanese in Indonesia and forced to labour on the notorious Burma Death Railway. READ MORE As empathetically brought to life by Hinds, Evans is a successful doctor who reluctantly recalls his war years for a journalist. But just below the patrician surface lurks unresolved trauma. The source of that pain is made dreadfully clear in the flashbacks to the war, where the young Evans is played with charismatic stoicism by Jacob Elordi . Flanagan's novel drew on his own father's experience of war. Kurzel's version hits like a sort of negative image of David Lean's Bridge on the River Kwai. That film depicted the war in southeast Asia as a triumph of stiff upper lips over Japanese cruelty. But the Narrow Road to the Deep North removes all the romance. In its place, there is nothing but cruelty and humiliation, exposed ribs and unmasked savagery. The awfulness to come is hinted at in an early scene in which Evans' unit is taken prisoner by the Japanese, who declare their incarceration an incomprehensible shame and that the only way the POWs can redeem themselves is by building a railway. To their captors, Evans and his comrades are dead already. What follows is not a punishment but natural retribution for their lack of honour. Horror is blended with heartache through flashbacks, in which Evans embarks on an enthusiastic affair with his uncle's wife (Odessa Young) shortly before shipping out to war – and despite being engaged to his girlfriend (Olivia DeJonge). Oddly, the same plot device is central to Sebastian Faulks' first World War elegy, Birdsong. What is it about young men who are about to potentially meet their maker and the forbidden rhapsody of the love of an older woman? Sunday nights on the BBC tend to be dedicated to superior, cosy crime or binge-worthy drama. The Narrow Road to the Deep North is something else. It's slow, difficult TV. But it is worth the effort, and Hinds has never been more commanding as a man who has left hell but knows hell will never leave him. The Narrow Road to the Deep North is on BBC 1, Sunday, 9pm
The Guardian
20-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Narrow Road to the Deep North review
There is an overwhelming darkness to The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Justin Kurzel's adaptation of Richard Flanagan's Booker prize-winning novel. Thematically, this is to be expected: it is about a group of Australian prisoners of war constructing the Burma railway in the mid-1940s, at the tail end of the second world war. It is about the lasting trauma of conflict and imprisonment. It spans half a century, and though it tempers its darkness with a rich love story, it is largely violent, fatalistic and sorrowful. But visually, too, you may find yourself fiddling with the contrast and brightness settings. This very much matches its mood to its palette. Jacob Elordi is perfectly handsome and haunted as the younger Dorrigo, a poetry-loving doctor who is about to be married to the well-to-do and socially connected Ella (Olivia DeJonge). The show covers three timelines, two of which follow closely on from one another. Elordi takes the main shift, Dorrigo as a young man. It opens in the thick heat of battle, going straight into the action. Young soldiers trade barbs with gallows humour, as they joke and tease, and place bets on how long they think they are going to live. Their banter is interrupted by exploding mines, the casualties already considerable, just a few moments in. The survivors are captured and put to work on the railway. It is hellish from the off, a vivid nightmare of torture and a tale of impossible endurance. Forty-nine years later, towards the end of the 1980s, Ciarán Hinds is the older Dorrigo, a successful, wealthy and celebrated surgeon, still married to Ella (now played by Heather Mitchell). Dorrigo is brooding, even more haunted and undergoing a reckoning with his own history. He is also celebrated as a war hero, but he is combative, arrogant, even reckless, in his professional and personal life. He gives a furious television interview, ostensibly about his experiences of war, to promote a book, the nature of which is deliberately abstruse. This enforced reflection causes him to remember what he has tried so hard to forget and, as a drama, flipping between timelines, it builds up a picture of what made him the unhappy, unfaithful man he has become. It does this slowly, convincingly and in great, awful detail. The 1980s storyline, in which Dorrigo's philandering ways are laid bare, provides some respite from the relentless violence. This is visceral, in its truest sense. Kurzel captures the bodily horror of war in an almost confrontationally frank manner. As they hack away at rock and trees, the men are emaciated, filthy, full of malaria and dysentery. The camera nestles in among them, and hovers above, conveying a real sense of their closeness and suffering. At one point, a leg must be amputated. This is a gory and drawn-out ordeal. At least, in the darkness, it is partially obscured, though the audio alone is gruesome enough. For all of its bodily horrors, this is a passionate, full-bodied love story too, a strand that is delicately balanced but just as impactful. Before he is called up, Dorrigo visits his uncle Keith (a small, mighty performance from Simon Baker) and is immediately drawn to Keith's young wife, Amy (Odessa Young). She is intrigued, if not impressed, but when they meet again at a poetry reading in a bookshop, after Dorrigo has become engaged to Ella, that initial spark ignites into a forest fire. It takes time for their mutual attraction to become more than yearning and longing, lingering looks and touches, but the pacing of it is moving and affecting. Compared to the grinding chaos of the jungle, their affair is sad and beautiful, as romantic as it is doomed. This is a literary drama and it makes no apologies for that. Dorrigo loves Catullus and Aeschylus. The men perform Romeo and Juliet for each other in the jungle. Amy cements her attraction to Dorrigo with a fragment of Sappho, which reads, simply, 'you burn me'. At times, its novelistic roots are more obviously on show; some of the dialogue is writerly and elevated, as the characters reflect poetically upon human nature and cruelty. And there is much cruelty to consider. There are so many killings, so many deaths, and one particular execution, in the jungle, is one of the most distressing scenes I have watched on television in a long time. The Narrow Road to the Deep North, then, is not an easy prospect, but it is an immensely powerful one, driven by strong performances and a bracing confidence in its ability to tell this story, at its own pace, in its own way. My only complaint is that I would have liked to have been able to see just a little more of it. The Narrow Road to the Deep North aired on BBC One and is on iPlayer in the UK. It is available on Prime Video in Australia, New Zealand, the US and Canada.
The Guardian
20-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
TV tonight: Jacob Elordi and Ciarán Hinds are outstanding in a stirring war epic
9.15pm, BBC One Jacob Elordi and Ciarán Hinds are outstanding as the younger and older Dorrigo Evans, a war hero turned surgeon, in this haunting second world war drama. Based on Richard Flanagan's Booker prize-winning novel, the Australian epic tells Dorrigo's story over three timelines: a promising student who is engaged to be married into a well-to-do family; a Japanese prisoner of war who witnesses unimaginable horrors while building the Burma railway; and a retired traumatised man who is grappling with his past – including an intense and illicit love affair with his uncle's wife Amy (Odessa Young) – while doing publicity for his memoir. A stirring watch. Hollie Richardson 8pm, ITV1 Lauren Lyle returns as the young Scottish cop with the gumption to unravel ice-cold historic cases. This time round it's a doozy: the unsolved kidnapping of an oil heiress and her baby at the height of the miners' strike. ('Scotland's John Paul Getty,' mutters her boss.) Pirie and her team must piece together what really happened outside a Fife chip shop 40 years earlier. Graeme Virtue 8pm, Channel 4 Jimmy Doherty already has zebras, meerkats and capybaras at his wildlife park in rural Suffolk. But brown bears? That's a different matter. After launching a huge appeal to fund the building of a new home for Diego from Sweden, Jimmy also needs to find him a suitable flatmate – and what if they don't get along? Ellen E Jones 8pm, BBC Four Nicholas McCarthy was born without his right hand and he is the world's only professional one-handed concert pianist. He's making his Proms debut with Ravel's atmospheric Piano Concerto for the Left Hand (which pianist Paul Wittgenstein commissioned after losing his right arm in the second world war). HR 9pm, Channel 4 Elisabeth Moss (with an English accent) leads this espionage thriller written by Steven Knight. She plays MI6 spy Imogen, who is recruited by the CIA to go undercover and find out whether French woman Adilah El Idrissi (Yumna Marwan) is an Isis operative. Will Imogen be able to learn the truth and stop a terrorist attack? HR 10.20pm, ITV1 Kate Kniveton is a former MP who was abused by her husband, ex-Conservative minister Andrew Griffiths, for more than a decade. She has since campaigned for a ban on domestic abusers from seeing their children. In this candid documentary, Kniveton shares her story, listens to others' and shows the work she's doing. HR The Amateur, out now, Disney+ Rami Malek lends his disquieting intensity to this surprisingly enjoyable spy thriller. He plays a mild-mannered CIA cryptographer sent on a bloodthirsty revenge quest after his wife is killed in a terrorist attack. What's fascinating about this film is that, had the lead been any other actor, it would have devolved into generic pulp. But Malek, in the hands of director James Hawes, really leans into the character's psychopathy. He has a dead-eyed stare throughout, the sort you'd usually expect to find on a film's antagonist. Sure, this is a globe-trotting Bourne-style romp, but you're never allowed to forget the ethical iffiness of, say, blowing someone up inside a swimming pool. Stuart Heritage All-Ireland Senior Hurling: Cork v Tipperary, 3pm, BBC Two The championship final at Croke Park, Dublin.
