"I couldn’t research online": The Film "1917" and its Production Team's Badhistory

This is probably a bit unusual since I'm not analyzing the movie itself (there's no wide release yet!), but rather a few recent interviews with the production team. It's not looking all that good. I do want to preface this with that the team, and Krysty Wilson-Cairns in particular since she made these comments, seem like fine people and fine artists. None of what I'm saying has any real bearing on their writing abilities, or ability to make a compelling film. None of this is held personally against them. None of this should be used by anyone to harass them. This will also mainly focus on the UK as 1917 is about British soldiers.

Easily one of the most baffling comments is this by co-writer Krysty Wilson-Cairns:

There are other reasons why the second war is covered more. It’s easier to research, via conversations with survivors, as well as books, newsreels and many other sources. In contrast, there are no living survivors of World War I. Wilson-Cairns adds, “I couldn’t research online; I had to go to the Imperial War Museum and to France, and find books out of print for decades.”

So this is one of the most ridiculous things I've read about the First World War. There's the excellent International Encyclopedia of the First World War. While it is still a tertiary source, being an Encyclopedia, each article is written by a scholar in the field, goes through the Project's editorial board, and are well cited with other academic books and articles. There are articles that range from Japan's War Aims to Veneral Diseases to Operation Albrich (when the film takes place!). But it's free, and I think even more importantly, is transnational. It's not focused on a national history of the First World War, but putting it into context for everyone. This is an easy to find and free resource for learning about the First World War. Also available online are so many lectures, whether it's ones given at the National WWI Museum and Memorial in the United States, the Western Front Association, and various universities and other institutions. These are free and are lectures given by historians of the subject! It's so easy to do even just a little bit of research on the First World War online.

Secondly, it has actual, current historians with in-print books going "Am I a joke to you"? And while I'm sure if you're researching a specific unit there may be some hard to find books for that specific unit, that doesn't mean that there aren't ways to locate them online, archive.org, for instance, is a great resource for finding out of print and out of copyright material. There are lots of old, out of print books on there.

Of course, that was bad-history about the process of doing research on one of the most written about events in human history. There is some poor history in regards to the war itself.

From the Variety article

“The Second World War was about countries uniting to fight the tyranny of the Nazis; it seemed like the only option to save humanity. But with the First World War, the motivations are obscure. It was partly for profiteering, partly because empires were starting to lose their stakes abroad.”

and from this Polygon article

World War I and II get compared all the time, and the real difference is that World War II had proper baddies. To put it into scripting terms, Nazis make for real good villains — total arseholes, the worst. World War I is a more complicated historical shitshow, for lack of a better word. Empire versus empire, war over treaties, men fighting for king and country without really knowing what that means. What fascinated me about WWI was that the trenches were sometimes as close as 50 yards apart. The man you hated over there was the exact same person as you. By the time we got to 1915 or 1916, a lot of the people had realized that the enemy was human just like them. There was something powerful and unifying about that conflict. That alone is enough to capture my attention. Sixty million people were dragged into the war, and that’s 60 million stories. I was like, “Gimme.”

These both basically say the same thing, which is the First World War was fought over nothing and was pointless and only wasted lives, while the Second World War started and ended as a Moral Crusade to save humanity.

This is what I feel is a false dichotomy. Peter Grant writes in his book National Myth and the First World War in Modern Popular Music

One problem to overcome in the mythologisation of the First World War in Britain is the reason for British involvement. The prevention of German military domination and the violation of Belgian neutrality seems, to many, especially at a distance of 100 years, a poor excuse for nearly a million British and Empire deaths. The fact that Britain went to war again in 1939 for entirely the same reason (with Poland substituting for Belgium) is now lost on a British public whose somewhat morbid fascination with the evils of Nazism and, entirely justified, revulsion at the Holocaust has retrospectively turned the latter conflict into a moral crusade. Most British people have forgotten, or do not wish to know, that our involvement in the Second World War was but a sideshow in a war won by massive attritional battles on the Eastern Front where losses dwarfed those of even the Somme or Passchendaele. In order to attain their mythical status events such as Dunkirk, the Blitz and the Battle of Britain also required a contrasting set of events, ones that were mythically futile, and the First World War where thousands were killed to move Sir Douglas Haig’s ‘drinks cabinet six inches closer to Berlin’ provided the ideal contrast (Curtis and Elton 1989 ). It became necessary for the First World War to be depicted as futile in order to demonstrate Britain’s key role in victory and the moral superiority of the Second.

This contrasting idea of the World Wars is also something that Chris Kempshall notes in his book The First World War in Computer Games (although it was less arguing about its purpose, and more discussing how such a dichotomy is reflected in games).

What Wilkes-Cairn has done is demonstrate that dichotomy perfectly. All the nuance is taken out of both conflicts. The fact that the UK was still a global Empire in 1939 isn't touched upon or even thought of. Notice how she describes the First World War as "Empire versus Empire", but at least one of those Empires was still kicking (and it wasn't the only one involved in the war...)! The Second World War wasn't started to "save humanity", it was started for a far more mundane goal, and one that truly was closer to the UK's reasons for joining the First World War than is often acknowledged.

But with the First World War, the motivations are obscure

The debate around the start of the First World War, will in my opinion, never end. It's too tied up in a lot of different factors such as national identity to ever truly be put to rest. But to say that motivations were obscure? I don't think the debate over the nature and interpretation of events should be confused for being obscure. We know, for the most part, why different nations made the various choices they did! For example, The United Kingdom was in part concerned with a realpolitikal goal in a "balance of power" and a more immediate goal of upholding Belgian Neutrality. These goals ended up aligning, or depending on your interpretational bent, Belgian Neutrality served only Realpolitiks, but no matter your position it's not really "obscure".

It was partly for profiteering, partly because empires were starting to lose their stakes abroad

This statement would come down to your definition of "profiteering" and "abroad". Who and what exactly are "profiteering"? Arms merchants? The nation at large? Would Austria-Hungary annexing Serbia count as "profiteering" under her definition or is it simply a money based argument? If it's the latter, then that doesn't hold much weight in my opinion. Nations did not decide to go to war in 1914 so businessmen and arms dealers could make money, that I would argue was an effect of the war happening, but not a goal or reason for starting it.

Similarly, how does she define "abroad". The UK was fighting for a balance of power "abroad" (Europe) in the widest of definitions or was she referring to Colonialism and Empire? The biggest colonial rivals: UK, France, and Russia were aligned and Imperialism wasn't that big of a driving factor in the start of the war. This is another area where I'd argue that an effect of the war is easily mistaken as a cause of the war if that's what she meant.

Empire versus empire, war over treaties, men fighting for king and country without really knowing what that means.

The Second World War was also "Empire versus Empire" (and it's arguable that some nations not traditionally classed as an Empire, such as the USA, were Empires or at least acted like them). Was the Second World War not also over treaties? This right here is ultimately why Britain went to war with Germany in 1939. It's a treaty! And that's not to say there weren't other factors that fed into that and had contributed to the declaration of war (because there were!), but it really isn't all that far off from 1914.

As to the last bit, about soldiers "not really knowing what that means", I find that to be downright insulting to those who were there. And I know, I'm falling into the trap of having the ghosts of the past haunt my argument, but hear me out. For me, it's not about "honouring" them in the way that is often said but simply about letting them speak and tell their own story. Not to infantilize them as "lions led by donkeys", idiots who didn't have an idea about what they were doing or fighting for. They were real, complex people. Any modicum of research would show this, one of the most easily accessible texts on the subject is Richard Holmes's Tommy: The British Soldier on the Western Front 1914-18. You end up realizing that more often than not those who were there had an actual idea of why and what they were fighting for, and that on the whole, they wanted to keep fighting and felt they had to win. Not everyone always agreed whether it was those who thought the war should end or those who thought the war should be fought a different way, but overall there was a feeling that the war was necessary by British soldiers.

By the time we got to 1915 or 1916, a lot of the people had realized that the enemy was human just like them.

If this were true I don't think we would have seen the continued drive to fight, or at least that drive would have been smaller. During the Battle of the Somme, for instance, British soldiers would often execute surrendered German soldiers. Some were shot right after surrendering, others were killed in crueller ways (in one example, a wounded prisoner was laying on the ground, when a British soldier activated a mills bomb and placed it on the wounded man's chest.). The war went on until 1918, the war was still cruel for years after 1915 and 1916. While I'm sure there were some who decided it was pointless and that they couldn't fight someone just like them, there were many more who felt the war had to keep going, and even if the enemy was the same, they had already inflicted a blood price that needed to be avenged.

EDIT

Forgot this gem from Variety

It was the first war featuring airplane fighting, machine guns and nerve gas; in other words, it was the birth of modern warfare. And the repercussions were long-lasting. An estimated 16 million died; genocides and the Spanish influenza killed an additional 50 million-100 million. And the cease-fire of 1918 left many things unresolved that erupted again in the World War II.

It wasn't the first war with Airplanes, but it gets a pass since you don't really see dogfighting and the like until the First World War.

But Machine-Guns? Nerve gas? Machine-Guns had been around since the 1880s and used in many Colonial wars, and even non-colonial ones! Principally the Russo-Japanese War... And Nerve Gasses weren't discovered until the 1930s, so odd how they had them during the First World War! The First World War did see the first usage of chemical gasses in that manner, but not nerve agents. So that's a half pass. First usage of gasses on a mass scale in warfare, but not "nerve gasses".

The middle bit is fine, but the last sentence leans way too much into the "Second Thirty Year's War" thesis which I am not personally a fan of. The causes and reasons for both World Wars were fairly distinct, there wasn't a lot that was "left unresolved" that started the Second World War.

Sources:

Links to online Academic resources

• International Encyclopedia of the First World War
• National WWI Museum and Memorial
• Western Front Association

Articles

• Mombauer, Annika. "Guilt or Responsibility? The Hundred-Year Debate on the Origins of World War I". Central European History, Vol. 48, No. 4 (2015), pp. 541-564.

Books

• Duffy, Christopher. Through German Eyes: The British and the Somme 1916. Pheonix Press. 2007.
• Grant, Peter. National Myth and the First World War in Modern Popular Music. Palgrave Macmillan. 2017.
• Herwig, Holger. The First World War: Germany and Austria-Hungary 1914-1918. Bloomsbury Academic. 1996.
• Herwig, Holger. The Marne: The Opening of World War I and the Battle That Changed the World. Random House. 2011.
• Holmes, Richard. Tommy: The British Soldier on the Western Front 1914-18. Harper Perennial. 2005.
• Joll, James. The Origins of the First World War. Longman. Second Edition. 1992.
• Otte, T.G. July Crisis: The World's Descent into War, Summer 1914. Cambridge University Press. 2015.
• Strachan, Hew. The First World War Volume 1: To Arms!. OUP Oxford. 2003.