John McManus, a World War II historian, looks at war scenes from "Saving Private Ryan" and rates them for realism.
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00:00You couldn't simply just lean on the trigger of an MG42 and cook off rounds like that.
00:12You'd have to pause a little bit, otherwise you'd completely overheat the gun.
00:16I'm John McManus, I'm a professor of military history at Missouri University of Science
00:21and Technology.
00:22I've written 15 books, mostly about World War II, including two about D-Day and especially
00:27Omaha Beach.
00:28Today we'll be looking at war scenes from Saving Private Ryan and to judge how real
00:32they are.
00:40I don't know how they did it, but the atmospheric feel for what you're seeing here is very similar
00:46to the morning of D-Day.
00:48You get a sense of the tides and the surf being pretty rough as they come ashore.
00:53That's 100% accurate.
00:54Of course, you just had a major storm system come through a couple of days before and even
00:59the day before.
01:00Eisenhower postponed the invasion for 24 hours.
01:03The initial D-Day was supposed to be June 5th.
01:06But he decided, you know, the weather's so bad, we just simply have to hold off on this
01:09thing.
01:15So you see him standing on the Higgins boats, okay?
01:17In the real invasion, the captain probably would have been at the front of the boat ready
01:21to lead when they got off.
01:23Now, there's solid reasons, of course, in a movie why you can't do that, why he's got
01:27to be kind of in the middle of his guys.
01:28You'll notice, too, they have mixed along with them guys with a blue-gray patch.
01:33Those are guys from the 29th Infantry Division, which is the sort of main formation that comes
01:37ashore at that part of the beach.
01:43Very dramatic film, of course.
01:45You know, a machine gun just has this Higgins boat completely zeroed in.
01:49You couldn't simply just lean on the trigger of an MG42 and cook off rounds like that.
01:55You'd have to pause a little bit, otherwise you'd completely overheat the gun.
02:00And it's true that there's a lot of heavy machine gun fire, especially at this initial
02:05wave at Omaha Beach.
02:06But really the bigger threat to a lot of the people coming off those Higgins boats was
02:11mortar fire, artillery fire, small, like 50-millimeter gunfire.
02:16But you are under that kind of cone of fire, and they really get that part of it right.
02:24Though I'm not a ballistics expert, it's actually almost physically impossible for bullets to
02:30have killed someone like that under the water.
02:32But I mean, like so many things with the movie, the realism is incredible on some levels because
02:38so many guys did go over the side.
02:40They're in the water.
02:41They're disoriented.
02:42And of course, you know, there's the danger of drowning as well.
02:51The sheeting that covers the guy's rifle, that's dead-on accurate.
02:55A number of people who come ashore at Omaha Beach did have plastic coating for the rifle.
03:00You'll notice one inaccuracy, though.
03:02If you're looking at the log obstacle, it's pointed in the wrong direction.
03:06It should be pointed to shoreward, and the reason for that was because the angle was
03:10such that at higher tide, it could catch a landing craft and blow the front off a
03:15landing craft.
03:16But it's just one, you know, minor error in this part.
03:25This is just so good because the biggest danger to your life if you're one of these guys coming
03:30ashore at H-Hour is the artillery, and these are clearly artillery rounds.
03:35And the way they show the explosions, the way people are kind of flipped about, dead-on
03:42accurate to what happens, unfortunately, to a lot of people.
03:50This is one of my favorite parts of the entire movie because it shows something that happened
03:57quite a bit at Omaha Beach and in combat in general, and it's called acoustic trauma.
04:02When you have these kind of explosions close to you, you are sort of concussed, but your
04:07hearing is, of course, severely damaged.
04:09So in this case, Tom Hanks' character, Captain Miller, is in the middle of an acoustic trauma.
04:14When you see all this carnage that's going on, it may seem a little over-the-top Hollywood,
04:19but I will tell you, those are taken directly from veterans' accounts.
04:23So here, you're seeing what would have appeared to you at Omaha Beach to be one of the safest
04:34points.
04:35We've just, you know, gotten past the 80th anniversary of D-Day, and so we've gotten
04:37a sense of how significant this was.
04:41The invasion that happens in France is going to open up a second front, as the Allies called
04:46it at the time, and there's really only two major reasons that they consider invading
04:51in any seriousness.
04:52Calais, which is farther to the east, and also Normandy.
04:56Normandy is a solid second choice because it's not as heavily defended as Calais, and
05:00it offers some ports, it offers suitable landing beaches.
05:04It is, you know, looking back on it, you know, certainly one of the seminal events in modern
05:09history because it's the beginning of the end of Nazi Germany.
05:12I'd give it a nine.
05:13I mean, a solid nine.
05:14I mean, certainly I would have preferred the log obstacles be pointed in the right direction.
05:19There are things to parse with here and there, but you know what?
05:22It's Omaha Beach, and I think overall, it's really well done.
05:26No armor has made it ashore.
05:29We've got no DD tanks on the beach.
05:32Dog one is not open.
05:33Here we have a little bit of mythology.
05:36The idea that no armor had made it ashore at Omaha Beach, actually a lot of armor made
05:39it ashore at Omaha Beach.
05:41The reason I think that this line is in there is because you hear them refer to DD tanks.
05:48Those are duplex drive, like, amphibious tanks that swam their way in, or they were
05:52designed to do that.
05:53Yes, it's true that 27 out of 32 of those sank, but in the opposite end of Omaha Beach
05:57from where they are, in the side of the beach where they are, all the DD tanks got in because
06:03they were brought in by landing craft.
06:04I got it!
06:05We stopped the bleeding!
06:06We stopped the bleeding!
06:09Yeah, I really like that clip because it shows just how difficult the job of the medics was
06:15that day.
06:17And you notice, too, how far forward they are.
06:20Omaha Beach is one of those rare battlefields where medics are having to move wounded toward
06:25the enemy instead of away for the obvious reason that they can't move into the sea.
06:29And so they are definitely vulnerable.
06:32So the way they portray that here is dead on.
06:34Bangalore's on the line!
06:43Bangalore torpedoes were a major way that the Americans got off the beach, and that's
06:46basically just like explosive-laden tubes, you see, that you had to assemble together.
06:52Why was that?
06:53Because you might need a very long tube of explosives to get over that kind of barbed
06:57wire or through a minefield to create a path somehow.
06:59Omaha Beach, that is really common, especially for some of these initial waves, to use Bangalore
07:04torpedoes to blow gaps in the barbed wire, although, when you see in this last part of
07:10the clip, the way the machine gun nest is portrayed is not necessarily all that accurate.
07:16It's certainly just right out there, completely vulnerable, and Germans probably wouldn't
07:20have had that many sandbags at a position like that.
07:24Yeah, I would say I'll give it an 8 out of 10, and the only reason I knock it down a
07:30peg is because of the idea of no armor making it ashore.
07:33For us Omaha Beach nerds, it's a little bit of a nettling thing, the idea that there's
07:38no armor on Omaha Beach on D-Day.
07:47There are some issues with this clip.
07:51The Vierville exit, you wouldn't have gone straight up that ravine.
07:54I mean, that just, like they portrayed, that would have been an absolute, you know, death
07:58knell.
07:59They actually kind of flank around from behind.
08:01It's a pretty bad situation if your last option is to send your sniper out there in an impact
08:05crater somewhere.
08:07What they would have done, what they did do, is to bring in heavier firepower.
08:11Some of those tanks, maybe, that are on the beach by now, there are also some anti-aircraft
08:18pieces that they can use to, you know, shoot at them.
08:22You're not that far from me, old lord.
08:28I mean, obviously, this is a really high-speed sniper that Barry Pepper is portraying in
08:33a, you know, Private Jackson.
08:34Special scope atop a Springfield rifle, which would have been, you know, the major sniper
08:39rifle you would have used in World War II.
08:41But one of the things that's always stood out to me is, you notice the bruising on his
08:45thumb.
08:46Now, that was more typical of the kind of problem that you'd have in firing a different
08:51rifle called the M1 Garand, which was the main rifle in World War II for Americans.
08:56The bolt could slam forward if you didn't load it properly, and it was called M1 thumb.
09:01And it almost looks like Private Jackson has M1 thumb, which has always made me curious.
09:05Like, oh, wait a minute.
09:06If he doesn't have an M1 Garand, and he's an incredibly expert rifleman, how would that
09:10have happened to him?
09:19Now, this is not my favorite scene in the movie.
09:26Quite far down the list.
09:27You have here what is often called the sort of classic example of the dumb German.
09:32Someone has just thrown a grenade into your bunker, and you're just going to sort of,
09:36you know, beetle out of there, out of the bunker, without looking to see who's out
09:39there.
09:40There's also, not strictly speaking, any real evidence that we ever had a flamethrower team
09:45clear out a pillbox or bunker with their weapon at Omaha Beach on D-Day.
09:55This is really well portrayed in terms of the terrain.
09:58There were trenches like this.
10:01The Americans were trying to clear them out.
10:03This last part here, with the Americans sort of catching them like fish in a barrel, those
10:08who fought around the Vierville Draw would have loved to have had a scenario like that
10:12on D-Day.
10:13But to my knowledge, there just wasn't a lot of that where the Germans got caught that
10:17badly.
10:25One of the things I really like about this clip, too, is it portrays the non-Germans
10:29who are in German uniform at Omaha Beach.
10:32In this case, I think these guys were Czech, and they're trying to explain that to the
10:35Americans, saying, don't shoot.
10:37And ironically, that's what gets them shot.
10:39Now, if we're thinking about, like, 100% accuracy, it's far more likely that the Americans would
10:44have encountered non-Germans who came from Russia, Ukraine, or Poland.
10:50Those were the three primary ethnic groups that you would have had in uniform for the
10:54Germans at Omaha Beach on D-Day.
10:56I'd give it an eight.
10:57You know, as I mentioned, I'm not that wild about how they're, you know, tossing the grenade
11:03and the sort of dumb German that comes out of the bunker and all that business and the
11:07use of a flamethrower when that probably did not happen.
11:10I would give, you know, overall, to all these Omaha Beach scenes, I'd give it a nine out
11:15of ten.
11:16It's so well done.
11:17It's so well researched.
11:18It's so true to many eyewitness accounts, many veterans' accounts.
11:21Do you want to explain the math of this to me?
11:24I mean, where's the sense of risking the lives of the eight of us to save one guy?
11:28Absolutely valid question that somebody probably would have asked in this circumstance.
11:33So the larger context, you know, in terms of what these guys are doing, they've been
11:37basically selected to go and find and save Private James Francis Ryan.
11:44So the whole thing is inspired by something that was really true, the sort of informal
11:48sole survivor policy that comes into place.
11:50Well, we don't want all the same brothers serving in the same unit.
11:55And as I understand it, what inspires the entire script in the first place, the story,
11:59is the story of the Nyland brothers.
12:00And so is it possible that you would have had a patrol sent out to get the surviving
12:07guy and get him home?
12:09I suppose theoretically, yeah.
12:11I've always thought it pretty unlikely that you'd send a patrol this far behind enemy
12:16lines and try and find him.
12:24The atmospherics, the buildings, the stone architecture destroyed, the wood lying around,
12:31the detritus, the rain.
12:33It's exactly like that in Normandy.
12:35So Nouvelle-Aplonne does exist.
12:37It's located about a mile north of Saint-Méric-Lys, which is more famous and is one of the first
12:41towns liberated in Normandy.
12:43You would have had, you know, plenty of fighting in the town, but also outside of the town,
12:48probably even more so than what you see here.
12:50What I don't like is that the soldiers portrayed among the airborne are from the 101st Airborne
12:55Division.
12:56Actually, the soldiers who fought at Nouvelle-Aplonne were from the 82nd Airborne Division, including
13:01Sergeant Nyland, who was killed, you know, just outside the town.
13:06I think that's kind of a disservice to the actual unit and the actual people who fought
13:10there.
13:11I mean, that really portrays the kind of close quarters nature of combat as you might have
13:24had in a Norman town like that, where one side could be in one building, another in
13:28the next, and they just kind of bump into each other.
13:31The translator, Upham, played by Jeremy Davies, is trying to speak to them in German, but
13:36someone who's as accomplished a linguist as he is, I think probably would have been on
13:40the sharper point of the spear of going and interrogating civilians, interrogating POWs.
13:45It would have been pretty unusual for him to move along with a patrol this far out in
13:49front at the spear point.
13:51The only thing that surprises me out of this clip is they did just open fire immediately.
13:56And I think that's more likely to happen because they may not have seen each other as well.
13:59Second!
14:00Second!
14:01Second!
14:02Second!
14:03Second!
14:04Second!
14:05Yeah, I really like that part of the clip because it's showing the French civilians
14:09and what's happening.
14:10How they're in the middle of this mess too.
14:13How they've lost their home.
14:15How now they're in danger.
14:16Come over here!
14:17Copy!
14:18Put your hands down!
14:19Nice ride, dude.
14:23There's a lot to unpack here.
14:25Certainly the sniper hunt.
14:26I mean, that is very much how a sniper would have operated.
14:30There's a number of things I've always wondered in relation to this part of the movie, though.
14:34You've got a sniper who's just fired down and wounded one of your guys.
14:37Why isn't the unit just firing at that steeple?
14:42Why aren't you pinning that sniper down and then maybe sending another maneuver element
14:47closer to the church?
14:49Now, there are plenty of times in World War II, of course, where a sniper has you covered
14:53and everybody's terrified and you're just kind of hunkering down.
14:55I think more likely in a church tower like that, you would probably have an artillery
14:59observer who would even be a much bigger danger to the unit because he's calling down heavy
15:03stuff.
15:04Yeah, I mean, I'll give it a nine.
15:06I just love the desperation of the moment.
15:09We can still skip it and accomplish our mission.
15:11I mean, this isn't our mission, right, sir?
15:15I love the precursor of this, of the discussion, the dilemma, whether to go after the radar
15:21station or not.
15:22And I think that in the American Army at the time, I think you probably would have had
15:26that conversation.
15:28You've got a lot of everyday citizens in uniform, including Captain Miller, of course, right?
15:33And so they're wondering about the logic of doing this.
15:37What I don't understand is how he's chosen to do it.
15:40The assault, as it's portrayed, would have been a very tough go going uphill against
15:44that fairly entrenched position there.
15:47You've got an amazing sniper in your unit.
15:50Why not hang back to a covered position because you've got the drop on these guys?
15:54Why not just pick them off?
15:55You throw a grenade and the other guy catches it on the other side and throws it back.
16:06That would have been a pretty neat trick.
16:09I think most any German soldier, any human being, would have just simply run from it.
16:14Here's the part of this I think is so good.
16:16The grenade explosions, which if you look at actual footage from the time, that's what
16:21a grenade explosion looked like.
16:23That's what it sounded like.
16:25Because in a lot of other movies that just aren't as well done as this, it'll be these
16:29big flames coming up and all that.
16:31It's like, no, they're not shooting Roman candles.
16:34Same thing with the German side.
16:35You'll notice the potato masher grenades they're throwing are basically concussion grenades.
16:40So I think that part of the movie, I think, is really, really well done.
16:44Cover!
16:45And that's exactly the way a lot of the fields in Normandy would have looked at the time.
16:55And as an infantryman, you absolutely would have concealed yourself that way.
16:59And in that halftrack, they would not have seen you.
17:03Halftracks were sort of, well, I mean, it gives you the mobility of a Jeep or a truck,
17:09but you've got some level of armored protection.
17:12And you can mount sometimes some pretty formidable weapons on it, like a machine gun or an anti-tank
17:18gun or something like that.
17:20In this scene, they're using the halftrack exactly the way it would have been used.
17:24The only thing I'd wonder about is that perhaps there'd be more than one halftrack, and that
17:28maybe you'd have some dismounted infantry kind of scouting around.
17:32It strikes me as very vulnerable out there on its own, but that's certainly very possible.
17:43I'll just get the one thing that I don't like about it out of the way first.
17:50We have some dumb Germans here, you know, who just sort of, like nine pins, come out
17:54of the halftrack and get just shot down and all that.
17:57Okay.
17:58Yes.
17:59Okay.
18:00That's Hollywood.
18:01But I love this clip.
18:02You have this kind of fog of battle in which the two American formations don't know the
18:07other is there.
18:09They're lucky that they don't have a friendly fire incident, but it's extremely well done
18:13in terms of not knowing who's where and what's going on.
18:17And then the way Miller's formation moves toward the halftrack, and even one of his
18:22men says to him, hold on, make sure they're down.
18:25And I really like that dynamic too.
18:27I'm going to give this one a 10, because I just really like how it portrays the exhaustion,
18:34the terrain, how infantry would have concealed there, and how you would have had this kind
18:39of chance meeting these two different units that are enveloped in the fog of war.
18:53So this is apparently portraying a Tiger tank.
18:56Now there's no evidence that the Americans ever faced a Tiger tank in Normandy.
19:01Behind it though, we have a self-propelled gun of the exact type that you would have
19:04encountered in this kind of town fighting.
19:08Now it would have taken a lot of guts to do what those American soldiers are doing there.
19:14The sticky bombs are accurate.
19:17That was supposed to be a kind of last line of defense to knock the tread off a tank.
19:23So all of that is really actually accurate.
19:25But to actually get close enough like they are to do it, I think it would have been very
19:29difficult to get that close to a tank.
19:32All this action is taking place in a fictional town called Rommel.
19:34It doesn't really exist.
19:36But it's well described because earlier in the movie, they're talking about how it's
19:41a major point over the Merderay River, which the Americans simply have to have any bridge
19:47over that river so that they can advance westward and then get Cherbourg and get most of the
19:52rest of Normandy.
19:54So that would have been, as they put it, a solid gold objective.
20:00I love how the machine gun is portrayed, firing at that exact position where the Germans are
20:10moving through.
20:11They're saying, we need 30 cal, and they're going through it very quickly.
20:15In the concept of the battle, that's so 100% true.
20:19In this second part here with the Molotov cocktails, you certainly would have used that
20:23to fight against a self-propelled gun like this, maybe even a tank, if you had soldiers
20:27courageous enough to do it and to get into position.
20:29I don't know about you, but if it's me, I'm either going to open fire at these guys before
20:34they can throw their Molotov cocktail at me, or I'm going to jump out of that vehicle where
20:38I know they're throwing it.
20:39Instead, they kind of just hunker down, which guarantees they're going to get burned.
20:43So I've never quite understood that reaction.
20:45Grenade in there!
20:49Grenade!
20:56This is one of the most disturbing parts of the movie, in my opinion.
20:59The close quarters battle with the tank would have been unlikely, of course.
21:02But if you could have done that, we see the tank commander apparently coming out of the
21:06hatch there, and they just shoot him, and I think that's dead on right with the kind
21:10of desperation of the moment.
21:12I don't know that you need to throw more grenades in there, and you might need them later.
21:16So here comes that 20mm flak gun, and that is so well portrayed because it's an incredibly
21:22devastating weapon, designed to shoot vehicles and planes.
21:26And you're talking about using it against people.
21:29I guess I'll give it a 9 out of 10, because I don't know about the realism of actually
21:34getting that close to a tank and using that much ordnance on it.
21:43Somebody would have had to have loaded that bazooka for the sergeant.
21:47The bazooka in World War II was a very difficult weapon to work on your own, because it was
21:51hard to keep the tube stable as you did that unarmed the rocket, and it could slide down
21:56through the tube and explode at your feet.
21:58One of the things I like about this scene is he probably understands exactly where that
22:02self-propelled gun is going to be most vulnerable, and he gets that kill shot in there, which
22:07is totally realistic in that kind of town combat, where you have probably a very limited
22:13vision for that crew, and they would never be able to see him, especially if he's sort
22:17of behind them.
22:22Hand-to-hand combat like that was fortunately really uncommon in World War II.
22:27Sources I found for just one battle, and this is a Pacific theater battle where hand-to-hand
22:31combat tended to be a little more common, found that maybe 0.7% of wounds would have
22:36been caused by puncture, like a bayonet, a knife of some kind.
22:42So that's pretty uncommon, but in this context, it could have happened.
22:54We see Upham lurking on the stairwell, and I'll tell you, when my students evaluate this
23:01movie and write reviews of it, this is always the thing that fires them up the most.
23:05It's like, oh, that coward, why wouldn't he have done this?
23:08But I'm so glad that the filmmakers did this.
23:11This was true for many, many other Americans or people on all sides of World War II, actually.
23:17Sometimes they just weren't up for it, you know?
23:19And so you see this face-to-face encounter, and you see that sometimes in modern war.
23:24And what I've always thought of in watching this clip, especially, is the PTSD element
23:28of it.
23:29He's going to have to live with that the rest of his life, thinking about whether he could
23:33have saved Mellish.
23:34I'm going to give this one a 10.
23:37I think it's so visceral and poignant.
23:40It explores so many elements of war that other war films just hadn't up to that point in time.
23:53Sandbags are really common in World War II and thereafter.
23:57It's a pretty standard way to provide some level of protection.
24:02Now, you had to have the equipment to do it.
24:04In other words, an E-tool or entrenching tool or shovel.
24:08And then the actual sandbags themselves, you'd fill up.
24:11Maybe they could have shown them filling the sandbags more earlier in the movie.
24:14But I think in a town or urban setting like this, the masonry provides you with some level
24:19of cover.
24:20You don't necessarily need sandbags.
24:22So that just simply probably means getting inside the buildings.
24:24I want to say this respectfully, because I think this is one of the most brilliant
24:36movies ever made.
24:37I think that these parts are beneath a movie of this brilliance.
24:41We also see the captain certainly grogging out of it because of acoustic trauma, snapping
24:46off shots at a tank, apparently a Tiger tank, with a pistol.
24:50Again, a little too Hollywood for me.
24:53And then we see it blow up.
24:54I remember the first time I saw this, I thought, no, they're not going to say that the pistol
24:58did that.
24:59That would be absurd.
25:00So fortunately, it's a plane that does it.
25:02When you look at German accounts of the Battle of Normandy, usually one of the first things
25:05they're mentioning is how suffocating Allied air could be.
25:09The planes that are portrayed, though, are probably not the ones you would have used
25:13for this purpose.
25:14I think these are P-51s.
25:16And Brian even says a little later in the clip, they're tank busters.
25:19Actually, the major tank busters were P-47 Thunderbolts that tended to be better at this
25:24kind of job.
25:26So I like that they showed the aircraft having a key role in the outcome of the battle.
25:32But I think the way it's done is not all that realistic.
25:40A ground unit comes to save the day, and that's a little bit of Hollywood, too.
25:43But you know what?
25:44That's not terribly unrealistic for what did happen sometimes in Normandy, where you have
25:48some embattled formations, especially airborne guys.
25:52And they're going to have amphibious-landed infantry units or armored units or whatever
25:57link up with them at a pretty good time.
26:00This part only is, I'll give it a 7 out of 10 because of the things I've mentioned, the
26:05sort of kind of cheap Hollywoodisms of shooting a pistol at the tank and all that.
26:10Overall, though, in the Rommel battle scenes, I'm giving that a 9 out of 10.
26:15I often say I like these scenes, the town fighting scenes, better even than the famous
26:20Omaha Beach scenes, because I think they're very true to Normandy, to the Battle of Normandy,
26:26exactly the way it would have looked.
26:28My favorite Saving Private Ryan scene is actually when they're having an argument over whether
26:34to let Steamboat Willie go.
26:36It's the aftermath of when they've assaulted the radar site.
26:40And the reason it's my favorite scene is it's so true to life for the burden of command
26:46that Captain Miller has and how he's going to restore the situation and discipline.
26:51I just think it's really intelligent and informed on how the leadership of military units works
26:59and how the human dimension really manifested itself in World War II, not just World War
27:04II, but in pretty much any combat setting.
27:10Thanks for watching.
27:11I'll see you next time.