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and not typical of the invasion as a whole. Overall, D- Day was no walk- over but
the operation’s 3,000 fatalities were far fewer than the 10,000 anticipated. Military
historian Antony Beevor (D- Day: The Battle for Normandy) points out that the “real
fighting and the real casualties came in the Battle of Normandy” further inland, in
the weeks following D- Day (Carey, 2009). Other aspects of the D- Day sequence
are not wrong but also tend to be misleading. Front and side view following shots
of the Higgins Boats approaching the shore show lots of open water right to the
horizon. The D- Day naval operation, code- named Operation Neptune, involved
history’s largest armada: 6,939 vessels (including 4,126 landing craft); any view
toward the sea that day would have disclosed myriad ships and boats as far as the
eye could see. At 23 minutes running time, the movie’s Omaha Beach segment
also suggests that the American breakout from the beach occurred quite quickly.
In real ity, it took U.S. troops, aided by further naval bombardment not depicted in
the film, some four hours to capture frontline German positions and get clear of
the beach. Even then, Omaha wasn’t entirely secure until the early after noon of
6 June— more than seven hours after the first wave landed. During the battle at the
fictive town of Ramelle, the film wrongly depicts the 2nd SS Panzer Division in
the vicinity of Normandy just days after the landings; it was not. Also, the movie’s
final battle is rife with unlikely tactical errors for an elite German unit (e.g., sending
in armor ahead of ground troops). Fi nally, in a broader sense, Saving Private Ryan
implicitly reiterates the popu lar but erroneous American notion that the United
States almost singlehandedly won the war against Hitler’s Germany and that D- Day
was the decisive turning point. In point of fact, it was the Soviet Union, not the
Western Allies that defeated Hitler’s war machine (and lost 8.7 million soldiers and
17.9 million civilians in the pro cess). By June 1944, Germany had already been
militarily beaten by the Red Army, was in steady retreat on the Eastern Front, and
was about to suffer a military catastrophe far greater than D- Day: the total destruc-
tion of the Wehrmacht’s Army Group Center during Operation Bagration (22
June–19 August 1944), the Soviet strategic offensive that liberated Belorus sia and
cleared a path for Berlin.
Schindler’s List (1993)
Synopsis
Schindler’s List is an American historical epic scripted by Steven Zaillian and directed
and co- produced by Steven Spielberg. Based on Schindler’s Ark (1982) by Austra-
lian novelist Thomas Keneally, the film tells the story of Oskar Schindler, a Ger-
man business professional who protected over 1,000 mostly Polish Jewish refugees
from certain death during the Holocaust by giving them jobs in his factories dur-
ing World War II. It stars Liam Neeson as Schindler, Ralph Fiennes as SS officer
Amon Göth, and Ben Kingsley as Schindler’s accountant, Itzhak Stern.
Background
Leopold Page (real name: Leopold “Poldek” Pfefferberg, 1913–2001), a Polish Amer-
ican Holocaust survivor who ran a small Beverly Hills leather goods store, was one