The premise of “Saving Private Ryan” is that three out of four brothers from one family are killed nearly simultaneously during WWII; a group of soldiers are sent to get the fourth brother and bring him home so as to spare his family any more hardship. This is not so easy, though, as that brother, Pvt. Ryan, is deep in combat. Five or six guys (I don’t remember exactly and the Wikipedia plot summary is unclear) die in the attempt, though they’re ultimately successful.
So what do you think - was the mission worthwhile? Or would the soldiers have been put to better use doing their small part to end the war faster rather than tracking down one man?
ETA: Bonus question related to Steven Spielberg movies set during World Wars: Towards the end of “War Horse” we see a trench hospital. Someone runs over to a doctor and tells him that a horse is hurt and needs his attention. The doctor - very rightly, in my opinion - says he’s too busy trying to save HUMAN lives to worry about a horse, but the guy insists that this horse is special and he should come right away. The doctor goes.
This scene infuriated me. Does anyone really think it’s okay for a military doctor to leave wounded men during a battle to take a look at a horse? If my memory of how that scene played out is not accurate (I only saw the movie once), someone please correct me.
In Private Ryan, the story is plausable. A distraught parent knows personally or writes an impassioned letter to a congressman appealing for his help to bring the last living child home. Congressman, who happens to be on the right war committee, is up for re-election and sees this as good publicity. So he makes it happen through his chain of contacts with the military command.
The horse thing… completely implausable. Maybe it should have been called, “Saving Black Beauty”.
The plausibility I don’t doubt; it’s the morality/worthwhileness I wonder about. Six guys died trying to save this one guy and their efforts were not directly in the pursuit of defeating the enemy and ending the war. (You could, I suppose, make a case that it was an important mission in terms of national morale/propaganda victory, which would itself help end the war.) I’m conflicted about it.
Pragmatically, no. There was nothing special about Private Ryan so far as the war was concerned – it’s not as though they were saving some great strategist or someone the war effort needed. Morally, I can’t agree that it’s proper to save one parent pain by spreading it among six other parents. From a propaganda standpoint, I doubt anyone learning that someone lost all their sons to the war would elicit more than a “that poor woman”. It’s not as though the country would suddenly swing against the war.
Of course, all that said, I recognize that wars are fought by people and we sometimes base our decisions on non-rational emotions. If I was making the choice to pull the guy out, I might have done the same. Just because it doesn’t work on paper doesn’t mean people won’t think it’s worth it.
They did kill some enemy combatants in the effort to find and bring back this one guy. If this one guy was trapped behind enemy lines but not yet taken prisoner, a detachement of men would likely be assigned (even volunteer) to rescue him, putting all at risk for one guy. So not so unusual of a scenario in that respect and in many ways the mission seemed much less hazardous. Especially from the point of view of a bureaucrat who ordered it.
Just down the road from me in my little village in England there is a small monument to 4 four brothers killed in the war. I can only imagine there were many more families around the world who suffered the same horrific loss which makes me think there must have been some underlying morale or propaganda reasons.
First off - fiction, although probably loosely based on some real life regulations/incidents (the Sullivan brothers in the Navy(?) come somewhat to mind).
Second, as I remember the movie - this was kicked off by some clerk noticing multiple notices going out to Mrs Ryan. It keeps getting kicked up the chain by compassionate people until it finally hits a general who can do something about it. In the real world, it could have happened - but also at any point in that chain, someone could have said “life is hard” and not passed it on. In which case Matt Damon may or may not die, but I think Vin Diesel and Tom Hanks odds of surviving go up.
Just a reminder that the movie is loosely based on the Niland brothers, where after 3 of the brothers were killed (though it turned out one had only been captured), the 4th & youngest was pulled out of combat and sent back to the USA. Pretty much as described in the movie - 2 brothers died on D-day, 3rd in the Pacific, and the survivor was in the 101st Airborne. No rescue mission though.
I realise that and I too have heard that the film was based loosely on the Sullivan brothers. My point is that were probably many families who suffered the same losses and this film brought that point home very well. I for one looked at that marker in my village differently after I saw the film the first time.
Yes and probably every one of those people in that chain saw it for the inherent morale/propaganda qualities.
Going with a virtue ethics approach: I think it would be immoral for an army to wage a war on an “anything for victory” principle. That path leads to condoning acts which are unpalatable just because they advance the cause in some sense, and probably to defending acts which are both evil and unnecessary using the “anything for victory” as an excuse.
So the fact that the mission was based on compassion rather than war goals doesn’t make it wrong. Even if it took skilled soldiers away from the war goals (actually slowing down victory) that still doesn’t make it wrong.
What about asking the soldiers to risk their lives to save someone else? The deal with joining the army normally is not “we’ll only make you risk your lives in defence of the USA”. Soldiers get asked to risk their lives for all sorts of things, many of them humanitarian and many where the good they achieve is less than the risk they undergo.
WWII was special though. Most of those soldiers did enter into a bargain putting their lives on hold and at risk for the specific purpose of ending the war. They were asked to do something different.
So my opinion: There was nothing wrong with the mission. Ordering those soldiers to undertake it was morally questionable, because it broke the deal between those soldiers and the state. The same mission with volunteers, or with career soldiers, would have been fine.
I Think what’s overlooked in this conversation is the fact that the rescuers weren’t necessarily directed to head into combat or avoid it. Everybody on the Western front after D-Day was subject to the possibility of heavy combat situations. It came with the situation and the territory.
So while men lost their lives searching and rescuing private Ryan they might just as possibly died in some other combat situation.
The troops were all there to engage the enemy and defeat them. The fact that this group’s assigned mission was to recover one soldier didn’t exclude them from the danger and duty they had to fight the enemy.
It’s plausible enough. No individual decision in the scenario seems unrealistic. Pulling the last remaining brother out of combat actually happened, and implementing the order to do so never expected all the complications that make up the movie’s story.
The film’s theme is the question of whether the mission is “worth it,” even demanding Pvt Ryan make sure it ultimately was. Without sending the squad on the mission, you have no movie and the “worth it” question is entirely hypothetical. I’m OK with a little handwaving and slapping logic around a little during the setup.
As for the horse: he’s the protagonist of the story and a standin for the audience, of course the doctor is going to attend to him. It might have been better to leave out the part where said doctor leaves human patients and just simply show up.
Th “no rescue mission” part matters. The movie ripped my heart out. It played me like a Stradivarius. That first half hour could not have been more powerful. But I knew it was pure hokum - all the way through the last words of Tom Hanks’ character, speaking from “the Greatest Generation” to the Boomers: “Earn this.”
Taking the Niland story and adding the rescue mission was “something the Greatest Generation would do for Boomers” - which is what Spielberg was in the business of trying to make us feel. Looking at it for reality or ethical correctness is not the point…
Again, though, the plausibility is not really the question here - what I’m wondering about is the morality of it.
It would have been WAY better not to show the doctor leaving human patients. That scene practically ruined the whole movie for me. (Of course, I don’t care much about horses anyway.)
Yes, they might have died in some other combat situation, but might it have “meant more” if they had died in actively trying to defeat the enemy/liberate Europe rather than tracking down one guy?
Part of what got me thinking about this is the whole debate of Sgt. Bergdahl and the soldiers who died looking for him. Those soldiers may just as easily have died while hunting down Taliban, but the idea that they may have died while looking for someone who might have deserted has angered some people. The scenario in “Saving Private Ryan” is different of course, but it did get me thinking about how and why people die in combat.
And of course, as it turned out, Miller and his squad probably did more towards “winning the war” than any other squad in France. They helped take out the German command post in the first town they came too (in the Ted Danson scene), took at the machine gun nest at the radar outpost, and most importantly, held onto the only armor capable bridge left over the Merderet until the P-51s showed up. Heck, they all should have gotten medals for that battle.
I didn’t really buy they were being wasted, since they were killing Nazis by the truckload, taking out snipers and machine gun nests and eventually (though they couldn’t have predicted this) defending the bridge. If they were used in more conventional missions they could have died to sniper and machine gun fire just as easily.
Sure, but the point there was to defeat the enemy or engaging in missions connected to the same goal.
That’s kind of the point. They were being put into circumstances where they were engaging the enemy “pointlessly”. They had a goal, of course, but it wasn’t a goal that was driving the overall war effort forward. If you’re going to send guys out to get shot at, it should be with the intent of reaching your war objectives.
Edit: Agreed that within the context of the film, they did a bunch of good stuff for the war effort. None of that was intended by the mission. You could have just as easily told a group of guys “Go wander around the French countryside and see what happens” and see if they take out command posts and defend bridges but no one would say that’s a good use of their time.
How I feel about that movie can best be summed up in a song by Harry McClintock(the singer that popularized “The Big Rock Candy Mountain”), called “The Trusty Lariat”.
Working backwards, I remember a sequence from A Bridge Too Far in which James Caan finds a badly wounded officer, puts him in his jeep, drives back to a medical centre - he dodges past some Germans - and I think it was only included to give James Caan something to do. He ends up holding a surgeon at gunpoint, forcing him to look at the wounded officer, who (it turns out) isn’t as dead as the surgeon thought.
It’s presented as an act of great heroism but it comes across as a complete waste of time; it doesn’t have anything to do with the book and I assume in real life his character would have had the book thrown at him.
As for Saving Private Ryan, I’ve always thought that the high command assumed the mission would be trivially easy, and that the reassignment of six men to a fairly pointless task was accepted as an insignificant drain on the Allied front. Tom Hanks’ character wasn’t pissed off that his squad was being sent to certain death, he was pissed off because he was being wasted. And that ultimately he found a way to make it worthwhile, albeit that it got most of his squad killed.
I would put it on a par with real-life WW2 propaganda films such as In Which We Serve, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo and so forth, that were filmed during the war and used actual military hardware, with soldiers and airmen as background extras; I imagine there was a certain amount of irritation that they were being used as propaganda - worse, being used to make money for Warner Brothers and Pathé - rather than actually fighting in the war. I remember the Germans spent a fortune on Kolberg, an epic historical war film shot in 1943 and 1944, that used thousands of soldiers as extras and cost the same as something like three Type VIII U-boats or a hundred BF-109s.
Ultimately if it persuaded people to buy enough war bonds to pay for a couple of P-51s, or pay the wages of six soldiers for a year, it would have been worthwhile.