and that happens as a climax in the movie, and robert mitchum says, "let's go on up that hill," and it's like the cavalry to the rescue. guys from all over the beach start yelling like banshees and start moving up that draw. it's a great movie scene, but nothing remotely like that ever happened in fact. what happened in fact was, those ravines were much too well-defended to get up. the tanks that the infantry were told were going to be coming in with them, beside them -- these swimming tanks, these shermans that had the inflatable rubber skirts around them, 32 of the 35 of them sank. there was no way to get up the ravines, and the true story of what happened at omaha was much more inspiring than the way daryl zanuck presented it. the true story is, junior officers and noncoms who had been college students two years before and had rotc commissions pinned down at that sea wall and couldn't retreat, couldn't go back -- it was just chaos back behind them -- couldn't, as the plan called for, go up the draws. they were getting butchered where they were all the sea wall because the germans had