1960s

By the early 1960s, films based on commando missions like The Gift Horse (1952) (based on the St. Nazaire raid) and Ill Met by Moonlight (1956) had begun to inspire fictional adventure films such as; The Guns of Navarone (1961), The Dirty Dozen (1967) and Where Eagles Dare (1968), which used the war as the backdrop for spectacular action films.

The late 1950s and 1960s also brought some more thoughtful big war films like Andrei Tarkovsky's Ivan's Childhood (1962), David Lean's Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), and Lawrence of Arabia (1962) as well as a fashion for all-star epics based on battles which were often quasi-documentary in style. This trend was started by Darryl F. Zanuck's production The Longest Day in 1962, based on the first day of the 1944 D-Day landings. Other examples included Battle of the Bulge (1965), Battle of Britain (1969), Waterloo (1970), Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970) (based on the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor), Midway (1976) and A Bridge Too Far (1977). A more recent example is the American Civil War film Gettysburg which was based on events during the battle, including the defense of Little Round Top by Colonel Joshua Chamberlain.