Saving Private Ryan

Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan traces the lives of a group of hastily assembled World War II soldiers, charged with the task of bringing home a fellow serviceman whose two brothers have been killed in action. The film’s protagonist, Company Captain John Miller, assembles the group after participating in the D-Day Normandy Invasion, at which point he is ordered to rescue Private James Ryan from behind enemy lines. Throughout the film, the sacrifices made by these men on behalf of their country and Western Civilization are revealed and praised.

We eventually learn that Captain Miller is an ordinary schoolteacher who left his job in order to guide younger, less experienced soldiers through wartime hostilities. The fact that a teacher of children could pick up and leave his job to go fight a war illustrates the sheer degree of the extraordinary sacrifices made by servicemen who put their lives and families on hold in order to ensure their futures, in addition to those of so many others, both born and unborn. Sadly, the experiences of such soldiers during wartime fundamentally altered their lives in exposing them to some of the most horrific and gruesome atrocities in modern history. Many of these men were unable to full re-adjust to life upon their return from service as a result of having witnessed these atrocities, which were unique in that they had never before been witnessed by human eyes.

The nature of warfare during World War II was decidedly in flux. World War I had thrust upon the world the use of mechanical machines as a means of waging war. Prior to World War I, flying apparatus and semi-automatic weaponry were extremely rare to find in active combat zones. After World War I, warfare emerged as fully mechanized and, as such, the men who fought World War II were subjected to even greater risks than were those who fought in any previous war. For example, the M3 Submachine Gun was adopted by the U.S. Military in 1942 and was far more accurate and convenient to use than any other gun preceding it. The M3 or “greaser” was capable of discharging multiple rounds in succession, thus exposing troop to far more risk of being hit than ever before. In addition, the Thompson submachine gun or “Tommy Gun” carried by Captain Miller in the film had been previously employed primarily by Prohibition-era crime syndicates since its invention in 1918. World War II, however, required that the weapon be brought to bear in armed combat and, as a result, far more lives were gruesomely lost than would otherwise have been.

Ultimately, the men who fought World War II made sacrifices of the kind that most men today would not make. They left their families and homes to fight for an enduring peace on behalf of the past, present and future. In so doing, they risked exposure to more physical harm than had ever before been faced by participants in wartime. In Saving Private Ryan, the sheer extent to which American G.I.’s were so exposed is revealed on screen, as the daring Normandy beach landing of D-Day is depicted in gruesome though realistic detail. For the first time in the history of modern warfare, ordinary men were witness to horrific injury of the kind never before inflicted; hunkering down beneath the bullet barrages, American servicemen watched their fellows hacked into pieces by semi-automatic gunfire, but nevertheless proceeded forward to take Normandy, after which they facilitated the Russian advance into occupied Nazi territory. Were it not for these men, we would not live so comfortably under the blanket of freedom that we today take for granted?

Work Cited

Saving Private Ryan. Dir. Steven Spielberg. Perf. Matt Damon, Tom Hanks, Tom Sizemore. DreamWorks Pictures, 1998. Film.