Artistic License History / The Twilight Zone (1959)

• In "The Last Flight", Flight Lieutenant William Terrance Decker, who has traveled forward in time from March 5, 1917, mentions the disappearance of the French flying ace Georges Guynemer. In reality, Guynemer disappeared on September 11, 1917.
• In "Long Live Walter Jameson", the immortal title character reads an excerpt from the diary of Major Hugh Skelton (one of his previous identities) in which he recounts how he participated in the Burning of Atlanta as a member of the 123rd Illinois Infantry on September 11, 1864. He did so reluctantly as he believed that General William Tecumseh Sherman's suppression of the Confederates was too brutal. In reality, the Confederate General John Bell Hood destroyed munitions to prevent them from falling into Union hands as his forces evacuated Atlanta on September 2, 1864. General Sherman ordered Atlanta to be burned on November 15, 1864 at the start of his march to the sea.
• In "Back There", Clara Harris refers to Henry Rathbone as her husband shortly before they go to Ford's Theatre on April 14, 1865. In reality, they were only engaged at the time. They eventually married on July 11, 1867.^note Rathbone murdered his wife on December 23, 1883 and was committed to an asylum for the criminally insane, where he remained until his death in 1911.
• In "The Odyssey of Flight 33", after Flight 33 arrives in what is later revealed to be 1939, the crew make contact with LaGuardia Airport. In reality, the airport was established in that year under the name Glenn H. Curtiss Airport and did not become known as LaGuardia Airport until 1953.
• "Death's-Head Revisited": Dachau KZ's actual commandant was SS Obersturmbannführer (equivalent to a lieutenant colonel, not captain-the SS didn't use normal ranks anyway) Martin Gottfried Weiss. Weiss didn't escape, but rather was hanged along with forty two SS officials at Dachau for their crimes in 1946.
• In-Universe in "Showdown with Rance McGrew". The actor playing Jesse James objects to a scene in which James attempts to shoot Marshal Rance McGrew in the back as his research indicates that the real James would have never done anything of the sort. This was done to appeal to the actor Rance McGrew's ego as he claims that fighting dirty is the only way that anyone could hope to defeat his character.
• In "The Thirty-Fathom Grave", it is mentioned that the submarine 714 was sunk during the First Battle of the Solomon Sea on August 7, 1942. In reality, the battle took place from August 8 to 9, 1942.
• In "Sounds and Silences", Roswell G. Flemington tells his psychiatrist that if he had been at Trafalgar, Horatio Nelson would have kept both his eye and his arm. In reality, Nelson lost the sight in his right eye (but not the eye itself) during the invasion of Corsica on July 12, 1794 and his right arm in the Battle of Santa Cruz de Tenerife on July 23, 1797. The Battle of Trafalgar, in which Nelson was killed, was fought on October 21, 1805.
• In "The Encounter", Arthur Takamori admits to Fenton that his father, the foreman of a construction gang at Pearl Harbor, was a traitor as he signaled the Japanese planes that attacked the base on December 7, 1941. In reality, there were no Japanese-American traitors at Pearl Harbor. The resulting controversy meant that this episode was not rerun in the United States until 2016.

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