Interesting, just yesterday I watched this clip on Youtube as it's one of my favorite movies. And I posted this comment there:

I have heard several times that the large send-off meal hampered some of the soldiers by making their sea-sickness worse. But how accurate is that, as they had the big meal on the previous day. Then the invasion was delayed by a day due to bad weather and the cooks had to scrounge what they could to provide another day of meals for all those men. So this "last meal" making things worse for those in the landing craft seems to be a myth.

Spielberg is a master storyteller, he's not a documentary filmmaker.

That's why we were given Ken Burns.

Several things always bugged me about the scene where they rush the MG 42, although I know that Spielberg had to have this scene the way it is to move the story along. Capt Miler assigns somebody to rush right, he takes the middle then waits for someone to volunteer to go left. And gets irritated when nobody volunteers, why not just order someone like he did on the right side? And then they have their only medic as part of the assault team. And why not have Jackson the sniper pick off the MG 42 crew? No doubt because his sniper skills already were the focus of two previous scenes. The MG 42 scene provided a turning point in the movie but the logic always irritated me.

And there always seems to be a perfectly intact piano in the street in WWII Europe, Saving Private Ryan, Band of Brothers, and Fury all had one.

"Defilade, other side of the hole!"

I had no idea about those two Czech men. What a great detail, and all the more potent considering some ignoramus like myself will only learn of it from watching a youtube video years later despite watching that scene 3 or 4 times.

It never made sense why the Allies couldn't just send along radio messages to all units on the front saying "If you have a pvt Ryan in your vicinity, send message back and don't let him die." Then they would at least know where to send the evac team.