The map starts after the world at war campaign ends, as we triumphantly raise the soviet flag over the Reichstag, we hear a speech about how from this brutal conflict which has killed so many millions, a better and more free world will be born from the ashes and bloodshed. As we see footage of the Enola gay about to drop its warhead upon Japan.
As the screen goes black, we re awaken to see a downed aircraft and figures walking towards us in the night, as our eyes flutter open and close adjusting its vision. We see this figure sprinting towards us and kick us in the head as it reveals the title nazi zombies.
Now contextually speaking, the downed aircraft we see is an American bomber. The footage we just saw was of the Enola Gay, if it cuts to black and we have a perspective from a downed aircraft it makes the audience feel that these two images are linked. Think of the Black-cats mission in the same campaign, where we see a the plane in the footage of the entry cinematic, then it cuts to our perspective in the plane.
The only problem of course is the Enola gay was flying over japan, not Germany, so why would we be made to make this association. The entire campaign had been split between American Marines fighting the Imperial Japanese Army and the Red Army fighting the German Wehrmacht.
Why are we now seeing American Marines in the European theatre?
Of course answers for this are retrospectively given later on, but I believe it’s fair to say those justifications are rationalisations which are made to justify creations the developers made intuitively without a plan.
I think it subtly adds to this feel that something is wrong, you’re out of place and feel additionally alone. If you were the soviets, perhaps you would feel just beyond that tree-line may be Reznov, ready to fight his way through with a legion of men to relieve you from your bunker, prison or holdout.
The figure who runs towards us in the intro cinematic is the model for the burned corpse, repurposed as a zombie with its glowing yellow eyes. Although, worth noting in the glowing eyes are removed for this into cinematic.
Making the running figure more grounded and realistic, there is something more horrifying about that grounded and relatable scene of a man running towards you in a strange way from the night’s fog. Without the trimmings of the glowing eyes to distract us.
I think the model used as well, makes us think of the effect the atomic bombs had on the civilians there. It makes it feel like the soldiers may be in some sort of nightmarish realm of the dead.
The plane also gives us the mental feeling that we’ve transported ourselves almost to another realm of being. Especially as our point of view character seems dazed from the plane crash (the cause of which is never explained).
Maybe our plane crashed and the bomb went off killing us, or perhaps we were transported via an anomaly such as a Bermuda triangle style storm into another realm. Almost like a limbo. One inhabited strictly by the dead of the second world war, baring burn marks akin to those we were about to inflict upon those civilians.
It’s almost like the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have wandered out of the ashes to punish these men for what they’ve done, like the grand final punishment of a villain in an Indiana Jones movie, where the spiritual world or the realm to science fiction drops completely for the climax, destroys evil and slips away again into the myst of myths.
Worth noting as well the famous ‘4 men interview’ from 1962. A radio broadcast with four key crewmen which was highly publicised and formed American public understanding of the event.
The four men were:
Robert Lewis - Co pilot
Richard Nelson - Radio Operator
Charles Sweeney - Pilot
Abe Spitzer - Radio
I believe if this is an airfield in Germany, while the assets itself are reused from an airfield structure in the campaign used in Japan, the closest comparison in Germany is Perhaps: Eschborn Airfield (Advanced Landing Ground Y-74).
Due to its small size, surrounding terrain and usage at the time by the American airforce.
Though, this is certainly more of an inspired use of assets more than anything. I do prefer the idea this is almost a type of surreal limbo, judgement or punishment place for those who live and dir by the sword to torment each-other forever, where victimisers must atone for their sins and explain themselves to the reanimated burnt corpses of their own doing.
In this groundhog day of violence, fog and night structures and places may only half be remembered, this may be why we see the Americans recall a Japanese style airbase in Germany, or maybe this reality has misremembered all places and people as being one in the same. It doesn’t matter who claims who started what, it doesn’t matter who killed who first. It’s more this perspective of ‘truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me”.
We are not strictly only ourselves in this place. Every zombie is not a nazi but a soviet, a Japanese, an American, a Civilian, a Sinner, a Saint, a Murderer and the innocent. They are a sort of manifestation of all the blood we have on our hands by the end of the campaign, and a silent judgement on the monsters of the war which was in of itself a crime against mankind.
It makes me think of how when we die, whether we’re rich or poor or of any myriad race on earth, we return to dust. Or in this case, charred flesh and bones. All our structures from japan to Germany are reduced to just steel enforced concrete ruins of ash. Doesn’t the fighting feel so useless now that we’re transported here.
When we look outside the map, the first thing we see are these metal bars keeping us imprisoned as the moon shines through.
It takes a long while for the zombies to get in, we are given time to marinate and reflect on what we’ve done. Then they come for us like a prison warden. Still occasionally goose stepping even in death, which takes on this tragic feeling. Some piece of humanity is still there under the surface of cracked bones. Still acting on instinct perhaps from all the drilling and brutal training like Pavlov’s dog, to even march through death. Or maybe some spark of love for their country still burns within them.
I believe love is a more powerful thing than death, i think if anything could survive death it would be live. Seeing them fumbling to march makes me think of the pride it may’ve given them in life, to stand for their country and loved ones in an hour of need.
Once they arrive and the blood thirsty frenzy of violence erupts, like a werewolf under a full moon we tear our ways through the dehumanised undead, which normally would be revered and respected, are here desecrated with bullets, fire, slashes and shrapnel. Before long we succumb to death, and we return from a dopamine and adrenaline high to a slow penance as we once again gaze at the full moon through our cell bars.
