The Big Red One Trivia Quiz

Answer: The Sergeant

'The Sergeant' was deliberately nameless throughout the film. Director Sam Fuller said that Lee Marvin, who played the role, was, "cast right...a man who represented death - gaunt, bony. He was wise, he was experienced and he was cold."

Marvin was a combat veteran of WW2 himself, having served with the US Marines.

Answer: How the U.S. 1st Division got its unit badge

The 1st Division's distinctive unit badge - a large red number 1 against an olive green shield - was where its nickname, and the title for the film, originated. In the film, one of the several versions of how the 1st Division got its badge was related. 'The Sergeant' cut a strip of red cloth from the cap of a dead German soldier and suggested to his commanding officer that it could be worn on the shoulder to represent a number one.

The US Army's 1st Division was founded on 8 June, 1917. It incurred the US Army's first fatalities of WW1 and suffered 22,668 casualties in total during the conflict. Five of its soldiers were awarded the Medal of Honor during WW1.

Answer: The war was already over.

When 'The Sergeant' reported back to his captain after the patrol in 'No Man's Land', he discovered that the war had been over for four hours. He then realised too late that the German he had killed had been trying to surrender to him.

Charles Macauley, who played the captain in this scene, reappeared later in the film as the general commanding the 1st Division during WW2.

Answer: French

The story centred on the five-man core of a squad - 'The Sergeant' (Lee Marvin), Griff (Mark Hamill), Zab (Robert Carradine), Vinci (Bobby Di Cicco) and Johnson (Kelly Ward). Their baptism of fire was the 1st Division's assault on the beaches of Algeria in November 1942. The beaches were defended initially by Vichy French troops who were soon glad to surrender and join the Allies.

Answer: A testicle

The fate of Private Smitty (Howard Delman) provided an example of the soldiers' dark humour. He was gruffly consoled by 'The Sergeant', who told him, "You can live without it. That's why they gave you two."

Answer: True

The movie was made on quite a restricted budget of $4 million. Although Fuller lacked the financial and technical resources that were available to Spielberg, for example, in his depiction of the assault on Omaha Beach in 'Saving Private Ryan', the sequence was still powerful. The water was red with blood and time was measured by a watch on the wrist of a corpse floating in the tide.

Answer: A patient in an asylum

In this almost surreal scene, the resistance fighter distracted the German guards long enough for the squad to ambush the Germans and liberate the asylum. It was a tragi-comic scene, with many patients oblivious to the firefight raging around them.

Answer: Schroeder

Schroeder was played by Siegfried Rauch. The paths of 'The Sergeant' and himself collided at several key points in the film, both evading death at the hands of the other by a whisker. In a poetic ending, Schroeder was killed by 'The Sergeant' after the war's end - a grim echo of the film's prologue. This offered a bleak comment on the film's debate about how far war sanctions murder.

Answer: Inside a German tank

This occurred at the same location where 'The Sergeant' had been in WW1, the scene that was the setting for the prologue. After a fierce firefight in which the squad foiled a German ambush set up by Schroeder, a Frenchman arrived with his heavily pregnant wife. Johnson delivered her baby inside a knocked-out German tank, using condoms for gloves!

The juxtaposition of violent death and new life was heavily underlined.

Answer: In a death camp in Czechoslovakia

This grim, climactic scene was heavily based on Fuller's own experience, when soldiers of the 1st Division liberated Falkenau Concentration Camp in the Sudetenland. When Fuller arrived at the camp as a young lieutenant on 8 May 1945, there were only 60 inmates still alive.

It was here that the future movie-maker first used a film camera, capturing images of the local German civilians being marched into the camp to witness the atrocities that had been committed. Fuller's efforts were incorporated into a documentary by French film-maker Emil Weiss, called 'Falkenau, the Impossible'.

Falkenau is now renamed Sokolov and lies in the Czech Republic.