Saving Private Ryan is the essential new Steven Spielberg film about WWII. Here CH gives a short review focused on the historical accuracy of this important new film.

The mating of a huge budget with a worthwhile script may not be rare, but it’s always pleasing when it happens. (Think Schindler’s List compared to Godzilla.) If only for that, Saving Private Ryan will disappoint few historians, movie buffs or just plain folks. More specifically, many big factors have coalesced to give us a rare treat: a big, realistic WWII movie, expertly and lovingly created, packaged and presented.

Spielberg is the right guy for the drama and the size of the story. For one thing, he had the budget to do the topic justice. Nevertheless, we all know how he can overplay what I call the schmaltz factor. Fortunately, that’s at a minimum here, where he clearly worked to stay out of the way and largely let the soldiers tell their own story.

However, I don’t want to go over plot devices and dialogue. I should just note that the script is very Hollywood, but the execution a generally quite accurate depiction of the way the second world war played out.

If haven’t seen the movie, you may not want to read on!

One question is: Did they get the facts of WWII right? The easy answer is Yes. One essential fact neatly worked in is the shooting of Germans attempting to surrender. Ugly, but real.

Despite an obvious attempt to be true to history, there are many nits to pick.

Act I – The Invasion Landing

In what many have hailed as the best piece of film of its kind ever made, Spielberg delivers a smashing tribute to the gods of war in the first 25 minutes of SPR. Boats, beach obstacles, barbed wire, gun emplacements, pillboxes – this first set in the film has everything, and the cast is correctly equipped. Then the defending Germans accurately blast the Americans at close range. The question I heard most often was "Why are they doing that?" The industrial slaughter of fellow Americans in this scene blows audiences away. And all one can say is "That is how it was."

Almost everything is right here, even the way a German machine gun crewmember pats the man firing the gun on the helmet. In the midst of the enormous noise of battle, a tap on the head or shoulder was often the best way to communicate. Like many excellent details of this long scene, this is caught just in the corner of one's eye. Very meticulous viewers might point out that the German fortifications were a bit more complicated than this (for instance, many pillboxes aimed along the beaches, not across them, so many men were shot from the side, not from head on. This also often served to them harder to take out.), but that would be picking nits.

Act II – The Journey

With such a thundering opening act, it’s not surprising that things bog down a bit after the beach assault. Here we meet some of the survivors of the landings and follow them on their silly Hollywood mission to find Private Ryan. Governments and militaries are certainly not averse to handing out dumb assignments, that the writers created this one for the film, not for troops in WWII. There are a number of other things that pop up to annoy critical historians in this portion of the film:

• The Americans are too pudgy – Unlike these days, most Americans in the 1940’s hailed from rural areas and chubbiness was quite a bit less common, in particular among our armed forces.
• The squad talks too much – Far from moving silently through enemy territory, our SPR troops chat about everything while sometimes looking around. Since they’re conversing, they also walk close together – an excellent target!
• Moving in the open/in daylight – Our SPR squad looks like it’s on a hike in Ireland (the actors were), not walking in enemy-held Normandy. Most Americans inland of the invasion beaches during those days were very cautious rabbits indeed, travelling in the shadows or even at night to avoid detection. And there was very little Allied-held territory.
• Stupid attack – One of the few combat boo-boos in ‘Ryan’ is the goofy daylight sprint at the enemy machine gun post in the middle of the movie. And the Cpt. Miller character was really experienced?

Act III – The Bridge Battle

• Not quite an historical battle – A number of small bridges played a vital role in the Normandy invasion. Our fictional ‘Ryan’ bridge parallels closely the bridge at La Fiere in Normandy, held for the first couple of days after the invasion by members of the American 82^nd Airborne Division (the sister division to the 101^st of the movie’s Private Ryan). However, the Germans in the La Fiere area were conscripted non-Germans under German officers, not the battle-wise scumbag SS units we apparently see in the film.
• Germans too dumb – Gee those Germans do go down in nice clumps, don’t they? Almost hidden in the midst of some great battle scenes are a couple of bonehead clips of Tom Hanks blowing up whole groups of Germans with hand-thrown mortar bombs. Shades of that goofy western-making bastard John Wayne! The Germans generally make nice targets throughout the final battle.
• Too many Germans go down – Yes, it’s an American movie, but the German troops depicted (assuming they are supposed to be the SS they are equipped like) were far more experienced than most of the Americans on hand, including the Rangers. They should be hard to kill and quick to find the Americans weaknesses.
• Americans are too perfect – With a few notable exceptions, the film’s American troops are a pleasure to watch in action; they do the right thing at the right time.
• Stupid tanks – Those German tankers seem determined to die in SPR. They don’t use their machine guns, they don’t back out of trouble and they stick with their infantry. No wonder they earn glorious death by socks.
• No German arty – The Germans would almost certainly have been pounding the American positions with artillery within a few minutes of making their attack on the bridge. Oh well. They probably forgot to bring a radio along.
• Biggest actors die last and slowest – One other concession to Hollywood: Hanks must not die instantly from a bullet in the head or anywhere else un-photogenic. And he can't bleed. And he has to get out some relevant last words.

I suppose one could make a case that the German tanks weren’t perfectly realistic, but the fact of the matter is that almost all such German war material was rightfully melted down at the end of the war, making it hard to get the right look for movies ever since. All of the German armor in the film is, however, either authentic or careful rebuilds of other real armor. The Tigers are converted Soviet T-34's; most of the halftracks are real.

Other things:

There may be some whining about SPR coming from Europe, of course. The British receive scant notice in the movie, although they were fighting hard alongside the Americans throughout the D-day invasion period depicted. The main comment is that they are "holding things up" and that their main general on the ground, Montgomery, is "over-rated." The comment about Montgomery may well be accurate, but the British actually had by far the harder opposition (most of the SS and armor units, in particular) in the first days of the invasion.

The only French we see are some hapless civilians - no valiant Resistance fighters, thank god.

Saving Private Ryan sets a new high-water mark for WWII movies. With a few tweaks such as those listed above, and an increased focus on the long-term industrial suffering of the common soldier, the next of the coming slew of WWII films might get it completely right on. But SPR will be a tough act to top.