Goofs

At 1:23:18 of the film, there's a wide angle shot that shows the men crossing a field. There are eight men in the field, but Caparzo is dead; there should be seven men. There are only seven men after the cut, when they assemble seconds later in the trench before they encounter the radar station.

When Pvt. Jackson is in the tower at Neuville he fires seven or more shots without reloading. His rifle, the Springlfield 1903, only holds five rounds.

When discovering that 3 of the 4 brothers were killed, it's stated that they were all in the same company until they were split after the Juneau was sunk. We also see a few shots later when the Army car is pulling up to the mother's house that there is a picture of all 4 of them together in uniform. When Miller and Ryan are talking about Ryan's memory of his brother towards the end of the movie, he states that the last time the 4 of them were together was the night of the barn accident before Dan went to basic.

When the soldier attempts to place the first sticky bomb on the tank, he is wearing the khaki uniform. However, when he explodes, the dummy is dressed in olive drab, and standing in the wrong position.

When the man is explaining the situation of the four brothers to the General, he says that the brothers had been together but were separated when the Sullivan brothers died. Later, when Matt Damon is improvising Ryan's memory to Miller, he says that night was the last he and his brothers were together.

The driver's viewport on a Tiger I featured 6 layers of armored glass, as well as another sheet just behind them. These systems would have prevented Captain Miller from simply sticking his submachine gun up to the port and spraying the inside of the driver's compartment with bullets.

In the scene where Jackson is firing from the bell tower, he fires 8 shots. The standard Springfield sniper rifle could only hold a maximum of 5 rounds. Jackson never reloads, and if he did, he would have had to take quite a bit of time as each round had to be inserted one at a time, due to the scope being in the way, the rounds could not be inserted using a stripper clip.

Several flamethrower troops are depicted as being easily set on fire or exploding when their fuel tanks are hit by enemy fire. This is a common misconception. Instructors would actually shoot at the tanks repeatedly to show new recruits that the flamethrower wasn't a danger to its operator. Medal of Honor recipient Hershel "Woody" Williams actually crawled up the beach at Iwo Jima with Japanese bullets harmlessly bouncing off his flamethrower tanks.

In the Omaha landing, two soldiers are struggling with their equipment underwater, only to get hit by enemy bullets. It has been proven that rifle caliber bullets can not pass through water with lethal force at an angle.

At the end, the elder James Ryan is facing the camera with the channel in the background. Ryan's wife approaches, reads the name on the marker. The way the shot is set up, Ryan is facing West, which means the name on the marker faces east. This is wrong: all names at Colleville-sur-Mer American Cemetery face west towards home.

As the squad travels at night, the flashes and sounds of far distant explosions are seen and heard roughly simultaneously. (The sound of an explosion a mile away should be heard some 5 seconds after the flash is seen.) The key is the word "roughly"; there are so many explosions that we may well be hearing one explosion around the time we see the next.

The waterproof bags holding rifles on D-Day were indeed some kind of clear plastic.

When Miller's squad first enters the town of Neuville, Jackson's rifle has a short scope. When the squad comes under fire from the German sniper, Jackson now has much longer, narrower scope attached to his rifle. However, if you watch carefully, you will notice that for the entire movie so far, Jackson has been carrying a large cylindrical canister on his back, which contains the longer scope. In the town when he says "I wouldn't venture out there fellas, this snipers got talent" you can see him reaching behind him and opening the canister. In the next shot it shows him removing the small scope from the rifle and mounting the longer scope.

General George C. Marshall is wearing General Staff lapel insignia. This is correct; there are photographs of him wearing these insignia.

In the beginning of the movie when attacking the German pillbox. The Germans are running out of the pill box there are no muzzle flashes seen from the American rifles, though they fire several rounds, and the rifles seem to recoil as if fired. This is not necessarily incorrect. Contrary to what movies almost invariable show, not every shot from every weapon produces a noticeable muzzle flash. A modern rifle (such as the World War II M1) with appropriate ammunition, will not normally have a flash.

In the final battle scenes the P-51's are supposed to be tank busters but none of them have any rockets, bombs or even bomb racks attached to their wings.

When Capt. Miller is firing his M1911 pistol at the advancing German tank on the bridge, after his second shot, the slide locks halfway open, indicating a stovepipe or similar jam, but he continues firing without clearing it.

The actor playing the part of the deaf soldier knowing Private Ryan appears to be the same as the screaming wounded soldier with the gaping shoulder injury being worked on by the medic on Omaha beach.

After the radar site battle, Capt Miller's men are roughing up a surviving German soldier and pull their weapons in preparation to shoot the soldier. Pvt. Jackson is armed with a 1911 semi-automatic pistol; he removes the magazine to check it, and it is clearly empty of cartridges. He reinserts it rather than replacing it with a loaded magazine.

Several times when Corporal Upham is seen carrying .30 caliber ammunition belts just prior to and during the holding of the bridge scene, it appears that primers are missing. A closeup of Upham after he crosses the street to go up the stairs shows many of the cartridges on his right shoulder to have empty primer pockets. The shiny brass bottoms of the empty pockets are clearly visible on eight of them in a row. Most of the rest of the cartridges appear to have a white substance filling or covering the pockets.

The "Clear up/Clear down" call was not in use during the Second World War.

Some of the paratroopers are shown wearing black jump boots. All Army paratroopers in WWII were issued brown jump boots. The Army didn't start using black leather for boots until the 1950s.

The "shaven" haircuts of the German soldiers in the movie are not typical of the day. The hair styles were usually longer on top and shaved on the side.

P-51s at end of movie have black and white checkered pattern on nose showing them to be from the 78th Fighter Group. This group did not receive P-51s until the end of 1944.

When the Captain in charge of the typing pool brings the three Ryan telegrams to his Colonel, the map behind the Colonel is a Mercator Projection of the world, split at the International Date Line. Mercator Projections in 1944 would have placed North America in the center and divided the Eurasian continent equally on both sides. The decision to split the map at the International Date line wasn't officially made until the National Geographic Society decreed it in 1988.

When the Americans are defending the bridge, there's a scene where the guy with the M1 carbine is shooting his rifle. When he shoots the last round, his rifle "pings". Only the M1 Garand "pings".

During the Ramelle battle, Cpl. Henderson and Pvt. Mellish are firing through a hole in the wall of a room at advancing German soldiers. After Henderson fires through the wall, then returning fire hits him, Mellish fires two shots through the wall before charging the German soldier in the doorway. There is no sound for his first shot.

During the battle of Ramelle, Private Jackson aims his rifle (at his own men) and although a gunshot sound effect is heard, his rifle does not recoil or flash.

In one scene, Miller, Ryan and Reiben are firing their weapons at the German 20mm cannon; the first shot of this shows an over the shoulder view from Captain Miller. Miller's Thompson briefly has the sound of Reiben's BAR. Likewise, when the shot cuts to Reiben firing a single shot from his BAR, it is given the sound of a burst from Captain Miller's Thompson.

On the beach, a soldier with a B.A.R. puts his arm around Captain Miller's neck and says they don't have a chance. His line carries over to the next shot of Miller unwrapping his Thompson, but we can see that soldier behind Miller, and he's not talking.

During the final battle at the bridge, right after Sgt. Horvath fires the bazooka for the last time he starts to run across the bridge with the bazooka. In the bottom right corner, for a second you can see the camera operator and a man in a white shirt helping him.

When Reiben, Ryan, and Miller are in the ditch a side angle shows them all on the same frame, if you look carefully to the right and behind some rubble, a blue tent is visible which is revealed in the special features to be the tent that dailies are viewed.

When Hanks, Damon and company are retreating to the Alamo (across the bridge) the camera pans an overview shot of their retreating and you can see two crew members in the shot - one holding a camera and another supporting member, both wearing white tee shirts on the right part of the screen.

In the field scene (before they meet the German APC), we can see the camera's square shadow on Corporal Upham's shoulder.

After the squad reaches the crashed glider and Miller is shouting Ryan's name, the extras for the scene are visible to the left, being held back and sent in on cue to form the column of airborne soldiers

In the opening scene, where James Ryan and his family are walking along the clifftop path at the Normandy American Cemetery, the beach and English Channel are to the left, so they are walking from west to east. The entrance to the cemetery is at the east end of the cemetery, so they are walking toward it. Mr. Ryan goes straight to the grave he is looking for and falls to his knees, so he must have gotten the location at the visitor's center at the entrance. If he knew where the grave was, and wasn't just wandering around the cemetery and coming back to it, he would have approached the grave from the east, and the beach and channel would have been to the family's right as they were walking along the path.

If the oldest Ryan boy was the last to go off to boot camp, as related in James' story in Ramelle, then there was no way the 4 of the Ryan boys could have posed in uniforms for the photograph that was sitting on the shelf/furniture to the right of the door at their house, shown when their mother went to the door to meet the man from the War Dept. and the local minister. James said that night in the barn was the last time they were all together.

Neuville, where the Miller squad is headed to try to save Private Ryan, is to the west of Omaha Beach, and just a few miles inland from Utah Beach. The Army would have been extremely unlikely to send troops from Omaha Beach in the opposite direction from the direction in which the troops were advancing. Moreover, Carentan, a city between Omaha and Utah Beaches, was still in German hands at the time, and it would have been very difficult for the squad to get past it without going much farther inland or swimming. The battle for Carentan didn't end until 15 June...three days after the final battle depicted in the movie. Any squad going to "save Private Ryan" would more likely have been assembled from troops who had landed on Utah Beach...if such a squad would have been assembled at all. It would have been far more logical (if less dramatic) just to put the word out among the troops to try to find Private Ryan as they found each other after the air-drop errors, and advanced inland.

The US Army would never have allowed such a mission during World War II.

In addition to the mistake of reversing the sign/countersign of "Flash/Thunder," the American soldiers are also using it on the wrong day: "Flash/Thunder" was to be used only on D-Day, then changed on a daily basis according to a memorized list.

When Cpt. Miller picks up Cpl. Upham in the beginning of the movie, Upham says his German "is clean" and had "a touch of the Bavarian". But actually there's nothing like a Bavarian accent in Upham speaking German. Though he speaks it very well and he certainly does not have a strong American accent (judging by the few lines he says in German), you can definitely hear that it is not his mother tongue.

Before the last battle, the squad is listening to an Édith Piaf song "Tu es Partout", and Upham seems to be translating the song as she is singing it. But the translation he gives is from a later part in the song, one we don't get to hear.

As Jackson makes a run for the ditch to take out the machine gunner, he clearly passes the wall, in the next shot though he is still leaning against the wall.

Pvt. Ryan incorrectly regarded the P-51 "Mustang" as Tank Busters, P-51 Mustangs are not effective at attacking ground targets as it is designed to counter enemy aircraft.

Another aircraft referred to as the P-47 "Thunderbolt", should have been more accurately been referred as a "Tank Buster" as it is designed to destroy enemy vehicles, including "Hard Skinned" German Panzers.