Fury is a fictional film about a tank crew during the final days of the war in Europe. Ayer was influenced by the service of veterans in his family and by reading books such as Belton Y. Cooper's Death Traps about American armored warfare in World War II. Ayer went to considerable lengths to seek authentic uniforms and weapons appropriate to the period of the final months of the war in Europe. The film was shot in England in large part due to the availability of working World War II-era tanks. The film featured Tiger 131, the last surviving operational Tiger I. The tank belongs to The Tank Museum at Bovington, England. It is the first time since the 1946 film Theirs Is the Glory that a real Tiger tank – and not a prop version – has been used on a film set. Tiger 131 is a very early model Tiger I tank; externally it has some significant differences from later Tiger I models, most noticeably the outermost row of road wheels (of the trio per axle, used in the Schachtellaufwerk overlapping and interleaved arrangement characteristic of the Tiger I) which are also rimmed in rubber, as well as the dustbin shaped cupola. In the last weeks of the war a number of these early model Tigers were used in last ditch defense efforts; one of Germany's last Tigers to be lost at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin was of a similar vintage. Ten working M4 Sherman tanks were used. The Sherman tank Fury was played by an M4A2E8 Sherman tank named RON/HARRY (T224875), also lent by The Tank Museum.
While the plot of the film is fictional, the depiction of the tank Fury and its commander Wardaddy parallels the experience of several real Allied tankers, such as the American tank commander Staff Sergeant Lafayette G. "War Daddy" Pool who landed just after D-Day and destroyed 258 enemy vehicles before his tank was knocked out in Germany in late 1944, and the small number of Sherman tanks to survive from the landing at D-Day to the end of the war, such as Bomb, a Sherman tank that landed at D-Day and survived into bitter fighting in Germany at the war's end, the only Canadian Sherman tank to survive the fighting from D-Day to VE Day. The plot also has some similarities to the battle of Crailsheim, fought in Germany in 1945. The last stand of the crew of the disabled Fury appears to be based on an anecdote from Death Traps, where a lone tanker was "in his tank on a road junction" when a "German infantry unit approached, apparently not spotting the tank in the darkness." This unnamed tanker is described to have ricocheted shells into the enemy forces, fired all of his machine gun ammunition and thrown grenades to kill German soldiers climbing onto the tank. Cooper concluded: "When our infantry arrived the next day, they found the brave young tanker still alive in his tank. The entire surrounding area was littered with German dead and wounded."The battle bears some resemblance to that of Medal of Honor recipient Audie Murphy aboard a burning M10 tank destroyer outside Holtzwihr in Alsace-Lorraine on January 24, 1945.The fighting in the film also bears similarity to the 1943 film Sahara starring Humphrey Bogart in which the crew of an M3 Lee named "Lulu Belle" and a contingent of stranded British soldiers, defend a remote well in Libya against a larger German force of the elite Afrika Korps, to the demise of most of the Allies.