The Reel War: Military History & Film
War Films provide drama, tension and horror in the right quantities to keep audiences in their seats. Having been in both the military and the film industry I’ve seen first-hand the pressure on a film’s historical accuracy of film production. The demands of getting the cast and equipment in the frame, and money on the screen, mean events which would be physically spread out, as real units and men would disperse for protection, are bunched up. Similarly, time scales have to be compressed – raids and battles that took hours or days become minutes, with several actions often combined for the narrative. Sound is distorted; the reverberations in the cinema floor or through your home Dolby speakers in no way resemble gunfire or shells, and characters on film are archetypes – if actors walked and talked like their real-life counterparts we would quickly tune out. But, while all this is understandable, directors, writers and producers often play fast and loose with the facts. As a friend and military film advisor recently complained; ‘I don’t know why they do it… For the same money they could get the real thing.’
Sir David Lean’s fabulous portrayal of Peter O’Toole as Lawrence leading the charge on Aqaba in Lawrence of Arabia (1962) never happened. Aqaba was taken without a shot. The real Lawrence deceived the Turks he was heading north towards Damascus with a diversionary raid, and, after they had sent their cavalry after him, turned south to take Aqaba. After a short siege the Turks surrendered. In the only charge in that campaign Lawrence shot his camel in the head by mistake and somersaulted over its head. Characters get similar treatment. In a famous scene in A Bridge Too Far (1977) Robert Redford crosses a river under heavy enemy fire, but the real Major Julian Cook was not in the boat that day. The truth doesn’t get in the way of a good story, as characters get credit for things they didn’t do, and far more nuanced military operations are glossed over in favour of the type of action an audience expects when they pay to watch a war movie.
There are some notable examples that go the other way. The TV series Band of Brothers (2001), based on Stephen E. Ambrose’s book of the same name, follows ‘Easy’ Company of 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, and remains religiously true to Ambrose’s research and veterans’ transcripts and is the better for it. And, counter-intuitively, films that dispense with the facts altogether often manage to portray the truth. The Battle of Algiers (1966) and Platoon (1986) are fictional, but the better for creative input from veterans – Jean Martin in The Battle of Algiers, and Oliver Stone in Platoon. Martin plays French paratrooper, Colonel Mathieu, tasked with destroying the Algerian insurgency. When he gives a speech to his troops in the film describing his service with the French Resistance and in the Indochina War he isn’t making it up. He did both. And the film’s portrayal of how the French lose to that insurgency is so accurate it should have been compulsory viewing for all officers on the recent NATO deployment to Afghanistan. Stone, a successful screenwriter, had served in Vietnam and wanted to portray the reality of fighting the Vietnam War through the eyes of a small, albeit fictional, unit. It’s impossible to argue that he didn’t succeed. And on the subject of Vietnam, the overblown budget and scale of Apocalypse Now (1979), fiction based on the Conrad novel the Heart of Darkness, set in the 19th century Congo jungle, goes further than any to show the insanity of US involvement in Vietnam.
My own specialist subject is the creation of the SAS, and recently I’ve had my ear bent by veterans about BBC’s SAS Rogue Heroes (2022) plot, portrayal of Sir David Stirling, and most recently the portrayal of Blair Paddy Mayne – so the question is, does the truth matter? After the carnage of the First World War, officer-turned-military-theorist Basil Liddell Hart pointed out that war is a part time profession – no commander or politician has ever fought a battle before and therefore it cannot be learnt by experience. He cited Bismarck in the opening line of his book on the subject: ‘Fools say that they learn by experience. I prefer to profit from others’ experience.’ He went on to study campaigns from Roman to the First World War, and came to the conclusion that victory went to those who dared to use The Indirect Approach – the title of his book, which influenced modern war from its publication to the modern era.
But what then, if the portrayal of history is wrong? Putin is no fool, and thought he could knock out Ukraine in a swift military strike. Nor was Tony Blair, when he committed British Forces to Helmand, Afghanistan. Nor Donald Rumsfeld, with his desire for regime change in Iraq. All these men thought a war was going to solve their problem. Why? My answer is because they were raised on fiction. Most politicians have neither gone to war nor stood on a battlefield. The only place they can get that information is from portrayals of history in books, television and film. And while there’s an argument that fictional portrayal of wars is good because it raises interest in the subject, and encourages the audience to look into real events, that is not true for children. Perhaps the most avid consumers of war fiction are boys. I first saw A Bridge Too Far at Leicester Square Odeon aged 11 and assumed this was an entirely accurate portrayal of events. Why would adults make this up? I found it terrifying, and, to be fair to Richard Attenborough, whilst the film may have inaccuracies, the theme that Operation Market Garden was hopeless is an accurate summary of events.
But too often war films glorify war. Military action is ‘kinetic’, heroes die bravely, and the film concludes the sacrifice is worth it. To quote First World War poet, Wilfred Owen, who was killed 6 days before the end of that war: ‘My friend, you would not tell with such high zest, to children ardent for some desperate glory, the old Lie: Dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori.’ So while we can portray war as fiction, we must also tell our children the truth. Or we may consign many of them to the body bags of our own generation.
Tom Petch is the author of Speed. Aggression. Surprise: The Untold Secret Origins of the SAS. You can listen to an interview with Tom on the Aspects of History Podcast. He is the director of the movie The Patrol.
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