369: Classic: Saving Private Ryan with Marty Morgan

00:02:13:01 – 00:02:40:00
Dan LeFebvre
Let’s start this off on D-Day, June 6th, 1944. In the movie, we find out from some text on the screen that we’re at Dog Green Sector Omaha Beach. And this is where we join Tom Hanks, his character, Captain John Miller, and the other soldiers as they’re heading toward the beaches and landing vehicles. This is an interesting look at what it might have been like for soldiers as they were nearing the shores.

00:02:40:02 – 00:03:11:26
Dan LeFebvre
They can’t see over the sides of the vehicles. All they can hear are the guns and explosions getting closer. There are splashes from the explosions that rain water down on top of them. Then, as it’s time to go, we see the front ramp lowered and the front soldiers are almost immediately mowed down by machine gun fire. Miller starts yelling for his men to jump over the sides, which causes even more problems because as they do, their way down by their packs, some of the men manage to get out of their gear underwater and make it back to the surface.

00:03:11:29 – 00:03:23:12
Dan LeFebvre
Others don’t. Can you give us a little more insight into the location that we get in the movie of Don Green Sector, Omaha Beach, and these moments up until landing on the beach?

00:03:23:19 – 00:04:07:29
Marty Morgan
Yeah, what they’re depicting is the moment of the greatest intensity during the battle for Omaha Beach. I would just mention that Omaha Beach was really six separate battles, each battle functioning separate and almost entirely autonomous, and disconnected from one another for the first half of the day on D-Day. And what the screenplay writer in the movie did was, he chose the battle that provided the greatest amount of drama because the U.S. Army Fifth Corps landings in the dark green sector of Omaha Beach, and those are landings primarily carried out by two battalions of the 29th Infantry Division and

00:04:08:02 – 00:04:42:28
Marty Morgan
Then, with a few Rangers thrown in. That is where the entire assault goes entirely wrong. In fact, the the the historical quote that I think most effectively communicates how bad it was there is what happens to a company of the 164th Infantry Regiment of the 29th Division, a company landed with 164 officers and men, and within five minutes of combat in front of the German Resistance Master Bunker complex at Dog Sector, they had suffered 91 killed and 65 wounded.

00:04:43:00 – 00:05:08:25
Marty Morgan
So that literally in the span of five minutes, an entire infantry company was reduced to complete ineffectiveness. And that’s a significant detail because the Yoma, the first wave at Omaha Beach, consisted of nine infantry companies spread out over the entire length of the beach and Omaha Beach is five miles wide. Out of the nine infantry companies that conducted that preliminary assault.

00:05:08:28 – 00:05:14:24
Marty Morgan
One of them is destroyed entirely in front of the defenses at Dark Green Sector.

00:05:14:26 – 00:05:25:08
Dan LeFebvre
I know you mentioned the number of, division, but just getting a sense of how many people are storming the beaches this five mile stretch of beach, how many people were there overall that were involved in the invasion there?

00:05:25:10 – 00:05:39:11
Marty Morgan
Or if you consider just the first wave? And of course, there were far more than just one way during the day on June 6th. But if you consider just the first wave nine infantry companies just as approaching 1800 to 2000 men.

00:05:39:13 – 00:05:40:00
Dan LeFebvre
Wow.

00:05:40:02 – 00:06:18:03
Marty Morgan
They’re going up against Germans and basically 13 resistance nest or bunker complexes. And the total number of Germans that were immediately in those fighting positions ready to resist the landings at right after dawn on D-Day. So the number of Germans is about 600. So our assault force, even with just the first wave, possesses numerical superiority. But the German defending force was behind concrete and then also, in positions that were built into terrain so that they had elevation over the battlefield.

00:06:18:05 – 00:06:40:14
Marty Morgan
The bluff at Omaha Beach is about 100ft tall. German positions were, at the water level, and they were on top of the bluffs. And the the effect of the elevation, the use of terrain, and the use of concrete fighting positions function as a force multiplier. That made it possible for those German defenders to inflict heavy casualties for a brief period of time.

00:06:40:14 – 00:07:05:03
Marty Morgan
A point I love to make when discussing the movie Saving Private Ryan is that you can go just a few hundred meters to the east, down the length of Omaha Beach, where you’re encountering US troops that are landing first waves, and they’re receiving a little bit of harassing fire at long ranges to where the fire is not entirely effective.

00:07:05:05 – 00:07:33:06
Marty Morgan
And in other words, you could you had Americans that landed that were just a few hundred meters to the east of dark Green Sector, and almost everyone gets out of the landing craft, gets, through the beach obstacles and makes it to the stand called the shingle with light casualties, that stands in strong contrast to what happens at Green Sector, which is, of course, what’s depicted in the opening scene of the movie, where you have effectively cataclysmic casualties.

00:07:33:08 – 00:07:55:09
Dan LeFebvre
The impression I got was that was essentially what was going on everywhere, because of course, that’s the only thing that we see is this just mass rain of of fire. As these people are getting out of the, the landing vehicles. And so I just assumed that that was happening everywhere on the beach. But it sounds like very, very different experiences.

00:07:55:11 – 00:08:26:21
Marty Morgan
That’s absolutely correct, because the movie will teach you the impression that it was a five mile wide slaughterhouse, and it simply was not that. It just wasn’t that at all. I make the larger macro argument that the depiction of the moment of the greatest chaos and casualties, it sort of fits something that’s been going on in the overall narrative of the war movie as a genre and cinema for at least 50 years now.

00:08:26:23 – 00:09:00:27
Marty Morgan
And I argue that the era of Vietnam introduced certain levels of disenchantment and cynicism to the way that Americans comprehend the experience of war, and that the Vietnam era changed the way that we understand war, and that we always think of it as being led by fools. Thing bureaucratically led to the point of producing a massive ineffectiveness. And we at a point I like to make do is that it takes up to the victimization of the lowest ranking people.

00:09:00:29 – 00:09:27:27
Marty Morgan
And so, in other words, since the era of Vietnam, we like to imagine sat, catch corrupted high ranking officers that are far removed from the experience of fighting on the front, who are planning of, planning the battles in which the best and brightest of American youth are slaughtered needlessly on the battlefield and Private Ryan, I find, is a movie that, at its core is very patriotic.

00:09:27:29 – 00:09:52:06
Marty Morgan
Which is why it came as such a surprise to me when the movie came out and I caught it for the first time in the theaters, it really felt like a change of gears, because it’s a movie that, in the end, is very patriotic, very, very romanticized. But at the same time, I find that it selects from some of what tropes that really characterize the era of the Vietnam War movie.

00:09:52:08 – 00:10:17:20
Dan LeFebvre
After the soldiers land on the beach again, going back to the movie, we get a look at how they advance inland. First, there’s some metal obstacles that the Germans set up to prevent vehicles from landing on the beach, but they use that as cover. Much cover, but it’s better than nothing. And one of the lines of dialog, as they’re getting shot at, they’re kind of struck me as interesting.

00:10:17:27 – 00:10:36:22
Dan LeFebvre
There’s a soldier that yells to Tom Hanks, his character, Captain Miller says something like, what are your orders, sir? And he replies, get your men off the beach. Like they had to be told not to just hang out there as as they’re being slaughtered. But from here, we see soldiers managed to take, berm in the sand.

00:10:36:22 – 00:10:57:11
Dan LeFebvre
They use that as cover, and then they use what they call Bangalore’s, which look like long metal tubes. You see them put an explosive in one end and then basically just throw the entire thing over. Almost seems like movie magic to me because it’s just like they throw it over, there’s a massive explosion, and then the men are able to advance closer to the machine gun nests.

00:10:57:13 – 00:11:19:27
Dan LeFebvre
And the next step of this advance inland here is on the movie is, Barry Peppers character, Jackson. He’s a sniper, so they use covering fire to get him into position to take out the men and machine gun nest. And then from there, the American soldiers make their way to the German bunker. They use a mixture of grenades and, flamethrowers to clear out the bunker.

00:11:19:29 – 00:11:45:26
Dan LeFebvre
And, of course, you know, we see the soldiers on the other side tell the other soldiers not to shoot them because they want them to burn up with the flamethrower, that, act of cruelty there. But, after this, we see Captain Miller sit down to survey the beach, and it’s just a very high level overview of how the movie shows, basically the troops gaining a foothold on D-Day.

00:11:45:28 – 00:11:55:11
Dan LeFebvre
How accurate is that depiction of how the soldiers advance from their landing craft to establish a foothold? How accurate was that?

00:11:55:14 – 00:12:32:15
Marty Morgan
Let me put it this way. It is the most accurate cinema depiction to date. That’s as nice as I can be. Because once you once you begin to pick this scene apart, with what’s with some advanced, like with an advanced course and knowledge and the history of D-Day invasion? It’s hard not to acknowledge the fact that there are some substantial errors and authenticity and the way that the scene is depicted, it feels almost wrong for me to harp on those, and I try to stay away from them as much as possible.

00:12:32:17 – 00:12:55:06
Marty Morgan
But because I believe that the scene I think that’s the most memorable takeaway of the entire motion picture, that whole first 20 minutes of that film is what galvanized everyone. It’s what grabs you by the throat and pulls you into that story. It’s such an effective moment in filmmaking, and it, I remember the first time I sat through it.

00:12:55:12 – 00:13:40:12
Marty Morgan
I mean, it was it took my breath away. It was it’s such an impactful, moment in cinema. With that said, it’s got lots of problems. And let’s just start with, the flamethrower. Don’t shoot. Let them burn. There is absolutely no use whatsoever of the flamethrower on Omaha Beach on Tuesday, June 6th, 1944. So right there, we got a big problem because, as a person who leads tours to Normandy many, many times every year and has been doing so for over 20 years, I have basically been doing so in the era since the movie Private Ryan came out, because it came out what was July 24th, 1998.

00:13:40:15 – 00:14:02:28
Marty Morgan
It’s been almost 22 years since the movie came out. I’ve been leading tours during that era. That’s sort of something that comes up basically with every tour. And I’m not saying that we did not conduct the interviews landing without flamethrowers. There were flamethrower was used on D-Day, just not on Omaha Beach. It was used in the British Canadian sectors, for example, with great effect.

00:14:02:28 – 00:14:41:07
Marty Morgan
They were used on armored fighting vehicles, particularly with great effect, not in the American sector and definitely not on Omaha Beach. So a scene that I believe provided this lasting impact for the viewer. Ammo, I should say a moment that provides a lasting impact for the viewer is built around a core level historical inaccuracy that I personally have to spend kind of a lot of time dealing with when I’m on the scene on Omaha Beach, taking people through the advanced course of what actually happened on D-Day, because what I’m finding is that people have maybe read a little bit about June 6th.

00:14:41:10 – 00:15:07:15
Marty Morgan
They’ve watched the movies, they’ve watched Private Ryan, and they come to Normandy. And it’s almost like when they get to Normandy, then the actuality of the learning experience can begin again. I feel like Saving Private Ryan did wonders for this subject. I think it created the era where there’s an enormous thirst for knowledge about D-Day. It put Normandy kind of back on the map as a tourist destination for Americans.

00:15:07:15 – 00:15:30:04
Marty Morgan
I can speak to that with authority because I might not have that tour guide work were it not for that movie. In other words, if Steven Spielberg had not decided that this was his next passion project, I might be working at the post office. But instead I spent. I get to spend a great deal of time on Omaha Beach every year, and I absolutely love every bit of it.

00:15:30:07 – 00:16:03:09
Marty Morgan
And I have to acknowledge and thank the movie Saving Private Ryan for making all that possible. Because these movies really offer such a powerful tool for getting people interested in the subject matter and getting people enthusiastic about the subject matter. So it feels. I feel bad when I harp on things like no flamethrowers on Omaha Beach, horses landed on Omaha Beach with flamethrowers, but a major moment for the landings of the US Army Corps on Omaha Beach, is that the troops are, for the most part, landed.

00:16:03:09 – 00:16:28:09
Marty Morgan
The troops of the first wave are landed for the most part on a sandbar off shore. That compelled them as they waited ashore to wade through water that got deeper and deeper. You can see this in this famous photograph that was taken by U.S. Coast Guardsman Bob Sergeant. And the sergeant. Photos show a group of men from 16th Infantry Regiment, first Infantry Division, landing in front of the easy Read sector of Omaha Beach.

00:16:28:12 – 00:16:47:28
Marty Morgan
And there’s a photograph that shows them on the landing craft right before they land. And then there’s a photo of the ramp down in the LCP, and the men are wading through water that comes all the way up to their chest. That, I think, provides a really powerful piece of evidence as to why things went wrong with things like flankers.

00:16:47:28 – 00:17:20:28
Marty Morgan
And also radios is where pieces of equipment that were never meant to be submerged in salt water, and yet they were submerged in salt water on D-Day. Which is why for the most part, radios and flamethrowers do not work on Omaha Beach. So you’ve got a big problem there with the flamethrower scene. Something that attaches nicely to the flamethrower point is that the depiction of the bunker from the don’t let them burn moment, that bunker is not something that appears anywhere on the landing area.

00:17:20:28 – 00:17:58:07
Marty Morgan
The 50 mile wide stretch of beaches in northern France, where the multinational coalition landed on D-Day. There is no bunker like that. There are none. Absolutely not. It’s a complete falsehood. There are bunkers that look like that, that are in the overall German system of of prefabricated design. But you don’t have one like that on Omaha Beach, so that when you see the flamethrower come into the back of the position and then he hits the flame and you see, a hardened position that’s on the face of the bluff, looking straight out to the water.

00:17:58:09 – 00:18:19:05
Marty Morgan
What? That looks more like an observation position than anything. You don’t have that on Omaha Beach. What you have are a series of fighting positions that present a much more modest profile. And when I say that, I mean a profile that’s a little bit harder to shoot and destroy. Their basic with two types, I should say three types of fighting positions.

00:18:19:05 – 00:18:44:27
Marty Morgan
On a small beach, there are fighting positions or heavy weapons like anti-tank guns, 88 millimeter guns, 75 millimeter guns, 50 millimeter guns. Those positions are, for the most part, oriented not out to sea, but oriented to direct info, lighting, fire gun, the length of the beach. And all of them have a traverse wall that protects the armature, which is the opening through which the gun points.

00:18:45:00 – 00:19:07:09
Marty Morgan
Then there are a series of fighting positions for automatic weapons. They’re much smaller in overall scale, and those fighting positions in some cases do point out to sea. But the Germans, also on Omaha Beach, had a large number of fighting positions that were, basically improvised, meaning they were dug positions that use logs and sandbags to to reinforce them.

00:19:07:11 – 00:19:48:18
Marty Morgan
Then you also have positions that concrete underground positions for mortars. And since I just spoke that word, I feel like I should jump ahead real quick and just address one other subject. There’s a there’s a very arresting moment in that opening scene of Private Ryan where you see an LCD landing craft on the beach. The camera perspective is over the right shoulder of a German MG 42 gunner, and that gunner is, just dumping a built of eight millimeter ammunition straight down through the ramp into the landing craft and slaughtering everybody on board the landing craft.

00:19:48:20 – 00:20:12:22
Marty Morgan
I’m not saying that there’s, a basic problem with that depiction, but I would say this, it has led people to believe that there were a very large number of MG 42 machine guns on Omaha Beach on D-Day, and it has led people to the further misapprehension that the MG 42 was a decisive weapon against Americans landing on Omaha Beach.

00:20:12:25 – 00:20:54:13
Marty Morgan
It certainly was not. That is definitely not what happened there. There were there was an assortment of different types of automatic weapons on Omaha Beach. Not all of them were MG 42. In fact, the minority of them were Ng 42 and the MG 42. Well, I should say this. The engine 40 and all of the other different types of automatic weapons, many of which were foreign, by the way, those weapons were far less effective than the opening scene of Private Ryan would have you believe, because what they what that scene but lead you to believe is that the entire area, everyone’s being slaughtered because the entire area is being swept by machine gun fire.

00:20:54:16 – 00:21:17:01
Marty Morgan
And it makes you furthermore think that the entire Al-hol Beach area was being swept with a machine gun fire and energy for it. There were MG 40 twos. They were the minority of all of the different diverse types of automatic weapons that were there. And automatic weapons fire did not produce anywhere close to the total number of casualties that the actual big killer on D-Day did.

00:21:17:03 – 00:21:32:20
Marty Morgan
And the big killer on Omaha Beach was a German model like 1934 80 millimeter mortar. That weapon does most of the dirty work against American forces landing during those early hours of June 6th.

00:21:32:22 – 00:21:50:05
Dan LeFebvre
There was a moment there, I think it was Tom Hanks, his character, when when the when the, I don’t remember the soldier’s name. I was talking to him, asking him what the orders were, but, he made a comment where they’ve cited in every inch of this beach, and I’m assuming that was referring to the mortars. Would that be correct?

00:21:50:07 – 00:22:17:26
Marty Morgan
That would be correct. And I should just mention this, that the one cool thing that Private Ryan does is that it borrows from stories from a number of actual living people, because I can see why Spielberg made the movie the way that he did, and I appreciate the movie that he made, and I like the movie that made, but he didn’t want to make a 100% pure and actuality based documentary the way that The Longest Day was.

00:22:17:26 – 00:22:40:29
Marty Morgan
For example, he wanted to create a story that he had some freedom to be flexible with, to create circumstances, to create tension between characters. He did the things that storytellers do, and it was all based on the story of Tuesday, June 6th, 1944, and a few days thereafter. One of the things he for the Tom Hanks character, he borrows from a few different people.

00:22:40:29 – 00:23:07:15
Marty Morgan
I’ll probably mention them as we continue speaking, but since you mentioned the quote of get your men off the beach, I would just say that in that moment, they borrowed from the story of the man who commanded the U.S. Army’s 16th Infantry Regiment on D-Day. His name was Colonel George Taylor and Colonel Taylor, and landing noticed that there were that the assault toward the beach had largely lost momentum.

00:23:07:17 – 00:23:29:24
Marty Morgan
And the reason that that momentum was lost was because that as men came off of their landing craft, they found that they were vulnerable to enemy small arms fire and more importantly, fragmentation from enemy mortar fire. The men then moved quickly through the built where the obstacles were located. And they found that when they reached the beach itself.

00:23:29:26 – 00:23:50:17
Marty Morgan
I’m not talking about the water line, but they’re reaching the basically the high water line. Because we landed at low tide as the tide was beginning to come in and at the high water line on Omaha Beach back then. It’s not like this today. But 75 years ago, there was this thing that they called the shingle, and the shingle was riprap.

00:23:50:17 – 00:24:16:27
Marty Morgan
So they were they were river rocks about the size of your fist by the millions. They were poured right at the water’s edge to prevent scouring of the beach from seasonal winter storms. The the shingle will as a result of wave action. It will sort of take the form of a little bit of a ledge. And there are only two places that I know of today on the overall length of Omaha Beach, where there’s a little bit of shingle still left.

00:24:16:27 – 00:24:38:13
Marty Morgan
The shingle has largely been removed. So the Omaha beach that you see today looks quite a bit different than the Omaha Beach did on June 6th, 1944. But what George, Colonel Taylor was finding was that as men came off the landing craft, as they made it up to the beach obstacles, they were being, hit by small arms fire and fragmentation from mortars.

00:24:38:15 – 00:25:02:28
Marty Morgan
The men pressed forward from there, and when they reached the shingle, they found that this ledge, created in the shingle by wave action, provided a degree of shelter, meaning that when the men reached that ledge at the shingle, that the enemy automatic weapons fire could no longer get to them, and the only way that the enemy could get to them would be to drop mortars and right on top of them.

00:25:03:00 – 00:25:28:04
Marty Morgan
And so what Colonel Taylor noticed was that the men had gotten off the landing craft, gotten through the obstacles, reached the shingle, and then the entire drive inland lost momentum right there because the troops had cover, ahead, cover and concealment. And I can’t say that I blame those men for stopping at the point where they were at least out of the small arms fire and the mortar fire.

00:25:28:06 – 00:25:49:18
Marty Morgan
The only problem was that the enemy could then begin dropping mortar fire in on them. And Colonel Taylor realized that so that when Colonel Taylor came off of his landing craft, as he moved across the beach through the obstacles, and when he reached the shingle and looked around and saw that nobody was moving inland, he realized, okay, we can’t stay here, because if we stay here, they’re going to get us.

00:25:49:18 – 00:26:17:28
Marty Morgan
They’re going to stop, start dropping mortar fire on us. And that’s where you see the first movement, the first moment that Tom Hanks’s character, John Miller, is inspired by something that was done by an actual historical character. And in this case, Colonel George Taylor and Colonel Taylor, he he he provided this quote right then that became memorable and is often cited in the quote was, there are two kinds of people who are staying on this beach.

00:26:18:00 – 00:26:39:28
Marty Morgan
Those are those who are dead and those who are going to die. Now let’s get the hell out of here. And that quote, as time goes by, has has changed and merged a little bit. And to a certain degree, it informs the Captain Miller character’s quote when he when he instructs Sergeant Horvath to get your men off the beach.

00:26:40:00 – 00:26:50:15
Marty Morgan
But there you have a moment where his experience is based on someone who actually survived the Battle of Omaha Beach on D-Day. There will be a few more, before the scene is over with.

00:26:50:17 – 00:27:07:27
Dan LeFebvre
Would you say it’s fair to say that what what they did and Doug Green Sector in the movie was basically take all of these different experiences that were happening on D-Day and, and compress them into as if they all happened in this one location.

00:27:07:29 – 00:27:36:17
Marty Morgan
It is a fair assessment. In fact, I would I would say that what happened there is I live in Louisiana and everything gets compared to a gumbo. It is a gumbo. It’s everything all mixed together to create a scene that provides the absolute greatest possible, tension, suspense, action and drama. I mean, and that’s the sign of good storytelling and therefore good filmmaking.

00:27:36:19 – 00:27:45:06
Marty Morgan
But we should also be careful that when someone tells a story well and provides excellence in filmmaking, we should understand it’s not a documentary.

00:27:45:09 – 00:28:04:09
Dan LeFebvre
Now, I’m curious because I did time it mentioned the first 20 minutes or so, and it was about 2020 one minutes or so, depending on where you start and stop, from when the landing craft drops the ramp to when Captain Miller is surveying the beach. How long did it actually take for them to establish that foothold?

00:28:04:12 – 00:28:25:24
Marty Morgan
It changes from place to place. I hate to give you typical story and answers because historians like to qualify things, but I recognize basically six battles for Omaha Beach. And in those six battles, you can mark how in each one of these pods of action men land, get off the beach, get up to the top of the bluffs.

00:28:25:24 – 00:28:52:21
Marty Morgan
And typically the point where we acknowledge that they’ve reached the end of the line is when they reach the top of the bluff, the first force to make it off the beach to the top of the bluff on D-Day. That was a cumulative period of time of, I’d say, a little over two hours approaching three, which says something powerful about what happened on Omaha Beach.

00:28:52:24 – 00:29:19:14
Marty Morgan
Because the plan was not that we would spend almost three hours bogged down by enemy machine guns and mortars. The plan was that we would land, overwhelm the enemy and move quickly into the interior, bypassing the enemy’s beach defenses, because we knew that once you move beyond the beach and you moved into the interior, the enemy’s ability to defend was greatly undermined by density of defensive forces and terrain.

00:29:19:16 – 00:29:45:04
Marty Morgan
We, in other words, we were not planning to lose a lot of great people trying to punch through the beach defenses. And that’s that’s what happened. So the first force is up and off the beach, way down at the far left, the far eastern end of Long Beach. And that is a force that was led for the most part by a lieutenant by the name of Jimmy Montes Lopes, on which Monteith gets his men off the beach.

00:29:45:04 – 00:30:20:00
Marty Morgan
He actually leads to Sherman tanks up the cardboard draw. They engage in intense action against a German bunker complex. At the top of the cardboard draw, the far eastern end of Omaha Beach in the Fox sector, a place called in 60. And they’re up some point between 9 and 9:30 a.m.. They’re the first off the beach, the air, the place where you get the men, the last group to get off the beach or to the top of the blast, that’s turning, that’s happening in the area, 16th Infantry Regiment.

00:30:20:03 – 00:30:38:15
Marty Morgan
And the eighth entry. That’s just to the, to the east, Green Sector. So that by 10:00, basically the entire first wave assault force has achieved the objective of getting off the beach and reaching the summit of the bluff behind the beach.

00:30:38:17 – 00:30:52:03
Dan LeFebvre
Okay. So it sounds like not only did they compress everything as far as the events themselves, but also the timeline was compressed some as well to tell. Like you said, end of the day, it’s not a documentary, but to tell the story.

00:30:52:06 – 00:31:14:11
Marty Morgan
Precisely like a great example of how it’s done. And another project that’s worked quite famous is people love to talk about episode two of the HBO mini series Band of Brothers, and in that episode, it depicts this battle at a place called Breaker Manor, where Lieutenant Dick winters leads his men in an assault on a German gun battery.

00:31:14:13 – 00:31:45:03
Marty Morgan
And in the HBO in episode two of the HBO series That attack unfolds over about a 20 minute time period when in actuality, the battle at Break Manor goes on for almost six hours during the day. On June 6th. Film making requires you to strip down timelines and compress fat, and that process of compression is something, but it exerting itself on the movie, Saving Private Ryan in a powerful way in that early scene.

00:31:45:05 – 00:32:23:14
Marty Morgan
But I would I would just say this, because as much as I like to go, actually, but and then point out a bunch of, of obscure facts that nobody cares about. So the fact that you do get a scene that is effectively 20 minutes of nothing but, combat and action, for all of its shortcomings, I would say that there is no living filmmaker on this planet that could get away with doing that, except Steven Spielberg, because any other filmmaker would be under the supervision of studio executives and studio executives.

00:32:23:14 – 00:32:44:17
Marty Morgan
One would want the film to conform to a more traditional action movie format. You can look at other movies that came out in the aftermath of Private Ryan movies that I always like to say, live in the shadow of Private Ryan Rubin’s movies that just didn’t perform like that, like that film movies that didn’t create the legacy that Private Ryan created.

00:32:44:20 – 00:33:06:04
Marty Morgan
I think of movies like, a movie that I actually really like, The Thin Red line. It just didn’t live up to the Private Ryan, like legend, the movie win talkers. I think it’s a great example that a film where the director was under a lot of studio pressure to conform to certain tropes of what an action movie, what they believe an action movie is supposed to be.

00:33:06:07 – 00:33:30:08
Marty Morgan
And the movie’s just it’s not memorable. It’s got a lot of problems with it, and it’s kind of not a good movie on every level. Private Ryan, on the other hand, is Steven Spielberg, who at the point in his career 22 years ago when he sat down to make this film, he was thinking about making that film almost 25 years ago when Spielberg sat down to make that movie.

00:33:30:08 – 00:33:51:02
Marty Morgan
He was at a point in his career where he could do whatever the hell he wanted to do. And it’s, it’s good to be the king, and I’m thankful for that because Spellberg, he did not have studio executives pressuring him to make the movie that they wanted him to make. He was making the movie he wanted to make, and he wanted that 20 minutes to do something to the viewer.

00:33:51:09 – 00:33:53:28
Marty Morgan
And I think it succeeds magnificently.

00:33:54:00 – 00:34:07:00
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah, for sure. Even though there are some historical inaccuracies in there, it was. It throws you in the action and it, if nothing else, at the end of it, it makes you want to find out more about what actually happened.

00:34:07:03 – 00:34:34:01
Marty Morgan
And if I had to indicate an overall greater good served by the movie, that’s got some historical accuracy problems. I think you’ve just identified it. And that is that that flashed that flicker to like that movie caused interest and enthusiasm to flicker to life at a time when interest and enthusiasm in the Second World War was dying off pretty quickly, that movie breathe a new breath of longevity and true enthusiasm for World War Two history.

00:34:34:01 – 00:34:45:12
Marty Morgan
And I just wish that Steven Spielberg would make another World War Two movies as man, that that gave me 20 solid years of work. I could use another 20.

00:34:45:15 – 00:34:49:09
Dan LeFebvre
There you go. Well, it’s Steven if you’re listening to this and yeah.

00:34:49:11 – 00:34:53:15
Marty Morgan
Yeah. No listening. So no, better get out there and get to work with me.

00:34:53:18 – 00:35:15:20
Dan LeFebvre
There you go. All right. Well, after speaking of the movie, going back to it after the invasion, we see these events lead to what is it? What is the main storyline and the title of the movie, Saving Private Ryan. And it starts when we see some of the bodies of the soldiers lying on the beach. And one of them it kind of the camera focuses in on is S Ryan.

00:35:15:22 – 00:35:32:17
Dan LeFebvre
And then from there were taken to rows of desks where women are typing away on typewriters. They’re writing letters to families back home, letting them know that their loved ones are gone. One of the women notices something, and then before long, she’s heading with three letters to one of the offices, and we see some of the names here.

00:35:32:17 – 00:35:59:29
Dan LeFebvre
It’s it goes up the chain to, Colonel Bryce to General George C Marshall, who is the United States Army’s chief of staff. And then we find out that there are three Ryan brothers who have died. Two of them died at Normandy, one in New Guinea. And Colonel Brice explains to General Marshall that the four Ryan brothers, three of them, have passed, but they were all used to be in the same company in the 29th Division.

00:36:00:01 – 00:36:16:09
Dan LeFebvre
But then when the Sullivan brothers died on the Juneau, the Ryan brothers were split up. We don’t get a lot more context around that. He just mentions that in a lot of dialog there. And then he says that the last one left alive. Or maybe he’s alive. We don’t really know. It’s James Ryan and he’s part of the 101st airborne.

00:36:16:11 – 00:36:43:27
Dan LeFebvre
He was dropped about 15 miles inland near Neuville, which is behind German lines. And then that sets in motion the whole plot of the movie. General Marshall pulls out a letter from President Abraham Lincoln, addressed to a woman named Mrs. Bixby in Boston that he’s apparently been keeping stashed away in a book in his office, and after reading the letter, he decides they’re going to go on this mission and try to bring Private Ryan home.

00:36:43:29 – 00:36:55:05
Dan LeFebvre
So that’s how the movie sets up this entire mission. That’s pretty much the whole, plot of the entire movie. How much of that actually happened?

00:36:55:07 – 00:37:27:19
Marty Morgan
All of that is based on effectively two tragic stories. And that’s the stories of the Niland brothers and the Sullivan brothers. It’s most closely associated with what happens to the Niland, because the Niland, the Niland brothers family story has a pretty significant rendezvous with destiny in the Normandy invasion, and now ends with four brothers Edward, Preston, Robert and Fritz.

00:37:27:21 – 00:37:58:24
Marty Morgan
Those four brothers were all serving in uniform. Edward was serving with the B-25 crew in in the Pacific. Preston was serving as a as a platoon leader in the fourth Infantry Division. He landed on D-Day, up in Ireland, was serving in the company of the five Parachute Infantry Regiment, 82nd Airborne Division, and Fritz was serving in in the 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division.

00:37:58:26 – 00:38:32:17
Marty Morgan
The four brothers, they have. Their story comes to the significant point on June 6th, and that’s because Edward was thought to have been killed in action. He was actually his B-25 was shot down, and he was captured on May 16th, 1944, right before D-Day. Preston Niland, who landed on Utah Beach with the fourth Division, was actually killed in action in the fighting in front of the the Chris Peck Battery, the largest of the German coast artillery batteries in the Normandy invasion area.

00:38:32:20 – 00:39:02:09
Marty Morgan
He was killed in action on June 7th. Bob Niland, Robert, who, jumped in, jumped in with D company of the Five Oaks, fifth. He was killed in action on June 6th. I mentioned the three of them because the Mrs. Niland was therefore in a position to receive three telegrams informing her of how Edward was missing. Preston was dead, and Robert was dead.

00:39:02:12 – 00:39:27:12
Marty Morgan
Fritz was initially missing in action because when he jumped into Normandy, the process of the experience of scattering of airborne units was such that not everyone reported in quickly. And so there was a period of several days during which Fritz was not even fighting with, what, 130? It ended up mixed in with the 82nd Airborne Division, and he was therefore carried as missing in action briefly.

00:39:27:14 – 00:39:55:13
Marty Morgan
And so what was therefore potentially going to happen was that Mrs. Ireland, back in Tonawanda, New York, was going to receive for, she’s going to receive four telegrams announcing the deaths of her four sons. Although, as it turns out, Edward survived eventually. But, Preston and Bob were both killed in action. And for a period of time, it looked like Fritz was also missing.

00:39:55:13 – 00:40:23:24
Marty Morgan
Just like Edward was. The story is loosely based on that. That story was told. It was a story that was well known before the 50th anniversary of D-Day. But the story was was recounted in Stephen Ambrose’s book D-Day The Climactic Battle of World War Two. And it was that book which compiled the stories of a large number of people from the German side, from the US, from the British side, from the Canadian side.

00:40:23:26 – 00:40:59:19
Marty Morgan
It was that book that Steven Spielberg gave to his screenplay writer. Robert wrote it and said, I want you to give me a screenplay that incorporates all of the elements that make this book great. And, and Mr. Spielberg and wrote at both recognized that the Niland story was powerful. It has and has some parallels with and it is influenced by also the story of what happened to the five Sullivan brothers and those five brothers George, Francis, Joseph Madison, and Albert, or L.

00:40:59:21 – 00:41:26:29
Marty Morgan
Those brothers were all serving aboard the, the the Atlantic class light cruiser USS Juneau. And that ship was sunk on November 13th, 1942, during the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal and Pacific Theater. All five of those brothers were lost with the sinking of Juneau. It was permitted in US naval service prior to that moment, or brothers or family members served together.

00:41:27:01 – 00:41:52:22
Marty Morgan
In fact, there were brothers and there were husband. I’m sorry. There were fathers and sons serving on board the USS Arizona, for example. And here you have five brothers serving on the same light cruiser. It’s lost in action, and all five brothers are lost. They become, something that patriotic spirit in the United States in the aftermath of the naval battle, Guadalcanal rallies behind.

00:41:52:24 – 00:42:22:13
Marty Morgan
We begin to wreck. Another country begins to recognize that that was an especially, precious sacrifice for our family to have made for the war effort. And that’s why, you see, you see posters that feature the Sullivan brothers during the war and the combination of the story of the Sullivans and the story of the islands come together to form the story of Ryan’s and the movie Saving Private Ryan.

00:42:22:15 – 00:42:37:23
Dan LeFebvre
I can’t imagine what that would be like to receive telegrams like that. I mean, that is such a any loss is horrible, but if you think of five losing five brothers at the same time.

00:42:37:25 – 00:43:02:19
Marty Morgan
I agree with you because I love to meditate on this idea of how times today are so very, very different. The wars that we fight today are wars that are characterized by significantly lower most. You have, you know, states now has 50 years of wars that are fought with relatively like casualties and with effectively no interruption of the civilian economy.

00:43:02:19 – 00:43:24:02
Marty Morgan
So it’s possible to be an American living during a time of war from 1969 to present. And there’s a war being fought and you can live your life with without having any, without experiencing any effect from that war. It’s it’s possible to live in the United States today without knowing anyone currently serving in the United States military.

00:43:24:04 – 00:44:13:04
Marty Morgan
In other words, the experience of the modern era has insulated us from of a powerful truism of the experience, the American homefront experience of World War Two. And that is that almost every single family in this country, during that conflict, they experienced loss. On some level. It was either a husband, brother, father or son, or it was someone who was a part of your extended family or the husband, brother, father, son of the next door neighbor to to some level, I don’t believe anyone in this country was not affected by loss during the Second World War, and I believe that is that’s something that Americans share in the 21st century.

00:44:13:06 – 00:44:40:22
Marty Morgan
I believe that we have to struggle to attempt to empathize with that and to comprehend that we had people killed in action last week. It gets it gets what I believe. I’m trying not to be cynical, but it’s, I believe, a passing mention in the news cycle only to be buried quickly by the other palace intrigues and high drama that goes on on a daily basis in this country.

00:44:40:24 – 00:45:04:04
Marty Morgan
And I mentioned the point only because I, I, I like to I’m, I spend most of my time trying to comprehend as best I can the American experience in World War II, you and the American experience. Conflict today is completely different because it’s possible to live your life today, being totally detached from the fact that the United States is fighting a war.

00:45:04:06 – 00:45:10:29
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah, you have to put yourself in a different mindset in order to really understand the time. Back then.

00:45:11:02 – 00:45:31:00
Marty Morgan
Everyone was affected to some extent, and if you didn’t lose someone in your family or or among your friends, you were affected by gas rationing, food rationing, or you were part of the wartime economy to some extent, everyone, no one was overlooked in being affected by that conflict. And I believe that Saving Private Ryan addresses that subject powerfully.

00:45:31:00 – 00:45:38:21
Marty Morgan
But I creating the fictional Ryan family based on the violence and and inspired partly by the solvent.

00:45:38:23 – 00:46:06:15
Dan LeFebvre
Speaking of the characters there, I’m curious about some of the other characters that we see in the movie. You mentioned Miller, Captain John Miller, Tom Hanks, his character, being based on a few different people, but there are eight men in the squad that are sent out to find Ryan. There is Captain John Miller. Then there’s Sergeant Horvath, there’s Private Ryan, Private Jackson, Private Mellish, Private Capasso and the T-4 medic Wade and Corporal Upham.

00:46:06:18 – 00:46:09:20
Dan LeFebvre
Are those characters based on real people?

00:46:09:22 – 00:46:49:09
Marty Morgan
I would say they’re influenced by real people to certain extents. Because for example, in the film, the bar gunner, Private Rye, Ben, not Ryan, but Rye, Ben Ryan has painted on the back of his model 1941 field jacket. The words I think it says Brooklyn, New York, USA. And that was partly inspired by a man who actually fought on June 6th and survived D-Day, the late Harold Baumgarten, who painted a big star of David on the back of his jacket and put Brooklyn, USA on it.

00:46:49:12 – 00:47:36:18
Marty Morgan
And and reading Stephen Ambrose’s book Robert wrote at and I believe Mr. Spielberg had noticed it as well, had noticed that in the Baumgarten story that there was that painting on there. So there are elements of these characters that draw inspiration from people who actually lived. And then I should just mention that it’s an interesting series of choices that they chose to represent the American melting pot and our primary cast, a cast of characters, and Private Ryan, they also chose to provide some to serve certain Hollywood war movie tropes, and that you’ve got a Jewish guy and you’ve got an Italian, and you’ve got a guy that’s a mild mannered schoolteacher, and then you’ve

00:47:36:25 – 00:48:05:17
Marty Morgan
you’ve got guys that were kind of at each other’s throats, but they also their risked their lives to save each other in combat. It’s those are some, some core Hollywood war movie tropes in and of themselves. And then you’ve got, since you’re talking about Private Ribbon, the bar gunner, you’ve got the wisecracking louse bob mouth, which is something that, I mean, you can you can recognize that same character in just about every war movie that’s ever been made to get to a certain extent.

00:48:05:20 – 00:48:40:01
Marty Morgan
And so the, the this core group of U.S. Army Rangers with corporal up on the plaque type is thrown in, the unlikely character among Rangers, none of whom, none of whom look very Ranger, in my opinion, but whatever. They’re they’re all serving some, some standard Hollywood tropes about characterization, and they’re also simultaneously partially inspired by actual events, by actual characters who lived as a part of a beat invasion.

00:48:40:04 – 00:48:58:27
Dan LeFebvre
So, again, similar to the opening sequence, we have characters that are essentially composite characters that are trying to capture the essence of what it might have been like, not necessarily these. This was an actual squad of soldiers that were tasked to do this actual thing.

00:48:59:00 – 00:49:24:25
Marty Morgan
Right? Because the process of compositing those characters gives the filmmakers so much more freedom, because if you try to tell the actual story, you will get mired down endlessly in actuality and being held to people holding up the ruler of historical authenticity against your story. And that’s why I respect the filmmakers decision to create a fictitious storyline that’s inspired by actual events.

00:49:24:27 – 00:49:45:26
Dan LeFebvre
While there’s two events I want to ask you about, and this is after this squad makes their way to Neuville in search of Private Ryan. The first is Vin Diesel’s character. When, Private Capasso, he’s hit by a sniper. And then Barry. Jack. Sorry. Barry Pepper’s character, Private Jackson. He sneaks around to get an angle on the German sniper.

00:49:45:26 – 00:50:17:20
Dan LeFebvre
And from the we can see from the German’s perspective, we see him looking for the American soldiers among the rubble, and he sees Private Jackson’s rifle just in time to see him fire. And the shot goes right through the German sniper scope and hits him in the eye as one. And then the other event is when Paul Giamatti’s character, Sergeant Hill, he’s sitting down to try to get something out of his boot, and he accidentally knocks over a board, hits a brick wall, knocks down the entire wall, and then surprise, there’s a room full of German soldiers there and they just yell at each other.

00:50:17:20 – 00:50:41:10
Dan LeFebvre
They’re yelling at each other back and forth. Before then, the Germans are shot by Ted Danson’s version of Captain Hammer and some other soldiers. They’re both of those events to me. When I was watching this, it just seemed like these are movie moments that could never have actually happened. That seemingly impossible shot. And then a surprise stalemate between two groups of enemy soldiers on either side of the wall.

00:50:41:12 – 00:50:44:10
Dan LeFebvre
Are there any stories of things like that actually happening?

00:50:44:12 – 00:51:11:14
Marty Morgan
There are. There are a few instances of our troops and their troops being hopelessly mixed in together. I’m thinking of a of a, a story that was told to me by a veteran, the 507th Parachute Infantry, 82nd Airborne Division, who was trying to cross a hedgerow and hedgerows in Normandy are very dense there. They’re thick branches.

00:51:11:16 – 00:51:38:17
Marty Morgan
They’re, there are a lot of storms and hedgerows making it quite difficult to to push through, put your way through a hedgerow. And this, this soldier named Johnny Marr was. He was a lieutenant and got me 5 or 7. He was trying to push his way through a hedgerow. And as he was pushing his way through, coming from the right side to the left side, there was a German trying to push through at the same spot from the left side to the right side, and the two of them met each other right in the middle of this hedgerow.

00:51:38:20 – 00:52:02:29
Marty Morgan
I think of that sometimes, because that provides the kind of, combat tension that I think war movies love. They feed on that sort of a combat tension, the no random moment where something like that happens, as you see depicted with that moment in the film when when Sergeant Hill tries to he I think he says he’s got a burr and his boot, and that’s why he leans up against the wall to take his boot off.

00:52:03:01 – 00:52:24:06
Marty Morgan
And it just I giggle sometimes when I think about that cast. That cast is so wildly exceptional and great and weird ways. Ted Danson as an airborne officer, Ted Danson, who was, I don’t know how old was at the time, but he was too old to portray a U.S. Army airborne officer. But whatever. He may be your division commander.

00:52:24:06 – 00:52:52:06
Marty Morgan
Original commander or a division commander, maybe, but certainly not a company commander. Nevertheless, Ted Danson plays the role very nicely, I think. And then that you’ve got him there with the person who I think is one of the finest living actors today, Paul Giamatti, who has this bit throwaway role. He’s in there. I have to remind myself at times that Paul Giamatti was in Saving Private Ryan, and he doesn’t really fit the form of your average airborne infantryman.

00:52:52:09 – 00:53:18:02
Marty Morgan
Lee looks a little bit too well served at the dinner table. The stuff that that role. But then again, almost all of them kind of do in the movie. Nevertheless. Giamatti’s good. Danson’s good. It’s all weird. The whole scene, it provides something that Spielberg needs. I mean, there’s, there’s literally a formula to making the perfect action film and I don’t know that it’s fair to describe Private Ryan.

00:53:18:02 – 00:53:49:06
Marty Morgan
It’s just being a pure action film. It’s more than that somehow. It’s it’s suspense, it’s action, it’s drama. It’s it’s a different genre than just your standard action movie. The, the cornerstone that we always point to as perfection in action filmmaking is movie aliens, the sequel from 1986. And there’s pacing to the way that you deliver action and within that formula, and you can see how in private Ryan, they were living according to that formula.

00:53:49:06 – 00:54:11:22
Marty Morgan
Where you go, you go, you open with a bang with the big Omaha Beach scene. Then you pull back and you begin the process of exposition, and you begin laying out your story. And then and you lay out what you need. So you divide a movie into three things. And the beginning, presents what what’s needed, what has to happen.

00:54:11:24 – 00:54:49:00
Marty Morgan
The center point provides tension and drama, and you get you see that clearly in private Ryan and the scene we’re discussing right now, it’s into that center phase when drama is needed and it gives you a nice big, fat battle sequence. That’s totally different than the opening battle sequence of the movie. And it’s and it’s also showing you how combat and comedy is often at close quarters, that the quality and character of that combat is often under unpredictable circumstances, the evidence of which is the Paul Giamatti moment when the wall collapses and there are Germans on the other side.

00:54:49:03 – 00:55:17:29
Marty Morgan
And that then I we’re, we’re now at the point where I have to address the elephant in the room, because you mentioned the Barry Pepper, sniper sequence where the bullet comes through his rifle scope, which is based in fact, it’s based on something that reportedly happened, although it didn’t happen during the Second World War. That is a story that is well remembered from a sniper versus sniper duel that occurred in Vietnam.

00:55:18:01 – 00:55:50:02
Marty Morgan
There’s, there was a sniper by the name of Carlos, half Cock, who wrote a book called Marine Sniper and Half Cock related that exact story of of being stalked by an opposing North Vietnamese sniper who might have been a Russian sniper. It’s just never entirely clear. But he’s being stalked by an opponent’s sniper, and he catches a glint off of his sniper scope and fires a shot and travels right down the the the scope tube and strikes the opponent sniper through his eye socket.

00:55:50:04 – 00:55:55:18
Marty Morgan
So they borrowed something from Vietnam to make that moment and a World War two movie.

00:55:55:20 – 00:55:59:15
Dan LeFebvre
Wow. I would have just assumed it was completely made up.

00:55:59:17 – 00:56:28:10
Marty Morgan
No it’s not. There are some questions about whether or not it actually happened the way that it was reported it. And I read Carlos Hecox book when I was a kid, and I loved it. And I don’t want to question anything that that man wrote. But the problem with Jackson character and Private Ryan is that there’s a it’s believed that it would it would be a 1 in 1,000,000 shot for the bullets trajectory to align perfectly with that scope tube.

00:56:28:13 – 00:56:51:26
Marty Morgan
And also glass decelerates bullets very effectively. A glass, a particularly thin glass is not good at stopping them, but it’s really good at decelerating bullets. And so there’s a lingering question about whether or not a bullet would be able to travel down the entire length of the tube of a sniper scope, with objectives and ocular eyepieces on it.

00:56:51:28 – 00:57:15:26
Marty Morgan
I would just refer anybody listening. Do have a look at, MythBusters tested this twice as one of the cooler episodes of MythBusters, and they were concluding that the their conclusion was the bullet couldn’t get all the way through a sniper scope. Who knows whether or not those circumstances played themselves out in Carlos happy cops experience?

00:57:15:28 – 00:57:48:26
Marty Morgan
That’s less important. What I think is important for this discussion, though, is to say that incident is based on something that happened in Vietnam, and I now have to address this issue of the sniper in private. Ryan, because that’s Barry Peppers character. Jackson, is a complete abuse of power and a misrepresentation on every level of the way that snipers functioned within the United States Army in the European theater of operation during the Second World War.

00:57:48:28 – 00:57:59:28
Marty Morgan
And in addition to that, he’s carrying effectively a Frankenstein of a rifle that did not actually exist during World War Two.

00:58:00:00 – 00:58:06:16
Dan LeFebvre
Really. So so there really would not have been a way that he could have shot that because the rifle didn’t exist to begin with.

00:58:06:18 – 00:58:27:00
Marty Morgan
Right. Well, it’s weird because, I mean, it’s almost like the rifle, Jackson’s rifle. And Private Ryan is the perfect metaphor for Private Ryan. It’s very tough because the rifle kind of exists, but it doesn’t exist in the way that it’s depicted in the movie, and it doesn’t function the way that it’s depicted as functioning in the movie.

00:58:27:02 – 00:58:55:12
Marty Morgan
First of all, the US military really didn’t have a formal sniper approach. During World War Two, snipers were treated more as a squad designated marksman, more than anything with a a level of informality that you didn’t see during World War one. During World War one, we had actual sniper training, and we dissolved all of that sniper training in the interwar period, and when World War Two started, we didn’t actually create a sniper program, and that didn’t really even exist until Vietnam.

00:58:55:15 – 00:59:33:08
Marty Morgan
We had sniper rifles. Yes. But we didn’t have a formal program during by which we trained people to be these precise marksmen, as they’re depicted in Private Eye and, all the rifle did was, was provide a tool that was capable of delivering improved levels of rifle, rifle marksmanship. Now onto the rifle. So the way that the rifle is depicted in the movie for most of the scene is because if you look closely in the movie, you will see the Jackson character carrying two different rifles with two different scopes.

00:59:33:10 – 00:59:58:05
Marty Morgan
The scope that appears in almost all of the scenes. So there’s basically one continuity era error I think might maybe even two, two moments where they show him carrying a different rifle. And I think that’s just a little continuity error on the film. So that’s not really an issue that’s depicting him carrying the model. 19 03A4 sniper rifle, which existed during World War two and was used by the U.S. Army.

00:59:58:08 – 01:00:26:19
Marty Morgan
But it depicts him using it with an M82 scope. But that’s the one that sneaks in a couple of times. That scope was not used by the US Army during World War two, but that’s the rifle that only shows up twice that I think of during the war that I can think of during the movie. The scope that is on the rifle and 90% of the shots of the movie is the internal eight power scope, which was not used by the United States Army during the Second World War.

01:00:26:21 – 01:00:49:26
Marty Morgan
It was used by the United States Marine Corps in the Pacific Theater of Operations only, and then when it was used by the Marine Corps, it was used on a totally different version of the 1903 rifle. So the 1903 rifle was adopted by U.S. military forces in the year 1903. It served the World War One. It served importantly throughout World War Two, and it had a big role on D-Day.

01:00:49:28 – 01:01:16:21
Marty Morgan
The Marine Corps and the Army used that as their platform for sniper rifles, but the two guns were quite a bit different. They use different scopes first and foremost, and the Army version was different than the art, just the rifle. Not even talking about the scope, but the rifle itself was. The Army’s rifle was quite a bit different than the marine course rifle, and the Army rifle used a totally different scope, and they the right.

01:01:16:21 – 01:01:40:09
Marty Morgan
The Army scope was the 70 3B1, which was only a four power scope. It was a was a little bit weak in terms of magnification. And it’s got the scope tube itself is pretty modest in dimension. I think it’s one inch in diameter overall. And it, it has an ocular eyepiece where you would look through, but it doesn’t have the objective eyepiece.

01:01:40:16 – 01:02:24:20
Marty Morgan
It’s not bigger. Whereas the Marine Corps version, there’s a big, long, objective eyepiece on the scope, and it looks gratuitously a lot more like a powerful sniper scope. And and my understanding is that on the set, when they brought out an actual version of the U.S. Army in 1903, a four sniper rifle equipped with the appropriate and correct M 70 3B1 scope that apparently Mr. Spielberg looked at it and went, that doesn’t look very much like a sniper rifle, and that they looked at they did some photographs and that he saw the Marine Corps version, which is the 1903 rifle equipped with the eight power U.

01:02:24:20 – 01:02:57:29
Marty Morgan
Nurdles scope. Anyone? That’s what. That’s a sniper rifle. But can’t we get that scope? And so they took that scope, put it on the Army version of the sniper rifle, which was, for the record, different than the Marine Corps version, sniper rifle. And that’s the scope that you see Jackson hunting and shooting with throughout the movie, except for two occasions that I caught, and that is, of course, a version of the oh three sniper rifle that did not exist at all anywhere during the second World War.

01:02:58:01 – 01:03:25:16
Marty Morgan
And the scope that he’s using is something that did not exist, being used by U.S. Army forces in the European Theater of Operations during the Second World War. So for the keen eyed student of World War two, history and small arms and things like that, the Jackson character is something you kind of have to shrug your shoulders and just learn to live with, because he’s wielding this rifle that is a fantasy.

01:03:25:18 – 01:03:49:21
Marty Morgan
And then come on, guys, left handed sniper in World War two. That’s not the way the world works. 75 years ago, if you were a left handed shooter 75 years ago and you entered the army, you suddenly overnight became a right handed shooter. They really didn’t provide accommodations for people shooting left handed. But you’ve got Jackson there with the sniper rifle that didn’t exist during World War Two.

01:03:49:21 – 01:04:03:22
Marty Morgan
You shooting it is a left handed, marksman. And so those those are little bumps in the road of authenticity that create heartburn or the purest of World War Two history.

01:04:03:25 – 01:04:17:00
Dan LeFebvre
I loved what you said. Where like it’s just a great example of the movie overall. It’s it’s all a composite. Everything kind of thrown together. And that character is just a great it just continues the tradition.

01:04:17:03 – 01:04:19:27
Marty Morgan
Yeah, it’s based on a true story, but it’s obviously.

01:04:20:00 – 01:04:21:16
Dan LeFebvre
There you go. Yeah, exactly.

01:04:21:18 – 01:04:43:15
Marty Morgan
Oh shut up. But I love the sniper rifle thing. I like the fact that they were at least paying attention enough to, to, to depict the diversity of weapons army. Everyone. So within the squad of Rangers to include them the Clarke type of stop them that’s tagging along. You’ve got and you’ve got the diversity of firepower represented.

01:04:43:15 – 01:05:14:15
Marty Morgan
And then when you bring in like when the Matt Damon Ryan character comes in the 101st Airborne Division, paratroopers are brought in, you see another weapon come in, and that’s the 19 1930 caliber machine gun. Yeah. In other words, you’re seeing this diversity of the firearms that were used by US forces on D-Day. And I kind of like that because I find that a large number of the people that come on my church, for example, that they imagine that all Americans landed on June 6th carrying the M1, they shot rifle and that everybody fought with that.

01:05:14:22 – 01:05:41:00
Marty Morgan
But in private, Ryan, instead, you get you have someone with a sniper rifle, albeit wrong. You have Sergeant Horvath, four back carrying the M1 car. B although the sergeant probably carried something different. You’ve got Captain Miller carrying the m1A1 Thompson submachine gun. You’ve got ribbon carrying the 1918 A2 Browning Automatic Rifle. And then you have what, then you have is it three men armed with the M1 rifle.

01:05:41:00 – 01:06:16:00
Marty Morgan
You’ve got Capasso. Upham is carrying an M1 rifle and then Mellish just carrying an M1 rifle. And I like the fact that they’re representing the diversity of firearms that were being used during the era of, of the D-Day invasion. I just wish that that Captain Miller and Sergeant Horvath had switched weapons, because you would typically see an officer carrying the M1 carbine, and you would typically see a technical sergeant, carrying the Thompson submachine go.

01:06:16:03 – 01:06:17:27
Dan LeFebvre
Really? Why is that?

01:06:18:00 – 01:06:37:08
Marty Morgan
It’s just basically the way that the T&E, the table of organization and equipment for U.S. Army fighting units in the European theater, it authorized who would carry a weapon. And it it differed a corn according to the type of unit you were in, whether you were an infantry unit or a supply unit, or, for example, a Ranger unit.

01:06:37:10 – 01:07:00:14
Marty Morgan
And it off it typically authorized officers and ground units, non airborne carrying the M1 carbine. But you know, it’s Tom Hanks character John Miller carrying the Thompson. And then the Sergeant Horvath character armed with the Thompson. But I don’t know Horvath is carrying the carbine. Miller is carrying the Thompson. That’s right.

01:07:00:17 – 01:07:37:27
Dan LeFebvre
I would never have thought about who’s carrying who’s carrying what and whether or not that would have been correct or not. But it’s I like I, I do like that you pointed out the diversity there because that is something that I noticed when I saw the movie. Like it. You’re getting well. Well, again, I mean, it might be a, you know, a bit of a trope as far as the characters themselves are concerned and throwing it, you know, like you’re talking about, you know, you have the loudmouth character and you have, you know, the the different tropes that you get in a lot of war movies, but you also get a pretty good diversity

01:07:37:27 – 01:08:02:08
Dan LeFebvre
of the types of weapons that they’re carrying. And I, I like that about about the movie that, I hadn’t seen a lot of other I’m specifically thinking of, like The Longest Day. And in that where it doesn’t really focus on a single squad with that sort of diversity, I guess, is what I’m trying to say there.

01:08:02:11 – 01:08:24:20
Marty Morgan
Yeah, I absolutely love the fact that the movie did that, because in it, there’s one larger point that I could make about Saving Private Ryan that is that I believe that it is, to date, the greatest achievement and the authentic presentation of a World War Two subject. I’m not saying the movie’s perfect. I’m not even saying that it’s excellent.

01:08:24:20 – 01:08:28:28
Marty Morgan
It’s got lots of problems, but it’s the best that I’ve seen yet.

01:08:29:01 – 01:08:37:27
Dan LeFebvre
End of the day, it is still a movie. It’s not a documentary, so you’re never going to have something that’s going to be 100% authentic. That’s not what movies are.

01:08:37:29 – 01:09:03:22
Marty Morgan
And I believe that what they did achieve in that film, in terms of authenticity, was on such a higher plane than movies that were around it, that came before it, that came at it. I think that what they achieved in terms of authenticity spoke powerfully to a certain audience of people, that the world of World War Two reenacting was basically it basically came alive after that movie was released.

01:09:03:25 – 01:09:28:07
Marty Morgan
And I think it’s because there were people that appreciated the effort that they put into creating and authenticity that you haven’t seen in previous films, and that is I have to acknowledge respectfully the fact that that Mr. Spielberg, turns he turns over issues of authenticity to someone in the film business that that is and has a pretty good track record of delivering authenticity.

01:09:28:09 – 01:09:58:10
Marty Morgan
And that’s got Gale by. He was in charge of training the actors. He was in charge of, helping create the atmosphere of authenticity that generally accompanies the film. And while that atmosphere is not perfect, it’s pretty darn good. And I think that the the goodness up that, created a lot of enthusiasm among a younger audience that probably would not have been reached by World War Two history otherwise.

01:09:58:13 – 01:10:16:27
Dan LeFebvre
Now, there are a lot of iconic scenes from the movie, but I want to ask you about one of the scenes that really stood out to me, and that was the dog tag scene. The men in this squad are given a bag of dog tags to see if Ryan’s name is in there, and we see the men sitting down.

01:10:16:28 – 01:10:38:09
Dan LeFebvre
They start going through them. Before long, they’re joking around and almost being playful about it as they’re going through the dog tags. And then meanwhile, you can see other members of the airborne are watching on, and it’s Wade, the medic, who stops the other men. He reminds them they’re not poker chip. Each dog tag represents a fallen comrade in arms.

01:10:38:11 – 01:11:06:19
Dan LeFebvre
And this scene really stood out to me because I saw it as a turning point. You could clearly see that these soldiers were becoming, or already were desensitized to, the events that were going on around them, as they’re joking around with these dog tags, I can’t help but think maybe just, you know, a few days earlier, before D-Day, they might have had a very different reaction to sifting through a bag of dog tags.

01:11:06:19 – 01:11:21:23
Dan LeFebvre
It kind of shows how the events that they went through in those few days changed them. As people. Was this sort of desensitization common among soldiers in the days after D-Day?

01:11:21:26 – 01:11:53:23
Marty Morgan
I believe that it was. And although I’ve not been in the military, I feel like I have an understanding of it to a certain level in that I have seen how gallows humor typically, accompanies military units as they experience combat, and that the deeper they get into it, the more the gallows humor tends to come out. And that scene does something very powerful in that it humanizes the lost, in combat on June 6th, 1944.

01:11:53:25 – 01:12:31:14
Marty Morgan
And it also sets the stage for this this daunting task of trying to find one person. And I would just if I could sidetrack for one quick moment, I would say that if that scene had been turned over to a lesser actor, I think the scene would have fallen flat. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out who’s the best actor in the film, saving Private Ryan, and I believe it might actually be Giovanni Ribisi playing Wade the medic, because in that scene, he he just expresses subtlety in the way that he realizes that the guys are laughing and joking a little bit too much, and that there being a little inappropriate

01:12:31:14 – 01:12:51:28
Marty Morgan
for circumstances and the way that he rushes over and he snatches it from him, I just feel like his acting performance in that scene is excellent. I feel like his acting performance in the entire movie is excellent and acting and I, I he’s in another movie that I really love and it Miracle Lost in Translation, where he plays a totally different kind of character.

01:12:52:00 – 01:13:05:24
Marty Morgan
He’s just a really good actor. I really felt like he brought that scene to life. And Private Ryan, although the scene is completely historically inaccurate on every level, and it really gets under my skin and drives me nuts like I.

01:13:05:27 – 01:13:07:11
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah, that was that was a that was a big turn.

01:13:07:11 – 01:13:24:04
Marty Morgan
There was, wasn’t it? Yeah. I’m conflicted. I am about this film because it’s so great. And at the same time I’m like, yeah. Where would you ever have one guy that just like, I’ve got 50 dog tags in this bag of people I’ve just been picking up over the last few days?

01:13:24:07 – 01:13:28:26
Dan LeFebvre
Oh, yeah. The chopper pilot, I think it was, was the one that that threw him the bag. Yeah.

01:13:29:03 – 01:13:30:14
Marty Morgan
And the glider pilot. Yeah.

01:13:30:17 – 01:13:31:10
Dan LeFebvre
Oh, yeah. Glider.

01:13:31:10 – 01:13:54:05
Marty Morgan
And he’s like, yeah, here’s here’s a bunch of dog tags. There was a general. There was a general order in place that, for combat casualties, you would not separate the dog tags from the casualties, because if you the moment everyone has two dog tags. But this was before the military was practicing. This, was tradition of wearing one around your neck and one tied in the laces of your boots.

01:13:54:05 – 01:14:24:06
Marty Morgan
That’s a big, thing. Not a World War two thing. So everyone had two tags suspended from a chain around their neck. You didn’t. You didn’t separate the tags from the bite. And that’s because those tags served a very specific purpose. And that those tags guaranteed that when the unit that came in that was responsible from the point that you would you were killed on the battlefield from that point forward, another unit was responsible for you, the unit you were assigned to up to your death.

01:14:24:06 – 01:14:53:03
Marty Morgan
That unit was in, was responsible for you while you were alive. And if you were killed, they were responsible for processing some paperwork about you. But your body then became fell into the responsibility of mortuary services and graves registration units. And those units had to collect remains, identify remains, and then keep the identification with those remains. And in order to do that, you had to have both tags with the remains.

01:14:53:05 – 01:15:17:10
Marty Morgan
There are extenuating circumstances. There were times when when human bodies were so shattered. As for the use of modern weapons that you no longer had a net for the dog tag to hang from, or you had body parts that were separated from the whole, and under those circumstances, yes, you would lose track of the tags, but when you had a complete set of remains, the tags, both tags stayed with those remains.

01:15:17:13 – 01:15:39:07
Marty Morgan
And that’s why that scene makes me kind of roll my eyes a little bit, because I can see how that scene gave them, a moment of tension in the story that they needed. But I also have to go. They would. That would never happen. Those tags had to stay with the bodies because they stayed with the bodies and the graves.

01:15:39:09 – 01:15:46:13
Marty Morgan
Registration mortuary services guys then knew what to do with the body and to identify that body.

01:15:46:15 – 01:16:06:02
Dan LeFebvre
Well, so were they with would they basically follow me with those divisions, basically following the front lines or how I’m curious how how that worked on that side? Because that is just a it’s a morbid job, but it’s a massive one to keep track of all that.

01:16:06:04 – 01:16:10:12
Marty Morgan
I can’t imagine the nightmares that those men must have had after the war.

01:16:10:15 – 01:16:12:03
Dan LeFebvre
Oh, I can’t, I mean, yeah.

01:16:12:05 – 01:16:36:29
Marty Morgan
Yeah, the men whose jobs it was to collect casualties on the battlefield, take them to a central point where they were being buried, and collect off, collect up, off and incomplete sets of remains. That that must have been traumatizing. And there’s been a great deal written about about that experience in the last few years. And that’s all extremely important and compelling.

01:16:36:29 – 01:17:07:03
Marty Morgan
And, in, in my personal work on one story that I’ve dealt with, I, I’ve had to investigate what happened with the specific graves registration unit and how they, after the fact, recovered the remains of men who were killed in action. And there’s footage associated with it. There’s footage of the men of the 603rd Quartermaster Graves Registration Company collecting bodies, that were that had been temporarily buried and re burying them.

01:17:07:03 – 01:17:52:26
Marty Morgan
And the footage? I can barely watch the footage. It’s so gruesome. And that was the everyday experience of uniform service of the United States Army for the men of these units. And, And I should just throw in one plug for them. I spent a lot of time tracking people who were killed in Normandy, tracking how they were killed, where they were killed, and where they ended up buried, and what overwhelmed me is that the men from the quartermaster graves registration companies and the mortuary services companies, those men carried out what I consider to be an extremely challenging mission, and they carried it out in an analog era of forms with carbon paper and

01:17:52:26 – 01:18:20:12
Marty Morgan
in triplicate and, and in the there with no digital assistance whatsoever. And they carried out that job with so much accuracy that and studying this subject intensely for about two, 20 years now, I have found very few mistakes, and I think all respect needs to be given to the men who picked up our war dead, made sure that they were identified, and made sure that they had a proper burial.

01:18:20:14 – 01:18:25:29
Dan LeFebvre
Well, yeah. Yeah, that’s that’s a side of it that I had never thought about before.

01:18:26:02 – 01:18:50:03
Marty Morgan
And that’s deep. So great for that subject makes its way into the grand narrative of Saving Private Ryan. And that’s almost I hate to criticize the moment because it at least addresses the subject, the subject. If the subject made it into Private Ryan, that’s basically a guarantee that here we are, more than 20 years later, people are still going to be talking about it, because that’s what blows me away about this movie.

01:18:50:05 – 01:19:22:09
Marty Morgan
It this I remember when I first started tour guiding. I remember thinking like 15 years ago, I remember I remember thinking that, I think interest is probably going to begin fading and, and I certainly won’t be able to find much of a livelihood in leading tours to Normandy, certainly not after about 2002, 2003. And here I am almost a decade later, and there’s more interest now than there was ten years ago.

01:19:22:12 – 01:19:25:24
Marty Morgan
I think Saving Private Ryan is to blame for a lot of that.

01:19:25:26 – 01:19:30:06
Dan LeFebvre
And to think that and but at the same time, it’s a conflict that.

01:19:30:09 – 01:19:47:19
Marty Morgan
You know, that movie did more than any book that has ever been written, any book that I will ever write, any book that smarter people than me will ever write. That movie did more than any of us ever could. To ensure the continuing popularity of that subject.

01:19:47:21 – 01:20:11:18
Dan LeFebvre
I want to shift a little bit to some of the geographical side, because we’re given some names in the movie, but we never get a lot of geographical context about the squad’s search for Private Ryan. They start on Omaha Beach, and then from there they head to what the movie says is behind enemy lines to Neuville, where the dog tag scene was.

01:20:11:21 – 01:20:40:26
Dan LeFebvre
And then I did a I look on online and as the crow flies, it’s about 21 miles or 34km between those two locations. And then from there they go to Rommel, which is on, the murder at River. And that’s another four miles or 6.5km. Since the movie makes multiple mentions that Neuville is behind enemy lines and that was their first destination, I can only assume that all of this is taking place behind enemy lines.

01:20:40:26 – 01:21:02:20
Dan LeFebvre
The entire time. Of course, there’s already other soldiers that mentioned the airborne who were already at Neuville, so it’s not like this rescue squad is the only Allied soldiers behind enemy lines. But can you give us a little more geographical context about where the German lines were in relation to these places that we see referenced in the movie?

01:21:02:22 – 01:21:26:09
Marty Morgan
Sure. The reason that they choose Neuville for the film, it’s there. What they’re doing is they’re giving a nod to the 10 million Oplan, which is the place where Bob Niland was killed on June 6th. And so they’re referencing that. Which brings us a little bit of a point of convergence with the story, the true story upon which the the fictional story is based.

01:21:26:12 – 01:22:03:00
Marty Morgan
But, Neuville is to the north and west of Sigma agrees. It’s a McBeal, as you have already calculated. Is pretty far from Omaha Beach. It is much, much closer to Utah Beach. It’s only about ten miles inland from Utah Beach. Maybe a little more, maybe like 11 miles inland from Utah Beach. But it is not located conveniently close to Omaha, which is why you have to suspend reality a little bit just to go with what Steven Spielberg and Robert wrote out want you to go with here.

01:22:03:00 – 01:22:30:14
Marty Morgan
And that is that this group of rangers that land on Omaha Beach at Doc Green Sector are then set far behind the lines behind Utah Beach to look for a missing paratrooper. Because the practical reality at work here is that this would have been a physical impossibility. And the reason I say, the reason I say that is that between Omaha and Utah, there’s this one town called Carrington.

01:22:30:17 – 01:22:50:11
Marty Morgan
Carrington was the point at which, the U.S. Army Fifth Corps landing on Omaha and the US Army Separate Corps landing on Utah were supposed to come together. They were supposed to come together late in the day on June 6th. Maybe on June 7th. They did not come together, for almost a week. It took time. That was not part of the plan.

01:22:50:13 – 01:23:26:24
Marty Morgan
But it’s not until 101st Airborne Division captures Carrington. It’s not even to occur that, actually. And that happens on June 11th. It’s not until after June 11th that Omaha Beach and Utah Beach are able to link up on their flanks. So for a group of rangers who landed on Omaha Beach on D-Day to make their way to the area, the drop zone area behind Utah Beach, I would challenge is a physical impossibility because it would have caused it would have called for them to not go straight as the crow flies 2020 miles, but more like 30 miles.

01:23:26:27 – 01:24:14:00
Marty Morgan
Circuitous. Lee is following terrain because the terrain in the area between Omaha and Utah is the area where there it’s, it’s a tributary area for several river systems. In fact, the dove River, the vier River, the river, those are all flowing into the English channels in the area between Utah and Omaha. So these guys would have not only had to have gone through enemy territory, but they would have had to have covered enemy territory, crossing rivers, going well out of their way to go, to move across flooded marsh areas because the Germans had seen to it that there was flooding that was beyond just the normal seasonal flooding in the area in

01:24:14:00 – 01:24:43:05
Marty Morgan
the tributary, the mouth area of the vier, the toilet and the dove and those men would been have had to have made their way without contact with either the enemy or other Americans for mile after mile after mile. And as we know from the film, they do contact other Americans if they do contact the enemy. But I believe it would have been physically impossible for them to move from the area behind Omaha to the drop zone area and land from Utah Beach.

01:24:43:07 – 01:24:50:26
Dan LeFebvre
That helps a lot. Put that into a little more perspective. Again, sounds like it was a a story decision.

01:24:50:29 – 01:25:24:08
Marty Morgan
Yeah, it’s a it’s a storytelling decision, as was the creation of the fictional village Rommel. That is a village that does not exist. That village was created just for the purposes of storytelling, and that what happens in that village is to an extent based on two, maybe three actual events. But there were no 101st Airborne Division Division paratroopers that were sent to babysit a bridge at a village called Rommel because there was no and is no village of Rommel and not interesting.

01:25:24:08 – 01:25:27:15
Dan LeFebvre
So yeah, they are a lot more made up.

01:25:27:18 – 01:25:44:24
Marty Morgan
Yeah, I respect the fact that they wanted to tell a story. They wanted that story to be a D-Day story. They wanted to do it with a level of authenticity that was unprecedented. And they did all of that. But to get there, they had to massage the actuality of the D-Day invasion, and they had to create a few things.

01:25:44:27 – 01:26:03:25
Marty Morgan
And they had they ended up, I think, unintentionally distorting a few things like, I’ve I’ve not gotten down in the weeds of picking out minor little authenticity details like how Spielberg had beach obstacles on Omaha Beach backwards. They were facing the wrong way. They were facing out to the water when they’re supposed to be facing the bluffs. I’m not.

01:26:03:27 – 01:26:28:00
Marty Morgan
I’m not carping on minor issues like like that. However, I mean, I know I mentioned the bunker and how the bunker on Omaha Beach was wrong, but, it there going to be little unintentional authenticity slip ups from time to time in a film. But then they also had to make some major decisions where they consciously departed from the actuality of the historical record.

01:26:28:06 – 01:26:32:14
Marty Morgan
And they certainly did that with the creation of a fictional village, remote.

01:26:32:16 – 01:26:54:09
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah. Well, well, since you mention it, because that was something that I wanted to ask because according to the movie, that’s again where they find Private Ryan, and Captain Miller gives him the bad news about his brothers. But then Ryan, Matt Damon plays, Private Ryan and he refuses to leave. He says something to the effect of, you can tell my mother that when you found me, I was here.

01:26:54:16 – 01:27:13:24
Dan LeFebvre
And with the only brothers I have left, there’s no way I’m abandoning this bridge. And then we find out from the man in charge, Corporal Henderson, that Allied planes from the 82nd took out all the bridges across the murder at. Except for two of them. One of them, alone, and then the other one that they’re at now.

01:27:13:28 – 01:27:38:24
Dan LeFebvre
And their orders are to defend that bridge at all costs. So we’re left with, Captain Miller making the decision that they’re going to keep the squad there in order to help hold the bridge and then take Ryan back afterwards. Is the assumption. But you mentioned that there there were possibly a couple of stories that this was based on.

01:27:38:27 – 01:28:20:13
Marty Morgan
Yeah. And I would just say that they androgynous Lee kind of inform what’s going on with Rommel and the 101st Airborne Division troopers. They, they borrow a little bit from an action that the 82nd Airborne Division is involved in, where there is a bridge and it is over the major AA river, and it’s in a place that called Lafayette Air, and that is the 82nd Airborne Division’s primary battle for the first three days of the invasion from G6 all the way through the afternoon of June 9th, the 82nd Airborne Division is struggling with German units, in the vicinity of the the Mercury River crossing site at LA here.

01:28:20:15 – 01:28:50:10
Marty Morgan
So it’s sort of based on that, where there’s an old 1840s stone bridge. And then also on another story of a murder, a river crossing that was just about three miles south of there at a place called Ship Depot. And interestingly, Private Ryan, you can when you read a little bit about life here and shift and it all started, suddenly starts to make sense how Robert Rowe that was inspired by those two stories, in addition to another story that I’ll get into later if you want me to.

01:28:50:12 – 01:29:15:28
Marty Morgan
But he’s inspired by last and shifted to a certain extent. There is a there’s a moment at the part that makes its way into Saving Private Ryan powerfully, where, a battalion commander in the 507th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 82nd Airborne Division, commanding Edwin Iceberg. They move down and they’re ordered to go and capture this bridge intact. So they move through the town, shift upon the madre River bridge.

01:29:16:00 – 01:29:39:08
Marty Morgan
A stone bridge is just south of town. Lieutenant Colonel Osbourne runs out onto the bridge, and when he’s just as he’s about to put his foot down on the bridge, he’s shot. He falls to the ground, rolls off the bridge, and splashes into the water, which is something that we see in the closing scene. The climactic battle scene in Rommel and Saving Private Ryan.

01:29:39:10 – 01:30:03:07
Marty Morgan
But then the next highest ranking officer takes over. And he was a friend of mine, a person I knew quite well. His name was Roy Creek, and Roy Creek was the iconic commander of the 507th Parachute Infantry Regiment, and Captain Creek took over the fight for the bridge at Shifter Park. And he takes the bridge. He has a small force.

01:30:03:09 – 01:30:30:07
Marty Morgan
It receives a note late in the day on June 6th, instructing him to hold the bridge shift. DuPont instructs him to specifically hold at all costs, and I find that Roy Creek’s story, from report to an extent, expired and inspires the imaginary story of the 101st Airborne Division paratroopers at the fictitious village of Rommel on the Madre.

01:30:30:09 – 01:30:44:24
Dan LeFebvre
Not to shift movies, but there’s the bridge and the longest day that they have to hold as well, and I. I don’t remember the exact line, but it’s, hold until relieved or something like that. Is that the same story.

01:30:44:27 – 01:30:55:10
Marty Morgan
In And Longest Day when you hear hold until really told until relief. That’s, Pegasus Bridge over the Cole Canal in the, Sword Beach area.

01:30:55:13 – 01:30:58:18
Dan LeFebvre
Okay, so not not related at all with with this story.

01:30:58:18 – 01:31:08:10
Marty Morgan
They’re not really, but I think maybe, philosophically and spiritually, it may have contributed some, inspiration to Robert Rota.

01:31:08:12 – 01:31:15:28
Dan LeFebvre
Well, yeah, I guess since it’s a fictional story and Saving Private Ryan, I guess there can be a lot of different, inspirations there.

01:31:16:00 – 01:31:34:20
Marty Morgan
Yeah. And, to me, what it looks like is wrote it, in a commendable way. I’m not criticizing him in the commendable way he treated the the broad story of D-Day as like a cafeteria. You can’t cram it all into one movie. There’s no way to do it. That movie would be 100 hours long and nobody would sit through it.

01:31:34:23 – 01:31:50:02
Marty Morgan
So he had to pick a choose. And as he went down the cafeteria line, he picked, I’ll take a little bit of lucky er, I’ll take a little bit of the part. I’ll take a little bit of rangers on Omaha Beach. I’ll take a little bit of George Taylor on Omaha Beach. I’ll take a little bit of Jenny Monty on Omaha Beach.

01:31:50:09 – 01:32:05:03
Marty Morgan
And he picks and chooses all of these things to create a story. And his objective was not to create a documentary, but provided a factual representation of D-Day invasion. His objective was to create a good story, and I think he succeeded.

01:32:05:05 – 01:32:23:09
Dan LeFebvre
With the strategy that they have in the movie around the bridge. Be correct, though, that, that they were a vital part of the war effort to to maintain those or to keep them. From being destroyed by the enemy.

01:32:23:12 – 01:32:51:23
Marty Morgan
This is where it gets a little weird and yes and no, again, the annoying historian qualified answer. Yes. And so far as the two bridge crossing sites of the murder a lot, the air and shutter port are elevated to an incredible level of importance after June 6th. And that’s because of the fact, particularly Lapeer, and that’s because of the fact that.

01:32:51:26 – 01:33:19:18
Marty Morgan
The Germans had purposely exacerbated seasonal flooding by manipulating locks on the beer River, the river and the Dover River by by manipulating these locks they tracked, they trapped a lot of water in the interior of the Cardington Peninsula, which is where the airborne force landed on D-Day. The American Air Force. And that trap water created a big lake where there normally was not a lake.

01:33:19:21 – 01:33:52:03
Marty Morgan
And by big lake, I mean big. I mean it is almost ten miles wide from top to bottom at a couple of places. It’s it’s two and three miles across. But at one critical point at last year, the flooded area was only about 700m wide, where there was the bridge over the river and then a raised roadway called the Causeway, reading from the east side of the flooded area to the west side of the flooded area.

01:33:52:06 – 01:34:30:09
Marty Morgan
And so this force landing on Utah Beach, the U.S. Army Seventh Corps, composed of multiple divisions of force of over 50,000 men. That force was to land on Utah Beach, push into the interior, and continue pushing westward all the way across the peninsula, the cotangent peninsula, the. By securing the peninsula by cutting up the peninsula, it would then become possible for the U.S. Seventh Corps to engage in maneuver warfare with four divisions that would then push from the south to the north to envelop and capture the port city at Cherbourg from its landward approaches.

01:34:30:09 – 01:34:54:22
Marty Morgan
That was the overall big picture Corps level strategy, and in order to carry out that strategy, the corps had to land all of its men and vehicles on Neutral Beach, and then they had to move westward, and in order to complete that westward movement, they had to get across this flooded area. And there was really only one good place to get across that flooded area.

01:34:54:25 – 01:35:16:26
Marty Morgan
And that was at lock here, which is why the battle of Locks here that unfolds on June 9th, 1944 is climactic and important because it opens up that artery. What was happening in the days before June 9th was effectively a building and growing traffic jam. Think of a traffic jam that’s being counterattacked by the enemy. That’s what was happening.

01:35:16:28 – 01:35:43:04
Marty Morgan
And then the 82nd airborne was given the task of punching through, the bus, recapturing the bridge and causeway, and therefore opening up a route for ground forces to move westward, which was the overall strategy of seventh Corps in the aftermath of the landings. So the stakes for the battle fought by the 82nd Airborne Division on June off year are extremely high.

01:35:43:06 – 01:36:15:10
Marty Morgan
They carry the field of battle. They are victorious. They open up the warfare Causeway, and those horses begin moving westward. And the aftermath of of that victory. And so if we assume that Robert wrote at base part of the fictional battle at Rommel, on what actually happened at Lapeer, you could say you could elevate the importance of that site to the highest level by saying, if we don’t hold this bridge and the enemy takes it, it changes the war.

01:36:15:12 – 01:36:47:06
Marty Morgan
Those those sort of, oh, sort of how dramatic. And I should note, I should say this, those sort of melodramatic terms typically accompany motion pictures and, and it’s a little bit of a Hollywood goofy thing to see moments like that elevated to these incredibly important terms. And it’s a little bit goofy in Hollywood to see, like, the lowest ranking people echoing these visions of grand strategy.

01:36:47:09 – 01:37:12:00
Marty Morgan
But that happens a couple of times in private, Ryan. And I think it had to happen, although it might be a little bit goofy and a little bit laughable. I think it had to happen because you had to have certain levels of character exposition, like there’s a moment where Tom Hanks is talking to Ted Danson, and they’re talking about Montgomery and Hal and Monty’s stall over there near corn, and we have to get to kind of get to Berlin.

01:37:12:00 – 01:37:35:24
Marty Morgan
And we have to get to Berlin to get to the big boat home. I think I’m quoting the movie correctly, and I find it a little bit peculiar that you would have two captains having these discussions of grand strategy. And also my big challenge to that idea will be, how in the world would two U.S. Army captains know all the details of what’s happening far away, and the area around Castle where the British were fighting?

01:37:35:27 – 01:38:01:16
Marty Morgan
I think that they wouldn’t. Maybe captains discussed grand strategy and down moments and Normandy, but I think they wouldn’t have had like up to date current events in terms of what the British were experiencing around Kong. And by that same token, when you see the 101st Airborne Division paratroopers and the fictional town Rommel discussing how we have to hold this bridge if the enemy takes this bridge, it’s all a little bit weird.

01:38:01:18 – 01:38:26:27
Marty Morgan
I’m not entirely convinced that the the ground troops on the lowest possible level are having discussions of grand strategy. I think that their conversations were probably, reflective of more immediate needs and more immediate concerns, like with this is how much ammunition we have, this is how much boom we have, how we do. We have communications established with anybody else.

01:38:26:27 – 01:38:35:26
Marty Morgan
I think they would have been discussing that sort of thing, rather than, we can’t let this bridge fall to the enemy, or else the entire invasion is undermined.

01:38:35:29 – 01:38:52:22
Dan LeFebvre
Well, it’s interesting you mention that, because that is something I wanted to ask you about, because in the movie they do the whole plan to defend the bridge. They do. There’s a mentioned where they talk about how they’re low on weapons and low on ammo, and they know the Germans are coming and they’re going to come with tanks.

01:38:52:24 – 01:39:08:24
Dan LeFebvre
And so, according to the movie side, Tom Hanks, his character, Captain Miller suggests that they make sticky bombs. And of course, they have no idea what those are. So he has to explain that you take a sock, you cram it with as much can’t be as it’ll hold. Coat it with axle grease, and then you throw it sticks to the tank.

01:39:08:24 – 01:39:39:00
Dan LeFebvre
Sticky bomb. That’s their best bet to take off a tank tread. And so we see a mixture of that. We see Jackson with his sniper rifle that we’ve talked about earlier. He set up and there’s a 30 caliber, machine guns that they use as well. And then, of course, there’s hand-to-hand combat. How well do you think that the movie did showing this strategy in this mix of weapons used to even though the bridge itself in the movie is fictional?

01:39:39:00 – 01:39:43:12
Dan LeFebvre
But how well do you think it did showing that battle?

01:39:43:15 – 01:40:08:12
Marty Morgan
Let me get the party pooper stuff out of the way first, and then I’ll give it a couple of minutes to compliment second party pooper. First. First of all, American airborne units within units of the American hundred and first and 82nd Airborne Division are not encountering Waffen SS planes are going to do ERS in that area because this area is androgynous along the length of the mayor de Rey River.

01:40:08:18 – 01:40:33:28
Marty Morgan
And I would just point out that there’s no point during the fighting in Normandy, where Waffen SS units engage American airborne forces along the murder. It doesn’t happen. 101st Airborne Division encounters and are going to doors of the 17th SS and the area of self guarantee and beginning on June 9th, but not up at the murder a river that’s just me being a party pooper.

01:40:34:06 – 01:40:58:28
Marty Morgan
And then also let’s talk tanks for a second, because what you see in the concluding climactic battle scene at mill is an assault gun. A really it’s not a really an assault gun. It’s actually, piece of self-propelled, self-propelled field artillery, C a self-propelled field artillery vehicle, and you see a tank that is supposed to be a Tiger.

01:40:59:01 – 01:41:21:03
Marty Morgan
And just for the record, that is a Soviet T-34 tank that has been modified to look like a German Tiger. It’s not an actual German tiger. They just need a big tank. And they there. There’s really only one functioning tiger anywhere in the world, and that’s in England. Number 131 that was depicted in theory. So they took a Soviet T-34, converted it to make it look like a tiger.

01:41:21:05 – 01:42:00:18
Marty Morgan
And it’s there present in the Rommel battle. Just for the record, no, Americans do not. Americans fighting in Normandy do not encounter a German tiger tank until the Mortein counteroffensive of in August. So from June 4th until August, we don’t encounter tigers. In fact, it’s not until, I think, July 28th that we encounter a pincer. It’s not until like July 28th that we encounter a German marked for tank.

01:42:00:20 – 01:42:28:13
Marty Morgan
I’m saying all of this because I think an important point for us to remember is that American forces, particularly American parachute infantry forces, do not encounter German made battle tanks until later. One. They encounter this this special German vehicle that we call a German or Stig. We encounter those around Saint Aragonese in the afternoon on June 7th. We encounter them in a few other places.

01:42:28:13 – 01:42:58:05
Marty Morgan
But that’s not a tank. It’s an assault gun. It doesn’t have a 360 degree rotating turret, and it is capable of quite a bit less than a Tiger or a Panther or even a mark four, for that matter. And we’re not seeing them. What we are seeing, though, in terms of German armored forces attacking American paratroopers shortly after the invasion, what we’re seeing are German armored forces that are attacking American paratroopers with French made tanks that were captured by the Germans in 1940.

01:42:58:07 – 01:43:29:13
Marty Morgan
In fact, there was a tank battle on the Lafayette Causeway in the afternoon on June 6th, and that tank battle consists of one German made Mach three tank and three French made tanks being used by a German fighting battalion. The battalion was called the Panzer Assets Update, and it was a training and replacement battalion that was almost completely equipped with these French made tanks, so there are no American paratroopers going jaw to jaw against the tiger.

01:43:29:15 – 01:43:51:25
Marty Morgan
It just doesn’t happen. I’m sorry. It’s a fantasy. It makes for a heck of a good scene, and it makes for a lot of tension. That whole tension associated with that. You know that moment in the movie where they show ribbon and Hanks and they’re in the hole and the ground’s shaking, and there’s literally like, rocks bouncing up and down from a rumbling of the approaching tiger that’s suspenseful and it’s almost visceral.

01:43:51:27 – 01:44:19:07
Marty Morgan
It’s just too bad it didn’t actually happen during D-Day, or any or any of the days that came immediately thereafter. So Americans are experiencing, German fighting vehicles, German armored fighting vehicles, but they’re not encountering the most frightening beast of them all, the German tiger. So there’s another license that the film takes with the reality of combat during the Normandy invasion.

01:44:19:09 – 01:44:48:29
Marty Morgan
So the idea of the SS carrying out this coordinated infantry and armor assault against the, village up on the Murdery River. It’s. That’s all a fiction created just for the movie. And it’s all based on, once again, a gumbo, a mixture of battles from different eras or areas of fighting in the European theater from different locations across the European theater.

01:44:49:01 – 01:45:22:06
Marty Morgan
It introduces some truths, and it introduces a lot of distortion and, and mythology. And just for the record, there was a sticky bomb during World War two. It doesn’t end up looking like a stock, stock with grease and composition being stopped in it. Although the training manuals did have a chapter on improvised explosive devices, where it instructed U.S. troops on how to create a bomb that was sort of like that, but not entirely.

01:45:22:06 – 01:45:58:11
Marty Morgan
And again, another fiction that was designed to, to it was designed, I think, to recognize an American, a unique American spirit of of being flexible, of being innovative, of working with what you got. And that is certainly a way that people tend to characterize the American army that fights in the European theater in World War two. But you don’t really see a battle where Tiger tanks come rumbling into the town, with airborne infantrymen.

01:45:58:11 – 01:46:21:28
Marty Morgan
And just for the record, airborne infantry is by its very nature, light infantry, airborne infantry with basically one anti-tank weapon. And that’s it. Because if you remember in the movie, the one anti-tank weapon they have is the one that was carried by, I think it was actually used by the the private Ryan character. It was a model m1A1 anti-tank rocket launcher, what we call the bazooka.

01:46:22:00 – 01:46:44:14
Marty Morgan
So you’re supposed to imagine this force of 101st Airborne Division paratroopers with a group of U.S. Army Rangers and then a 20 night division clerk typist, Browning, on top of it. They have one anti-tank weapon, and they’re supposed to hold off this coordinated assault by Waffen SS. Plans are going to be supported by armor. There’s a lot of fantasy going on in that scenario.

01:46:44:16 – 01:46:47:00
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah, it sounds like it.

01:46:47:03 – 01:47:08:22
Marty Morgan
I forgot to give it compliments. I should give you a compliment. One compliment that I think it deserves is that that scene is an intense combat scene, but it’s got a totally different quality to the intense combat scene that comes at the beginning of the movie. It’s an intense combat scene, but it’s totally different. And I think it’s I mean, it had the first time I saw it having on the edge of my seat.

01:47:08:22 – 01:47:32:00
Marty Morgan
I mean, it’s visceral. It’s powerful. The hand to hand sequence is evocative, and I mean, it’s stimulating and all of the negative ways. I mean, you really empathize with the Mellish character when he’s trying, when he’s engaged in hand-to-hand combat with this top looking Waffen SS Panzer going to be going to mirror that and involves them beating each other and biting fingers off.

01:47:32:00 – 01:47:57:25
Marty Morgan
And then ultimately, the German bayonets. The Mellish character. That’s a powerful scene, and I think it’s powerful and thought provoking as well. That is a part of the exposition of that scene. It also addresses the idea of someone who is, who is traumatized by the experience of being in the middle of a battle because the Upham character is is atomized by this battle that’s going on around him.

01:47:57:26 – 01:48:21:19
Marty Morgan
He’s not ready for it, and he doesn’t cope with it well because he hears Mellish screaming for his life just up the stairs up there with a loaded M1 right click. He could go up and he could save Mellish, and he’s so paralyzed by fear that he doesn’t do it. And I think that is an interesting thing for the movie to have addressed, because that is definitely something that is a part of the American experience of fighting in the European theater, in combat and what we’re to.

01:48:21:19 – 01:48:50:01
Marty Morgan
Because not everybody, but there were Americans who, when it came time for them to to turn on their bravery in battle, some men were not capable of doing it. There are some people that in the face of combat, their instinct drove them to retreat. Whereas there are others who rise to the greatest levels of self-sacrificing courage. And you could imagine.

01:48:50:03 – 01:49:10:23
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah. Well, yeah, you you hear all those stories about the, the heroic side and the people who do that, you know, they they rise to the challenge. But first time I saw Saving Private Ryan, that scene really stood out to me with with Upham. And because it was one of the first times that it was like, well, yeah, not everybody’s going to rise to that challenge.

01:49:10:23 – 01:49:24:04
Dan LeFebvre
It’s just there’s not everybody can. And so I think that they addressed that, really spoke volumes and told a completely different side in just those few moments.

01:49:24:07 – 01:49:51:02
Marty Morgan
Yeah, that’s that’s a subject I find myself talking about on my tour quite a lot. And just like you said, not everybody is cut out for it. And consider what we what’s the American military became what it had become by 1944. And that is that it wasn’t a military force that was composed of a large number of people that volunteered, and then also a large number of people who did not volunteer, a large number of conscripts, people who were drafted into uniform.

01:49:51:04 – 01:50:17:23
Marty Morgan
And among the draftees. I am fascinated by the way the U.S. Army draft the experience in World War Two. The volunteers are people who I think knew that they were cut out for it to begin with, and then experience basic training and experience during combat. They were cut out before they had been gotten through that evolution. And then a large number of men are drafted to the U.S. Army, put in uniform.

01:50:17:25 – 01:50:42:29
Marty Morgan
They go through accelerated basic training programs. They are delivered to fighting units in Europe. And sometimes the don’t do well. You have to book ends of experience. You have the complete polar opposite. And that I’m fascinated by the number of U.S. Army draftees who go to Europe and earn the Medal of Honor and some of the most amazing acts of bravery you can imagine.

01:50:43:01 – 01:51:08:08
Marty Morgan
And then you also have men like there was a man named Eddie Slovic. It was a the 28th Infantry Division who was a draftee. And once the battle of the bulge began, and there was disorder and chaos created by the German advance in the battle of the bulge, Slovic took the opportunity to desert his unit. It was ultimately found and was tried, or the desertion was ultimately, executed by firing squad.

01:51:08:08 – 01:51:43:26
Marty Morgan
The one and only U.S. Army soldier who was executed for desertion during World War Two. He was a draftee, and I he interests me. He deserted his unit in Luxembourg. There was another U.S. Army soldier in Luxembourg named D.G. Turner, who was a draftee, and who by the time he got to Luxembourg for the battle of the bulge, he had already earned a Bronze Star, and as a draftee he went on to earn the Medal of Honor, and then was engaged in another act of absolutely incredible bravery when he was ultimately killed in a combat on February 7th, 1945.

01:51:43:28 – 01:52:08:11
Marty Morgan
And he was a draftee. So when you when you assemble a citizen soldier army and the the American military ultimately becomes seven, 16 million people in uniform during World War two, whenever you a symbol of course of that scale and you get there by instituting a draft, some of them are going to be people that can handle it, and some of them are going to be people that cannot.

01:52:08:13 – 01:52:13:27
Marty Morgan
And interestingly, very much that the movie Saving Private Ryan addressed that very issue.

01:52:13:29 – 01:52:39:10
Dan LeFebvre
Going back to the movie, despite taking heavy losses at the bridge, the Americans are able to hold back the German assault just long enough. All hope seems lost. Captain Miller is mortally wounded, and he’s shooting at a tank with his pistol, and one of the shots results in a massive explosion. And then we see a P-51 fly over it, and they come out and take out the German tanks.

01:52:39:12 – 01:53:04:14
Dan LeFebvre
Other reinforcements arrive, and they push back. The rest of the German forces. But Captain Miller has been shot. Ryan makes it to him just before he dies and holding him close. Miller tells Ryan two words earn this. And then the movie takes us back to the beginning. We have the elderly man in the cemetery from the beginning of the movie, and this is when we find out it’s James Ryan.

01:53:04:16 – 01:53:29:00
Dan LeFebvre
He’s there with his family, visiting Captain Miller’s grave. He stand in front, says he never forgot what he said that day on the bridge, and we’re left with tears in her eyes as the movie comes to a close. Now, what I gathered from this was that James Ryan felt the pressure to live his life to the fullest, because he came home when so many did not.

01:53:29:03 – 01:53:45:23
Dan LeFebvre
Of course, in his case, it was a specific mission to save his life that cost the lives of others. Was this sort of survivor’s guilt that we see in the movie something common among veterans who managed to make it home after the D-Day invasion, when so many did not.

01:53:45:26 – 01:54:13:02
Marty Morgan
Make it was for my first and second books. I interviewed a couple of hundred D-Day veterans, almost all of whom are gone now. And they spoke to that right away. In addition to that, I was raised in a household by a Vietnam veteran and spent two years, two tours of duty in Vietnam, and he was traumatized. And I was raised by a man who obviously felt survivor’s guilt.

01:54:13:05 – 01:54:47:00
Marty Morgan
My father’s unit was attacked in Vietnam during the Tet Offensive at a place called coochie, right after my father had rotated out to go home. And his first sergeant, whom I’m named after, was killed. And, I saw the way that my my father felt guilt all the way until his life ended. And that guilt, I think, simultaneously tortured him and then admonished him to live the fullest possible life that he could.

01:54:47:03 – 01:54:56:17
Marty Morgan
And although he wasn’t a survivor of D-Day or the Second World War, I feel like the experience of combat between these conflicts is the same.

01:54:56:20 – 01:55:14:10
Dan LeFebvre
I’m not a member of the military. My dad was was in the Army, but, I think it’s just a great and great message. Overall, it still hit me even though I’m not in the military. It’s still hit me like, you know, live, live your life to the fullest because you never know.

01:55:14:12 – 01:55:33:07
Marty Morgan
You know, Dan, when that movie, when I saw the first time I watched it, Georgia. And when the credits rolled, I looked around and I was like, what the hell just happened in this theater? What I did when I went into that movie, that was not what I expected. I did expect an emotional drama. I did not expect the levels of authenticity.

01:55:33:07 – 01:55:59:17
Marty Morgan
Although they weren’t perfect, they were great. And I certainly didn’t expect a film where if you pay close attention to that movie, establishing shot number one as a waving American flag, it fades up from credits to the southern flagpole on the northern plughole at the Normandy American Cemetery. And when I saw that, my first thought was like waving American flag, what am what’s about to happen to me in this theater?

01:55:59:20 – 01:56:20:15
Marty Morgan
And then 2.5 hours later, I came out going, this is not what I expected because I felt like the movie Saving Private Ryan. Keep in mind the era, but my maybe I’m just unique in timing because my era of movie watching was the war movies that I got addicted to when I was young was stuff like Longest Day.

01:56:20:17 – 01:56:42:25
Marty Morgan
Stuff like Tor, Tora Bridge. Too far from an era when war movies were a bit different, but they were about to change. And then the movies that were new releases that dealt with World War Two subject matter. When movies like big Red won and then moved into the 1980s, and the movies that came out in the 1980s, really the one stand out World War two movie, the 1980s.

01:56:42:25 – 01:57:17:14
Marty Morgan
For me is Memphis Belle, and this Belle kind of I bleeds. It wasn’t celebratory, and romanticized in the way that Private Ryan was. I felt like Memphis Belle was a little bit of, a world War Two Vietnam movie. And of course, in the 80s, that’s when the big Vietnam movies were out, the biggest of them all, of course, platoon, which I argue established an overall narrative about the experience of Vietnam that is completely distorted and and not really factually accurate.

01:57:17:16 – 01:57:48:12
Marty Morgan
But regardless of what I think about these movies, these movies had a quality of, of of disenchantment and, and cynicism that you don’t see in the movie Saving Private Ryan. When I sat down in the theater before the credits, before the theater lights dimmed a bit, I, I was not expecting to go down the line of a movie that was going to be a little patriotic, a little triumphal.

01:57:48:14 – 01:58:17:06
Marty Morgan
I didn’t expect it to be quite as reflective. There are moments where it’s about as subtle as a barn door, but then there are moments where it’s pretty subtle and emotional. I did not expect the film that Steven Spielberg gave me, and it’s anything I feel like. Though the lasting popularity of Saving Private Ryan is because Steven Steven Spielberg did not give us a Vietnam movie that was set in World War Two.

01:58:17:08 – 01:58:33:14
Dan LeFebvre
I wasn’t expecting that either. The first time that I saw it, it was I wasn’t expecting it to be as emotional as it ended up being. I thought they did a great job of showing the human side.

01:58:33:17 – 01:58:54:25
Marty Morgan
It did, and I. I struggle with this because I, like every other historian out there, were a dime a dozen, and we all have added ideas of screenplays that we’re going to write and how we’re going to make the next Saving Private Ryan. And we’re going to be a responsible sport. And I, I often argue that it is not possible to match that, that achievement.

01:58:54:27 – 01:59:15:08
Marty Morgan
And here’s why I think it’s not possible. And I think it’s not possible because of Steven Spielberg. That movie happened because Steven Spielberg wanted to make that movie. And people didn’t tell Steven Spielberg how to make his movie. He made a movie he wanted to. So the man who brought us E.T. brought us the way the American flag and earned this.

01:59:15:10 – 01:59:27:29
Marty Morgan
And I don’t mean mentioned it to be negative or cynical. I mention it because he clearly makes movies that want to pull at your heart strings. And the movie Saving Private Ryan definitely did that.

01:59:28:01 – 01:59:53:03
Dan LeFebvre
Well, thank you so much for coming on to chat about Saving Private Ryan. I think one of the biggest takeaways that I’ve heard from people after seeing the movie and after our discussion, is just how it visualizes what it must have been like during D-Day. But that leads us right into an even better way to visualize D-Day with your book called D-Day A Photographic History of the Normandy Invasion.

01:59:53:05 – 01:59:58:06
Dan LeFebvre
Can you share a little bit of information about your book and where someone can pick up a copy?

01:59:58:08 – 02:00:24:03
Marty Morgan
Sure, yeah. The the book was released just early mid last year for just in time for the 75th anniversary of D-Day. It’s it features 450 photographs of the Normandy invasion. Something earlier some never been before. What I sought to do in the book was to bring, a greater level of specificity to captioning an explanation of where certain famous photographs were taken and what they depict.

02:00:24:05 – 02:00:45:27
Marty Morgan
I also do a little bit of then and now photography, and I do a little bit of storytelling in the book as well, and it was a compilation of my experiences of having conducted interviews with hundreds of D-Day veterans and spent a lot of time around the subject and spent a lot of time in Normandy. And, I’m just glad that it was rereleased in time for the 75th anniversary.

02:00:45:29 – 02:01:04:19
Marty Morgan
I think it is for the most part, the rerelease is for the most part sold out now, but I see that copies are available on Amazon. You can find it on there. The only Martin K Morgan that has published books on Amazon.com. And I hope that, somebody out there interested me, they might go buy it.

02:01:04:19 – 02:01:27:23
Marty Morgan
So that would mean that I have sold maybe at least two copies in 2020. I I’m proud of it. I like the book a lot. I, I look back on it as a positive moment. It didn’t really burn the world down in terms of reaching people, and it wasn’t a bestseller. But, the economics of publishing in the 21st century are pretty complicated, and I’m just glad to have a book out.

02:01:27:26 – 02:01:30:01
Dan LeFebvre
Thank you again so much for your time, Marty.

02:01:30:03 – 02:01:39:13
Marty Morgan
Well, it’s my pleasure. Thank you for the honor of inviting me to be a part of a discussion.