1917 and why bad history in movies can happen

Right...so due to a two-week long battle with a gum infection (I feel like I've spent the last couple of weeks living in a certain episode of South Park), I'm not working today. So, I figured I'd try to see what I've got in the "tank" by writing and posting something that's been in my head for a while now.

As people have probably noticed from my few posts on this subreddit, I prefer to go beyond pedantry. Treasonous, I know, but I think it's far more interesting to tie pointing out historical mistakes to something discussion-worthy. 1917 is an amazing movie, but it's riddled with errors (the fact that as a WW1 specialist I can still enjoy it is a testament to just how damned good it is). So, I thought it would be fun to not just look at some of the errors the movie makes, but why they might be difficult to avoid. So, each one is divided into "The Error/s" and "The Meta":

(NOTE: I am focusing only on errors that can have a reasonable explanation - pure research errors that do not will not be discussed here.)

Trenches

The Errors

1917 gets the British trenches wrong on a number of levels. For one thing, you see front line trenches that are mostly straight, and while this was a thing you would see in September 1914 when everybody was desperately digging in, it wasn't a thing you would see 2-3 years later. Trenches used what was called a "traverse" system, with short segments and numerous sharp angles. You also have telephone wires attached to aerials just above a trench (by this time they were buried to protect them from being cut by artillery) and going all the way to the front lines (by this time they had been removed from the front lines to prevent the Germans from listening in to phone calls). And then you have the protagonists entering the trenches from the rear and making it to the front in a matter of minutes, which would have been impossible - the trench systems stretched back for thousands of yards (to get a sense of the scale, here is a trench map from December 1917: https://maps.nls.uk/view/101465269 )

The Meta

1917 is a tour of the trenches and No Man's Land, shot to look like a single take, and this is one of the things that makes it stand out over other war movies. However, while traverse trench systems are all well and good for defending against artillery and attacking infantry, they're not great for having a camera crew follow a pair of actors around inside one. Even with handoffs, you can't be losing sight of the actors every couple of minutes and expect a good viewing experience. Realism is nice, but you still have to film inside the thing. This error is much less forgivable in a movie where you can have lots of set pieces and locked-off shots, but this is not one of those movies.

As far as getting from the back of the trench system to the front lines in a single take, how many hours have you got before the audience gets bored? Compression of space is a necessary evil here, as you can't go through the entire runtime of the movie and not even get to the front lines - it's not reasonable to ask an audience to sit through that.

Time and Space

The Error

This movie takes place starting on April 6th, 1917. The German withdrawal has taken the British by surprise, and the protagonists wonder aloud when the next offensive would be starting. But, all of this is wrong - the German withdrawal had started at the end of February, and the British had been dealing with it for weeks. Further, the initial aerial reconnaissance of the new line had taken place in October 1916 as it was being constructed, and while at the time the British had not made the connection between the new trenches and a German withdrawal, they made it soon enough once the withdrawal started at the end of February (meaning, there was no question as to the strength of the Hindenburg Line).

To make matters even more comically wrong, the conversation about when the new offensive would happen takes place during the initial bombardment for the Battle of Arras - so, not only would they be able to hear it, but they probably would have been mustered to their starting areas for the attack.

The Meta

There are a lot of hands that a movie passes through, and not every one has the same dedication to accuracy (a good example is Midway, a movie where the VFX department clearly cared far less about historical accuracy than the writer and director did). And, in this case, there are some indications that the script was originally set in March 1917 - and a story starting on March 6th, 1917, would have avoided many of these errors - the German withdrawal would only be around a week or two old, and the connections of the withdrawal to the reconnaissance of the Hindenburg line could credibly still be in the process of being made. Certainly, there would be room for exploratory attacks and the like. So, this is an entire set of errors made because of somebody getting one word wrong on the screen at the very beginning, and the error not getting caught before release.

Battlefield Tactics

The Error

When you see the attack at the climax of the movie, you see a human wave attack directly into enemy shellfire. This is utter nonsense - by this time the British would be advancing behind a creeping barrage, with squad-based organization in play. Behind them would be men whose job was to clean up any enemy machine gun positions in No Man's Land which had survived the bombardment. This was generally successful - the problem with WW1 battlefield strategy was not breaking into the enemy lines, but turning that into a breakthrough.

The Meta

I'm going to start by taking a side-step to Midway (which, despite the cases where the VFX team didn't care that much about accuracy, I still consider one of the better WW2 historical movies), with this scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9do27YD2AqY

It's epic, it's heroic, it looks like pure Hollywood, and it is, in fact, historically inaccurate - in reality, part of the carrier deck was also on fire while this happened.

History can be outlandish. And while I cannot (and will not) make excuses for the human wave (at the very least, you should have seen proper squads), I do have to wonder just how much an audience would believe a creeping barrage - after all, that would involve a curtain of shells descending across the battlefield right in front of the trenches, the men standing up and taking position behind it, and then walking slowly into it until it shifts a few yards down, and following it to the enemy lines. It's actually pretty outlandish - and that's before you run into the problems of filming it (is there an insurance company that would let you walk actors into several lines of explosions?).

I would love to see a creeping barrage on screen one day - I would love to tell people that yes, that's what soldiers in WW1 actually did. I doubt I ever will.

Conclusion

Sometimes, historical errors are face-palm events that come from somebody not doing research they should have. But, sometimes the situation is more complicated (one person making a mistake that wasn't there to begin with, such as changing "March" to "April"). Sometimes, the error might even be necessary to do justice to the setting (such as the compression of space in 1917 to allow the viewer to see the scope of the battlefield).

Um..and, that's what I've got. I need a good proper conclusion, or at least a distraction to let me outro...Look! A creeping barrage!

Sources

• Andy Robertshaw, "The Filming of 1917": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6Mh68E5CDw

• Capt. Cyril Falls, Official History of the Great War: Military Operations France and Belgium - 1917 Volume I

• Paddy Griffith, Battle Tactics of the Western Front: The British Army's Art of Attack, 1916-1918

• R.E. Priestly, The Signal Service in the European War of 1914 to 1918. (France).

• Ian W. Toll, Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific 1941-1942