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

Now this week, I'm excited to bring to you one of the most classic, one of the most epic

World War II movies ever made, and that is the most classic, one of the most epic World War II movies ever made.

And that is the 1962 classic, the longest day. I know I'm going to use the word

classic a million times, but it just doesn't get much more classic than this one. So, as always,

I'll kind of set the stage and then I'll hand it over to Sean. And this movie has so much

cool backstory and so many

neat stories behind the story that we're not going to give you every single one but we're

going to give you some of the most interesting ones but before that let's talk about the basic

data about the movie the length is two hours and 58 minutes so almost three hours this is

the longest movie about the longest day i don't know is saving private Ryan isn't it almost three hours. This is the longest movie about the longest day. I don't know, is saving

Private Ryan, isn't it about three hours too, Sean? Yeah, yeah, it's pretty long. I think it's

long, too. Yes, you know, we're going to do Saving Private Ryan later, of course. You can't not do

that movie in a series like this. We'll talk about it a little in this episode just by comparison,

but not much. We want to save that for its own episode.

Yeah. Rotten Tomatoes, average positive rating of 87% by the critics and 90% by the fans.

...