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the 1955 movie "To Hell and Back" staring Audie Murphy. Unlike most of the war movies that are shown that day, the hero in "To Hell and Back" is played by himself.

The role movie star Audie Murphy played in front of the cameras in 1955 was the same role that he played as a real combat soldier in North Africa, Italy and France a decade earlier.

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During his three years of combat he earned 33 medals and awards, including a Purple Heart, the Congressional Medal of Honor and numerous other American medals for bravery as well as five medals from a grateful France and Belgium. During this same period he rose in rank from Private to Sergeant and ended his military career with a battlefield commission as a Second Lieutenant.

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The Longest Day is a 1962 war film based on the 1959 history book The Longest Day by Cornelius Ryan, about "D-Day," the invasion of Normandy on 6 June 1944, during World War II.

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Many of the military consultants and advisors who helped with the film's production were actual participants in the action on D-Day, and are portrayed in the film. The producers drew them from both sides; Allied and Axis.

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In the movie the story is based on the building in 1943 of one of the railway bridges over the Kwai Yai at a place called Tamarkan, five kilometres from the Thai town of Kanchanaburi. This was part of a project to link existing Thai and Burmese railway lines to create a route from Bangkok, Thailand to Rangoon, Burma (now Myanmar) to support the Japanese occupation of Burma. About a hundred thousand conscripted Asian labourers and 12,000 prisoners of war died on the whole project. Although the suffering caused by the building of the Burma Railway and its bridges is true, the incidents in the film are mostly fictional. The real senior Allied officer at the bridge was Lieutenant Colonel Philip Toosey.

Some consider the film to be an insulting parody of Toosey.[citation needed] On a BBC Timewatch programme, a former prisoner at the camp states that it is unlikely that a man like the fictional Nicholson could have risen to the rank of lieutenant colonel; and if he had, he would have been "quietly eliminated" by the other prisoners. Julie Summers, in her book The Colonel of Tamarkan, writes that Pierre Boulle, who had been a prisoner of war in Thailand, created the fictional Nicholson character as an amalgam of his memories of collaborating French officers. The destruction of the bridge as depicted in the film is entirely fictional. In fact, two bridges were built: a temporary wooden bridge and a permanent steel and concrete bridge a few months later. Both bridges were used for two years until they were destroyed by Allied aerial bombing. The steel bridge was repaired and is still in use today.