page_title: Fury (2014 film)
section_title: Portrayal of history
hierarchical_section_title: Fury (2014 film) / Portrayal of history
caption_attribution_description: English: 1943 map of Hannover, Germany published by the Great Britain War Office during World War II.
context_page_description: Fury is a 2014 American war film written and directed by David Ayer, and starring Brad Pitt, Shia LaBeouf, Logan Lerman, Michael Peña, Jon Bernthal, Jason Isaacs and Scott Eastwood. The film portrays U.S. tank crews fighting in Nazi Germany during the final weeks of the European theater of World War II. Ayer was influenced by the service of veterans in his family and by reading books, such as Belton Y. Cooper's Death Traps, about American armored units in World War II and the high casualty rates suffered by tank crews in Europe.
  Production began in early September 2013, in Hertfordshire, England, followed by principal photography on September 30, 2013, in Oxfordshire. Filming continued for a month-and-a-half at different locations, which included the city of Oxford, and concluded on November 13. Fury was released on October 17, 2014, received positive reviews, and grossed $211 million worldwide.
context_section_description: Fury is a film about a fictional tank crew during the final days of the war in Europe. Ayer was influenced by the service of veterans in his family and by reading books such as Belton Y. Cooper's Death Traps, about American armored warfare in World War II. Ayer went to considerable lengths to seek authentic uniforms and weapons appropriate to the period of the final months of the war in Europe. A seed for this movie may be found in the heroic saga of Ernest R. Kouma, a sergeant of a tank battalion, with his single-handed battle during the Second Battle of Naktong Bulge in August 1950 soon after the outbreak of the Korean War by the Communist North Korean invasion.
  The film was shot in the United Kingdom, in large part due to the availability of working World War II-era tanks. The film featured Tiger 131, the last surviving operational Tiger I, owned by The Tank Museum at Bovington, England. It is the first time since the film They Were Not Divided (1950) that a real Tiger tank, rather than a prop version, has been used on a film set. Tiger 131 is a very early model Tiger I tank; externally it has some significant differences from later Tiger I models. In the last weeks of the war, a number of these early model Tigers were used in last ditch defense efforts; one of Germany's last Tigers to be lost at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin was of a similar vintage.
  Ten working M4 Sherman tanks were used. The Sherman tank Fury was played by an M4A2 Sherman tank named RON/HARRY (T224875), also lent by The Tank Museum.
  Ayer's attention to detail also extended to the maps used in the film. A 1943 wartime map of Hannover, Germany, held in McMaster University's Lloyd Reeds Map Collection, was used to demonstrate the types of resources relied on by Allied forces.
  While the storyline is fictional, the depiction of Fury and its commander Wardaddy parallels the experience of several real Allied tankers, such as the American tank commander Staff Sergeant Lafayette G. "War Daddy" Pool, who landed just after D-Day and destroyed 258 enemy vehicles before his tank was knocked out in Germany in late 1944, and the small number of Sherman tanks to survive from the landing at D-Day to the end of the war, such as Bomb, a Sherman tank that landed at D-Day and survived into the bitter fighting in Germany at the war's end, the only Canadian Sherman tank to survive the fighting from D-Day to VE Day. The plot also has some similarities to the battle of Crailsheim, fought in Germany in 1945. The last stand of the crew of the disabled Fury appears to be based on an anecdote from Death Traps, wherein a lone tanker was "in his tank on a road junction" when a "German infantry unit approached, apparently not spotting the tank in the darkness". This unnamed tanker is described to have ricocheted shells into the enemy forces, fired all of his machine gun ammunition, and thrown grenades to kill German soldiers climbing onto the tank. Cooper concluded: "When our infantry arrived the next day, they found the brave young tanker still alive in his tank. The entire surrounding area was littered with German dead and wounded." The battle bears some resemblance to that of Medal of Honor recipient Audie Murphy aboard a burning M10 tank destroyer outside Holtzwihr in Alsace-Lorraine, on January 26, 1945. The fighting in the film also bears similarity to the film Sahara (1943), starring Humphrey Bogart, in which the crew of an M3 Lee named "Lulu Belle" and a contingent of stranded British soldiers defend a remote well in Libya against a larger German force of the Afrika Korps, to the demise of most of the Allies.
caption: Map of Hannover, Germany used in the film.
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