War has played a key role in the history of the United States, from the nation's founding

right down to the present. War made the U.S. independent, kept it together, increased its

size, and established it as a global superpower. Understanding America's wars is essential for understanding American history.

Welcome to Key Battles of American History,

a podcast in which we discuss American history through the lens of the most important battles of America's wars.

Here is your host, James Early.

Thank you. your host, James Early. Hello and welcome to another episode of key films of World War II in Europe.

This is your host, James Early, as always.

Now, at our last battle episode, we talked about Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the

Soviet Union. We don't really have a movie to go with that one. I'm sure there's one somewhere.

I'm sure there's a Russian movie or a German movie or something, but at least among ones that

were easy to find and that we've seen, we haven't yet found one. So we're going to put in a movie that

actually has nothing to do with Operation Barbarossa, but it kind of goes through the whole war.

And this is the 1980 movie called The Big Red One. This actually is a movie that before

Sean and I started putting together our list of movies we wanted to talk about. I had,

not only had I'd never seen this one, I'd never even heard of it. I do not remember this.

I remember 1980 very well. I remember a lot of things that happened in 1980. I remember

movies that came out that year, but I do not remember the Big Red One. But anyway, some of our

listeners, Sean may be saying, gee, how could you not know about the big red one?

But there's a lot of things I don't know about I haven't ever heard of.

But anyway, we talk about the basics, some of the just absolute basic information about the movie like I usually do.

And then I'll hand it over to Sean to give us some of the background and production and things like that.

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