The events as they’re presented in Saving Private Ryan would never happen that way. This was my grandfather’s terse review of the Steven Spielberg movie back in 1998. He would know. After serving in the Pacific Theater throughout the war—being there from Pearl Harbor to Saipan, and then Okinawa—he carried a quiet lifelong interest in documentaries about the World War II American experience. And he had little time for Hollywood sentimentality.
“Eight guys for one man during D-Day? Never would’ve happened.”
Indeed, the idea of eight men being potentially squandered during the largest seaborne invasion in history is probably a flight of fancy by Spielberg and screenwriter Robert Rodat. Nevertheless, there is a poignant, mostly heartbreaking truth which informs Saving Private Ryan’s fiction. The context can be absurd at times, with Tom Hanks’ Capt. Miller leading a group of U.S. soldiers behind enemy lines to find one paratrooper,...
“Eight guys for one man during D-Day? Never would’ve happened.”
Indeed, the idea of eight men being potentially squandered during the largest seaborne invasion in history is probably a flight of fancy by Spielberg and screenwriter Robert Rodat. Nevertheless, there is a poignant, mostly heartbreaking truth which informs Saving Private Ryan’s fiction. The context can be absurd at times, with Tom Hanks’ Capt. Miller leading a group of U.S. soldiers behind enemy lines to find one paratrooper,...
- 4/8/2021
- by David Crow
- Den of Geek
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