goof in the chaplains service

He actually wasn't in the 101st. His shoulder insignia indicates a service command I believe. There were a lot of black soldiers involved with the moving of men and material. They were part of what was called the Redball Express.
He was probably trapped there with the rest once Bastogne was encircled.

"Did anyone else notice the black soldier in the 101st uniform during the chaplain's sermon? I'm not sure, but I don't think there were any black soldiers in the 101st in World War II."

In his personal account of the Battle of the Bulge, Seven Roads to Hell: A Screaming Eagle at Bastogne, Donald R. Burgett (506th PIR), states that "We were aided only by a couple of battalions of the 9th and 10th Armored Divisions, one platoon of TDs of the 705th Tank Destroyer Battalion, and one battery of 155s manned by Negro artillerymen of the 969th Artillery Battalion."

So, yeah, there were black combatants (I haven't heard anything about service troops, but these guys were definitely Redlegs) in the Bastogne garrison with the 101st Airborne Division. "Long Tom" battalions being either Corps or Army assets, it might be entirely possible that their shoulder patches would designate them as 3rd Army troops, especially if they came into Bastogne along with 10th Armored Division (one of the first units Patton sent to aid VIII Corps) or if they had been attached to VIII Corps before the onset of Wacht Am Rein. Bear in mind that Bastogne was the location of VIII Corps HQ at the time of the German offensive.


Oh good! My dog found the chainsaw!

There was a combat engineer battalion in the Bastogne area. It was the 31st Engr. Bn (Combat). All the enlisted men were African American since the military was still segregated at that time.

"black soldier in the 101st uniform"

The military was segregated, but the filmmakers want to gloss over that, I would think. Still, in the mess of battle in that area, it's very possible that black troops really could have been standing side by side at some generic 'service'.

The thing that you're missing is that while they did have such generic 'services', that became more the thing after the war, I think. What you see during the war are photos of Catholics, for example, hearing Mass and receiving The Eucharist from an actual Catholic priest - not some Lutheran 'switch-hitting', as the script says. Look at film footage of Iwo. There's a Catholic priests, straddling a collapsing trench on the black sand, risking getting shot by a Japanese sniper, giving Communion to Catholic troops who kneel before him, and make the Sign of the Cross after he places The Eucharist on their tongue. That's actual historical film footage. And you see a lot of still photos of the same, around the world in various theaters during WWII.

So, a lot of revisionism. It just struck me as being phony.