Call of Duty 2: Big Red One and the real 1st Infantry Division

Call of Duty 2: Big Red One follows the US 1st Infantry Division from the beaches of Algeria to the concrete teeth of the Siegfried Line, and it never reaches Berlin. That is not a design shortcut. The division itself never got there. It ended the war in Czechoslovakia, where on May 6, 1945, its soldiers reached the Falkenau concentration camp. The game covers most of that road, takes liberties with some of it, and leaves out the ending entirely.

It comes from the era when Saving Private Ryan, Band of Brothers and Medal of Honor had made World War II the setting of choice, long before Call of Duty jumped between past, present and future wars. Big Red One is one of the most focused products of that wave: one unit, one war, told in order.

Not the Call of Duty 2 you are thinking of

Two games carried the Call of Duty 2 name in 2005, and they are easy to confuse. The main Call of Duty 2, made by Infinity Ward for PC and Xbox 360, rotates between American, British and Soviet soldiers. Its American campaign follows the 2nd Ranger Battalion, the same unit as Tom Hanks's Captain Miller in Saving Private Ryan.

Big Red One is a console spin-off developed by Treyarch and published by Activision for Xbox, PlayStation 2 and GameCube. It launched in North America on November 1, 2005, in Europe on November 18, 2005, and in Japan, on PS2 only, on June 29, 2006. It was the first Call of Duty from Treyarch, the studio that went on to make Call of Duty 3 and later the Black Ops games.

That patch is where the nickname comes from: a large red numeral 1 on an olive drab shield. In the game you stay with a single squad of the division, led by Sergeant Glenn Hawkins, voiced by Michael Cudlitz, who played Sergeant Denver "Bull" Randleman in Band of Brothers. Several other Band of Brothers actors, including Frank John Hughes, Richard Speight Jr. and Rick Gomez, join him. The story was written by Aaron Ginsburg and Wade McIntyre, and the archive footage between missions, supplied by the Military Channel, is narrated by Mark Hamill.

North Africa and Sicily: faithful in places, compressed in others

The 1st Infantry Division was formed in 1917, when the United States entered World War I, and was the first American division to land in France. In World War II its combat debut came with Operation Torch in November 1942, landing near Arzew to take the Algerian port of Oran. The game opens with a prologue in Maubeuge, France, then flashes back to Oran in a mission called "Baptism by Fire."

Torch sent American and British forces ashore in Morocco and Algeria to overcome the Vichy French garrisons and open the way east toward the German and Italian armies in Tunisia. Oran fell within days.

Tunisia was harder. The game's Kasserine Pass mission has the division crossing a minefield and retaking captured American howitzers. The real defeat at Kasserine in February 1943 was far larger and fell mainly on other units, so the game hands the Big Red One center stage in a disaster that was not chiefly its own. Kasserine did matter as a turning point: inexperienced American troops were caught by German and Italian forces under Erwin Rommel, and the shock led to changes in command and a far more effective army afterward. The division did play a major part in the rest of the Tunisian campaign, including the fight at El Guettar, until Axis forces in North Africa surrendered in May 1943.

The Sicily missions are closer to the record. You land at Gela, relieve scattered paratroopers of the 82nd Airborne and fight the Hermann Göring Division, an elite armored formation of the German air force. Then the game reaches Troina and invents freely, turning it into a street battle. Most accounts place the real fighting in the hills around the town. From July 31 to August 6, 1943, German troops of the 15th Panzergrenadier Division and their Italian allies held high ground with clear views over the approaching Americans. Troina fell only after heavy bombardment and flanking moves through the mountains. It was a grinding fight of hills and rearguards, not the house-to-house brawl the game delivers. Soon after, the division's commander, Major General Terry Allen, was replaced by Clarence Huebner, who would lead it into Normandy.

Omaha Beach

On June 6, 1944, the Big Red One landed on the Easy Red and Fox Green sectors of Omaha Beach, facing the German 352nd Infantry Division. The first wave came off the boats into machine gun fire across open sand, with men drowning under the weight of their gear. Sergeant Ted Lombarski of the 16th Infantry Regiment later compared being in that first wave to suicide. According to historian Joseph Carpenter of the University of Texas at Arlington, the 16th took nearly a thousand casualties that day, about a third of its strength. Confirmed figures for the whole division list 186 killed, 358 missing and 620 wounded.

It was Colonel George A. Taylor, commanding the 16th, who got the men moving. His famous remark was that only two kinds of people were staying on that beach, the dead and those about to die, and that everyone else had better get off it.

At least four Medals of Honor came out of D-Day, and three went to the Big Red One: First Lieutenant Jimmie W. Monteith Jr. and Technician Fifth Grade John J. Pinder Jr. of the 16th, and Private Carlton W. Barrett of the 18th Regiment. Monteith led men and tanks across the beach through mines and heavy fire and was killed in the fighting. Pinder was hit repeatedly while carrying radio equipment ashore and died on the beach. Barrett survived, remembered for carrying wounded men to an evacuation boat.

The game's Omaha mission puts you with the regular infantry rather than the Rangers, whose landing is the one Saving Private Ryan dramatizes. The trade-off is scale: the playable stretch is short, and the fighting feels more manageable than it should. The real assault waves had no cover at all.

Aachen, the Ardennes and the road the game skips

After Normandy the division fought through the hedgerows, joined the breakout at Saint-Lô, reached the German border in September 1944 and took Aachen in October, the first major German city to fall, after weeks of house-to-house combat. It went on into the Hürtgen Forest and then held the northern shoulder of the Battle of the Bulge around Bütgenbach in Belgium, stopping German armor in brutal cold.

Gregory Fontenot's book No Sacrifice Too Great: The 1st Infantry Division in World War II, published by the University of Missouri Press, portrays a division that reworked its tactics after every fight. It won the Army Historical Foundation's Distinguished Writing Award for unit history in 2023. That constant change of conditions, from desert to mountains to beaches to frozen forest, also happens to make excellent level design.

The game's thirteen missions end at the dragon's teeth of the Siegfried Line. Everything after is missing: the Rhine crossing near Remagen, the encirclement of the Ruhr pocket and the advance into Czechoslovakia. By the division's own count, it suffered about 20,659 combat casualties in the war, including 3,616 killed in action.

The ending the game leaves out

Among the soldiers who reached Falkenau in May 1945 was Samuel Fuller, a rifleman in the Big Red One who filmed what he saw on a 16mm camera. Decades later he turned his war into the film The Big Red One (1980), starring Lee Marvin. One of its young cast members was Mark Hamill, the same voice that narrates the game's archive footage a quarter of a century later.

The men of the 1st Infantry Division fought in North Africa, Sicily and Western Europe, often beside British and French forces and the paratroopers of the 82nd Airborne. They were not in Berlin when the Nazi regime fell, but they were present for much of the work that brought it down. Big Red One is a good way into that story. It is also only a way in, and the real campaign, with its mistakes, its hills and its camp at the end of the road, asks more of anyone who follows it.

Platforms: PlayStationXbox