@frontrank2 Thanks for your perspective on the parameters and limits of this film. I worked on it the week of Pickett's Charge, alternately portraying Union and Confederate (mostly the latter) as the directors requested (I have the
Killer Angels hat and T-shirt from before the name change). For all of its limitations and down sides (as many pointed out in this thread) it is a true representation of what Shaara wrote, the characters he focused on, and the combat he felt would drive the story. It is a terrific novel and a good movie adaptation, but as several have correctly noted, not historically accurate or complete. Part of this is due to the limitations of Shaara's research when he wrote the book in the early 1970s. You can see the influences of standard works, particularly Bell Wiley's Billy Yank/Johnny Reb books, Bruce Catton's Army of the Potomac series, Billings
Hardtack and Coffee, Fremantle's
Three Months in the Southern States, and Douglass Southall Freeman's
Lee's Lieutenants, throughout the book and movie. This is particularly apparent in the Virginia-centric bias among all the Confederate officers except Longstreet. That Pickett calls on "Virginians" to make the charge (excluding all others) is Freeman all the way, as is Longstreet's stubborn opposition to Lee's offensive tactics. Shaara modified this conflict to make Longstreet more sympathetic, but the Virginia bias remains entrenched and carried over to
Gods and Generals with less than sterling results (debating the merits of that film warrants another thread). Needless to say, the scholarship on Gettysburg, the battle, the units involved, and the commanders on both sides has exploded in the decades since
Killer Angels was written, thus we have a knowledgeable audience that is critical of some of Shaara's simplistic interpretations, including the one where the college professor turned commander saves the whole Union army at Little Round Top (and who left a detailed memoir to base this interpretation off of).
If I was going to add units to the existing book/movie narrative it would be the 8th Ohio, a single regiment on picket duty along the Emmitsburg Road on July 3rd that fired into the flanks of Pettigrew's division at the same time as Stannard's Delaware brigade was attacking the other flank (as depicted in the movie right before Hancock's wounding). For the Confederates it would be to focus on Col. William C. Oates, who commanded the Alabamians attacking Little Round Top. After the war, he and Chamberlain squabbled over the location of the 15th Alabama unit marker, which was farther into Chamberlain's line than he recollected. Oates lost his brother John there and insisted that his guys had come closer to winning than anybody thought (see Glenn LaFantasie,
Gettysburg Requiem: The Life and Lost Causes of Confederate Colonel William C. Oates, Oxford Press, 2006). Chamberlain won that debate and his version is reflected on the battlefield today (if you see a small Confederate flag next to a rock in the rear of the 20th Maine's line, that is the Oates location.)