McDermott's fifth war film, shot once again near his Weston, Connecticut home (the same location as Pickett's Charge), and using as he did before a small unpaid non-professional cast of friends and neighbors, with his wife and daughters serving as technicians, dramatizes the World War I battle in Northern France where a Marine brigade fought with the United States Second Division and captured Belleau Wood, renamed by the French Bois de la Brigade de Marines. Ex-Marine McDermott in his own words “wanted to make an honest film, with semi-documentary atmosphere... (to) contrast the young Marine with the old-time Marine....”
Like Pickett's Charge, Belleau Wood captured realistically and powerfully the atmosphere of men at war, and more honestly than big-budgeted Hollywood treatments of similar themes.