Battleground was often referred to as The Big Parade for World War II. The earlier picture, an account of the ordinary soldier in wartime, was released in 1925, several years after the end of the First World War, and was an unexpected hit. Like its 1949 counterpart, The Big Parade was reluctantly put into production by MGM chief Louis B. Mayer, who insisted Americans didn't want to look back on an earlier war. Both pictures proved Mayer wrong when they turned out to be hugely successful and garnered awards and critical praise.

The shot of Spudler getting shot while reaching out of the foxhole for his boots recalls Lew Ayres's death in All Quiet on the Western Front (1930).

Critics and film historians have noted that although director William Wellman preferred the more documentary feel of his other war hit, Story of G.I. Joe (1945), the pictures he shot in far more controlled situations in the studio, such as The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), are more visually striking.

Some observers have commented that Don Taylor's role as wealthy recruit Standiferd is similar to the part he played in the later war film Stalag 17 (1953).

The care with which the creators of Battleground matched exteriors, studio shots, and real combat footage and strove for authenticity in geography and climate has been compared favorably to a later war epic about the same campaign, though on a much grander scale, Battle of the Bulge (1965). The battle in the later film is erroneously depicted as taking place in a rather barren, hilly area, and not the flat, dense Ardennes Forest. Some shots betray the production as taking place during warm weather rather than the deep winter conditions depicted.

In John Sayles's film Lianna (1983), the title character's thoughtless husband, a college teacher, leaves the room in one scene to go watch Battleground on television because "I have to teach it next week."

The computer-colorized version of Battleground was released on video in the 1980s during the brief trend for adding color to old black-and-white movies.

The MGM release Go for Broke! (1951) is sometimes mistakenly listed as a sequel to this film, probably because it capitalized on Battleground's success by starring Van Johnson in another war movie written and directed by Robert Pirosh, who penned Battleground. In the later film, however, Johnson plays a totally different character in a different story.

by Rob Nixon