Having written recently about D-Day on its 80th anniversary, and the epic achievements of the Allied forces on June 6, 1944, it occurred to me that no series of postings on great movie scenes could possibly omit Saving Private Ryan‘s depiction of the storming of Omaha Beach, upon which the toughest fighting occurred.
The headline pasted in above comes from an article written by Tom Ward of Esquire in 2023, and while I’ve tried to think of another contender, I really can’t. Not even the night assault in Platoon, the helicopter attack in Apocalypse Now, or the depiction of the Viet Nam battle of Ia Drang in We Were Soldiers puts you right there amid the horror in quite the same way as Spielberg’s recreation of the assault on Omaha, one of the five code-named beaches upon which the D-Day landings occurred. Spielberg has said that as he consulted with various experts, historians, and witnesses in preparation for filming, the veterans who’d been there that day, to a man, urged him not to sugar coat it in any way. They wanted him to let people see what it was like, and strip them of their illusions. Maybe then they’d learn something valuable. The director did his best to honour their wishes, and set out to make his portrayal hew as closely to the brutal, gory reality as he could, knowing he didn’t have to make anything up, or exaggerate any of the details. He just had to remain true to the human experience of the kids pouring out of their landing craft, which, on Omaha, was particularly gruesome.
An impossibly huge number of things went according to plan on D-Day, making it, arguably, the greatest single feat of arms in military history, but of course there had to be some number of failures, cock-ups, and plain stupid mistakes, amplified by the bad luck that has to attend at least some portion of any endeavour as huge, with as many moving parts, as D-Day. So it was on Omaha Beach, where one thing after another went wrong. Allied heavy bombers were supposed to have blasted the defences to oblivion prior to the landing: bombing blind through thick cloud, they missed entirely, despite dropping something like 13,000 bombs. Bombardment by the enormously powerful guns of the numerous battleships on hand for the invasion should likewise have neutralized the defences, heavily fortified though they were; the shelling wasn’t accurate enough to have any significant effect. The troops were supposed to come ashore in the company of ingeniously modified Sherman tanks, which had been equipped with bath-tub like skirts that could be raised to give them the buoyancy to float, and special duplex drives that could turn propellors before being switched to the tracks as they came ashore; they were put into the water too far out from the beach, and foundered before they could make it to dry land. Unusually strong winds and tidal currents pushed the landing craft away from their intended landing spots, leading to much confusion and a dangerous dispersion of forces. As to the bad luck, the Germans, though they expected the attack to come at Calais, hadn’t neglected the need to build fairly heavy defences all along the coast (an “Atlantic Wall” which, incredibly, stretched from France all the way to Norway), and put Erwin Rommel in charge; Rommel not only placed all manner of traps and obstacles on the beaches to thwart any movement ashore, he intuited that the one we’d code-named Omaha was a very likely landing spot, owing to its similarity to the beach at Salerno, which had been used for amphibious landings in the Italian campaign. The Germans were better prepared at Omaha than at any of the other landing sites.
The result was 2,400 casualties, many more than at any of the four other landing beaches (the forces that hit Utah beach suffered fewer than 200, and the British at Gold Beach lost 400). By the standards of warfare conducted on this scale this wasn’t anything close to an utter bloodbath, and the Americans weren’t thrown back into the sea – by nightfall they’d put over 34,000 troops ashore, despite everything the Germans could do, which under the circumstances was an outstanding achievement – but for the boys crawling up the beach amid withering artillery and machine-gun fire, it was terrifying, bloody, and, as Spielberg is at pains to depict, shockingly disorienting. Spielberg was masterful in his use of sound, camera angles, rapid cuts, and often blurry cinematography to convey the stunned, almost wholly incapacitating confusion of finding oneself in the middle of all those horrendous blasts, with fellow soldiers dropping left and right, blood and body parts flying all over the place, and the surf turning red from the hemorrhaging of all those who didn’t even make it out of the water before being cut to ribbons.
It’s one indelible image after another. The GIs being mowed down by machine guns the moment the ramp drops on their landing craft. Men, trying to avoid the incoming, jumping over the sides of their landing craft too far from the beach, drowning in deep water under the weight of their gear. A soldier with a flamethrower being hit and exploding in a blast of napalm. A wounded soldier pausing for a moment, then turning back to retrieve his severed arm, carrying it in his remaining good hand as if somebody might later reattach it for him. The frantic triaging as Army medics try to save who they can, and ease the pain of the rest. Those who’ve made it as far as the shelter of the sea wall running back on to the beach to strip ammo belts and other useful gear off of the dead and the pitifully wounded, still writhing in agony, who’ll no longer have any use for it. A grunt yelling LET ‘EM BURN, urging his comrades not to put anyone out of his misery with gunfire as the blast of a flamethrower blows burning German gunners right out of the front of their pillbox. The merciless shooting – execution, really – of Germans trying to surrender. Captain Miller, struggling to get a grip on himself and figure out what to do as he shelters amid the big metal tank traps, half-concussed and just about ready to succumb to PTSD from all the fighting he’s seen already, none of it as horrible as this. Jackson, the deadly sniper, quoting scripture as he takes aim and delivers the blow that turns the tide for Miller’s company, in a moment of calm, surgical killing that feels to us as welcome as the deliverance it is.
I’ve read that even at that, you only really get a dim sense of it. The terror, the adrenaline, the deafening noise, the sudden, repeated loss of friends and comrades-in-arms, the feeling that overcomes you when you go from figuring you’re going to be O.K. to realizing you’re almost certainly going to be turned into ground chuck within the next couple of minutes, are all, finally, impossible to properly convey. But Spielberg comes as close as anyone ever will.
Saving Private Ryan was beat out for the Best Picture Oscar by Shakespeare in Love. Perhaps the truths it conveyed were too much for the Academy voters to digest straight away, in which case I guess I can understand. They were meant to be.
the needlefish 