Cross of Iron

Army sergeants Dave and "Fixit" spend a three-day pass in Pasadena, where they meet Janet and Cora, two young women who work in a parachute factory.

A young Catholic priest from Boston confronts bigotry, Nazism, and his own personal conflicts as he rises to the office of cardinal.

Intercutting dramatic vignettes with newsreel footage, the story follows the characters from an infantry squad as they make their way from Sicily to Germany during the end of World War II.

In the center of the plot is a screenwriter hired to create a new film. He writes a script about his childhood in the post-war Moscow courtyard. About how the boys were at enmity with the firemen, how they tried to blow up the fire, and how the firemen took revenge on them ... And how the boys ate the earth, swearing allegiance to each other ... And about who passed the test and who did not .. In his memoirs the script writer seems to be walking around in circles, returning to his childhood, as the brightest part of his life, where he very much wants to return, like a prodigal son in his father's house...

London, England, May 2000. The peaceful life of elderly Joan Stanley is suddenly disrupted when she is arrested by the British Intelligence Service and accused of providing information to communist Russia during the forties.

Even though bringing in cameras to the internment camps was prohibited, one man managed to smuggle in his own camera lens and build a camera to document life behind barbed wires, with the help of other craftsmen in the camp. That man was Toyo Miyatake, a successful issei (first generation immigrant) photographer and owner of a photo-shop in the Los Angeles Little Tokyo district, and of one of the many Americans who was interned with his family against his will. With his makeshift camera, Miyatake captured the dire conditions of life in the camps during World War II as well as the resilient spirit of his companions, many of whom were American citizens who went on to fight for their country overseas. Miyatake said, "It is my duty to record the facts, as a photographer, so that this kind of thing should never happen again."

Four Swedish volunteer soldiers are trapped in Russia. In front of them lies the front with enemy outposts and patrols, behind them the enemy minefields. Hope to return to their own lines decreases each day. Corpses of fallen, "dead of cold and hard as iron", forms the macabre landmarks in the winter landscape. Nearby is a burnt Russian village.

In the first days after the Second World War, as collaborators are being taken care of, a former partisan finds out that war never truly ends — not even in time of peace.

During routine manoeuvres near Hawaii in 1980, the aircraft-carrier USS Nimitz is caught in a strange vortex-like storm, throwing the ship back in time to 1941—mere hours before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

The story of a group of men, an Army Rifle company called C-for-Charlie, who change, suffer, and ultimately make essential discoveries about themselves during the fierce World War II battle of Guadalcanal. It follows their journey, from the surprise of an unopposed landing, through the bloody and exhausting battles that follow, to the ultimate departure of those who survived.