According to the AFI catalog entry for this film, for the battle scenes in Italy MGM constructed five 35-foot towers, a full-sized evacuation hospital, and more than 100 Army tents at the Lasky-Mesa movie ranch 35 miles outside of Hollywood. The set took three weeks to build and the scenes used hundreds of extras, five cameras and six assistant directors. This was all for a re-creation of the historic capture of the Anzio beachhead in Italy by U.S. and British forces on January 22, 1944.
When Col. Johnson visits Snapshot in the hospital, she quotes a few lines from an old English ballad entitled "Sir Andrew Barton": "I am hurt, but I am not slain; / I'll but lie down and bleed a while, / And then I'll rise and fight again."
New York film critics named this picture as one of the 10 worst of 1948.
Homecoming (1948) was one of MGM's biggest hits of the year and was number one at the U.S. box office for four straight weeks. It earned theatrical rentals of $3,699,000 in the US and Canada and $1,895,000 elsewhere resulting in a profit of $1,047,000 (10.8M in 2017).
Homecoming (1948) also provided the third Clark Gable/Lana Turner pairing, which had proved remarkably successful in their first film together, Honky Tonk (1941). The other movie in which they had starred together was Somewhere I'll Find You (1942). They would follow Homecoming with Betrayed (1954), which resulted in Gable and Turner's last pairing together, and Gable's last performance at MGM. Like two of the others, they were about a couple caught up in World War II.