It’s one of the greatest war films ever made and has been hailed for its historical accuracy, yet Saving Private Ryan didn’t get everything right about the British involvement in D-Day.
World War II historian Philip Kay-Bujak has penned a new book about a part of Omaha Beach called Dog Green Beach, which is on the extreme left of where Steven Spielberg set the opening scene of his film.
In Empire Javelin, D-Day Assault Ship: The Royal Navy vessel that landed the US 116th Infantry on Omaha Beach, the author challenged the Hollywood director’s assertion that there was no British involvement in the part of Operation Overlord.
The historian has shared a couple of crucial mistakes in Saving Private Ryan’s opening sequence.
Kay-Bujak shared: “Despite Spielberg’s insistence that there were no British troops on Omaha Beach, he was wrong. All the landing craft were manned by British sailors who took the US troops into battle in the first waves. The Empire Javelin was manned by the Royal Navy and had a crew of over 200 that day. There are a lot of families that I know who are upset that their fathers of grandfathers have been forgotten. They did some very brave things.”
The historian added: “Secondly, no one seems to have noticed yet that the US Troops from the Empire Javelin landed from British landing craft. This may not seem important to us, but the British boats were narrower than the American Higgins boats and only one man at a time could get off – the Americans complained bitterly about this – in my view a major reason why the casualties were so high. This was on only on Dog Green Beach but it was Dog Green that had the highest casualties on the whole of Omaha.”