Historical inaccuracies that are not minor

[bup]

@I_Know_Nothing

Haven’t read it but I hear War and Peace has Napoleon burning down Moscow when all evidence shows the Russians did it, a myth widely believed in Russia today.

Tolstoy doesn’t say that. What Tolstoy says is that of course a wooden city with no infrastructure and no effective government and no fire department is going to burn down. It’s inevitable. There were fires all the time in cities; if nobody puts a fire out and the whole city is crowded and wooden, the whole city will burn. He says nobody knows who did it, and it doesn’t matter; the burning was going to happen one way or the other.

It’s a recurring theme in War and Peace - Napoleon and other generals aren’t really in control of battles: nobody’s in control of a war, or history. Things just happen.

I feel I owe the thread a gross examples of historical inaccuracy/-ies in allegedly decent historical fiction…I’ll have to think.

[bup]

Now I know that the thread is already two pages long, and searching for “War and Peace” on the first page alone doesn’t mean I’m the first one, nor even the second, nor third, to address I_Know_Nothing’s example. Sorry 'bout that.

[fiddlesticks]

@Sampiro

How is a poisoned dress even possible?

A recent episode of Criminal Minds featured a “poison dress”… nicotine being the poison. That episode was rather … gothic to say the least.

[Malthus]

@RickJay

No, they would mostly have worn pants. In battle the better equipped men, which would have included Wallace, would have worn chain mail and such; he certainly would not have gone charging into battle without wearing armor. He wasn’t as insane as Mel Gibson.

The kilts worn in “Braveheart” are great kilts, more or less. When William Wallace was alive those were still about two hundred years into the future.

Not to mention portraying the (Scottish-Norman knight) Wallace as some sort of Pict, painting his face blue … about as likely as Winston Churchill doing the same.

[CalMeacham]

@fiddlesticks

A recent episode of Criminal Minds featured a “poison dress”… nicotine being the poison. That episode was rather … gothic to say the least.

Independent Scholar Adrienne Mayor writes about it in her book Greek Fire, Poison Arrows, and Scorpion Bombs

http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPST/GreekFire.pdf

[astorian]

@bup

Tolstoy doesn’t say that. What Tolstoy says is that of course a wooden city with no infrastructure and no effective government and no fire department is going to burn down. It’s inevitable. There were fires all the time in cities; if nobody puts a fire out and the whole city is crowded and wooden, the whole city will burn. He says nobody knows who did it, and it doesn’t matter; the burning was going to happen one way or the other.

It’s a recurring theme in War and Peace - Napoleon and other generals aren’t really in control of battles: nobody’s in control of a war, or history. Things just happen.

I feel I owe the thread a gross examples of historical inaccuracy/-ies in allegedly decent historical fiction…I’ll have to think.

Excellent summary- indeed, the one general Tolstoy admired more than any of the others was Kutuzov, precisely because Kutuzov understood (as Napoleon and others did not) how many elements in war were completely out of his control.

[Sampiro]

A drinking game played with inaccuracies, historical and otherwise, or cliches on the Michael Bay movie Pearl Harbor would probably cause death by the end of of the movie. One of the most jarring to WW2 purists was the notion that two of the pilots in the air at Pear Harbor would later participate in the “30 Seconds Over Tokyo” raid; none of the men in that raid had been in the air during the attack on Hawaii.

I mentioned in another thread a lady I knew in Montgomery named Anna Busby who was a nurse at Pearl Harbor and who was interviewed by the producers of the movie along with other nurses. (Anna died a couple of years ago in her late 90s.) One of the things that they all told the producers and that offended them when they saw the movie was the idea that nurses could gallivant around with sailors unattended. Anna had attended a Catholic school run by nuns at one point in her childhood and said that she had an easier time sneaking off for privacy as a child surrounded by nuns than she ever had as a grown nurse on a military base.

Nurses were only allowed to date officers (I don’t remember if Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnett were officers) and all dates HAD to be chaperoned and approved. This was mandatory, and, per Anna at least, this was not “nudge nudge wink wink” but ironclad. If a nurse and her officer got caught spending the night together, or even kissing in public, or anything anybody might consider improper, it was considered a fairly serious matter and would result in disciplinary action for both (especially the nurse, who would probably be sent home). If sailors on leave wanted female companionship, there were were mixers with the girls in the community (again with major harem-guard style chaperonage since good families don’t leave their virgin daughters alone with young sailors). If they didn’t want chaperones, there were plenty of brothels and bars where you could meet fun girls.

I’ve mentioned in other threads two of the things Anna used to tell in her talks and in her books that would have been perfect for the movie:

-She was a patient in the hospital herself due to a stomach virus on the morning of the attack, and the way she knew something was about to happen was that when she was served her breakfast the coffee cup began to rattle against the tray, and then the entire tray began to rattle, and then she heard the airplane engines. This would have been an excellent scene and they could have used it for any character (wouldn’t even have to be in a hospital)

-The hospital at Pearl Harbor was, of course, not equipped to handle anything remotely like the number of patients they had that day and there were nowhere near enough nurses to go around, so volunteers came from the town. Among them were many of Pearl Harbor’s many prostitutes (many of them Asian, some Japanese), who worked alongside nurses and nuns and military wives and civilian women and you name it. Again, this would have been an absolutely wonderful scene for the movie, which is set in the freaking hospital on the day of the attack, but, nope.

Instead, the people who interviewed the nurses ignored the great stories they told to concentrate on how nurses got away to get their freak on every chance they got. When basically they heard from the nurses that you had to have the skills of Harry Houdini to get away from the nurses barracks, they basically just decided to ignore everything the former nurses said and show them as only slightly less free than your average college students.

[mlees]

They needed/wanted a love triangle, Sampiro. I guess they couldn’t use a prostitute character, as that might not have been seen as wholesome enough.

[JohnT]

One of the most jarring to WW2 purists was the notion that two of the pilots in the air at Pear Harbor would later participate in the “30 Seconds Over Tokyo” raid; none of the men in that raid had been in the air during the attack on Hawaii.

I think a more jarring sequence is when Ben Affleck goes to Brooklyn so he can board a train to take him to England. :rolleyes:

[Marley23]

@Sampiro

-She was a patient in the hospital herself due to a stomach virus on the morning of the attack, and the way she knew something was about to happen was that when she was served her breakfast the coffee cup began to rattle against the tray, and then the entire tray began to rattle, and then she heard the airplane engines. This would have been an excellent scene and they could have used it for any character (wouldn’t even have to be in a hospital)

Everybody would have accused the filmmakers of ripping off Jurassic Park even though this apparently happened first, and, uh, in real life.

[Jackmannii]

@Lord_Mondegreen

The movie U-571 has the US Navy capturing the first Enigma machine rather than the Royal Navy. Whether this is major or minor is probably up for debate, and the side you take in the debate is probably almost entirely dependant upon which side of the pond you come from.

The movie U-571 would have been grossly inaccurate had the heroes been British. Nothing like that ever happened in WWII.

The U-boat capture was not a grand deception operation, but involved routine anti-sub warfare. The recovered Enigma and other secrets were due to a British boarding party going into the abandoned sub and hauling out stuff over a period of hours. It took bravery to go into a sub that might or might not hold a hidden German crewman determined to go down with the boat (which was damaged and could have sunk at any time (and those involved were decorated later), but as a movie plot, it stank. A true account would have had theatregoers dozing in their seats after the first 15 minutes.

Now if you want injustice, let’s have a word about the British WWII documentary that repeats the false story about the photo of the American flag-raising on Iwo Jima being staged…

[mlees]

Lot’s of stuff in the movies about the American West set in the last half of the 19th century are… embellished in the interests of making an entertaining story.

The classic stare down/quick draw gunfight, for example.

[silenus]

@Jackmannii

A true account would have had theatregoers dozing in their seats after the first 15 minutes.

Well, they could have been semi-accurate if they’d told the story of the USS Pillsbury’s boarding and capture of U-505.

[Sampiro]

@mlees

Lot’s of stuff in the movies about the American West set in the last half of the 19th century are… embellished in the interests of making an entertaining story.

The classic stare down/quick draw gunfight, for example.

One of the more accurate might be the comedy, Cat Ballou. Lee Marvin’s character is a down on his luck gunfighter who’s far more a product of Buffalo Bill and dime novels than actual suave bravado, and Butch Cassidy is managing a run down mercantile in Hole-in-the-Wall.

[Annie-Xmas]

That Dr. Charles Drew, the black physician who discovered the technique of separating blood plasma, died because he was refused a blood transfusion based on his race. Even used in an episode of MAS*H.

Absolutely 100% false

[Sampiro]

@Annie-Xmas

That Dr. Charles Drew, the black physician who discovered the technique of separating blood plasma, died because he was refused a blood transfusion based on his race. Even used in an episode of MAS*H.

Absolutely 100% false

The same story of dying from being denied treatment by a white hospital goes around about Bessie Smith and was the basis (and the title) of an Edward Albee play. Even Smith’s own half-sister, “Diamond Teeth” Mary McClain, repeated this one (though she wasn’t there and barely knew her half-sister). Total fabrication: she was killed by the car accident and d.o.a., plain and simple, race had nothing to do with it.

[BrainGlutton]

@mlees

Lot’s of stuff in the movies about the American West set in the last half of the 19th century are… embellished in the interests of making an entertaining story.

The classic stare down/quick draw gunfight, for example.

And they always gloss over [url=]this.

Instant Death Bullet

In fiction, almost all gunshot wounds fall into one of two categories: instantly fatal, or merely inconvenient.

In real life, being fatally shot almost always leaves the victim the option of 1-2 minutes of essentially normal activity before they finally fall unconscious. In fact, it is not uncommon for the victim to fail to realize they have been shot. Police trainers report that many officers are hurt or killed when their target fails to instantly fall down when shot, “like they do on television,” but instead retaliates. (Heck, this is one of the underlying reasons behind the “stopping power” debate in firearms/ballistics circles.)

In fiction, of course, one to two minutes of fairly normal activity followed by death is almost never an outcome of being shot.

Consider the Showdown at High Noon, or any other pistol duel. Screen renderings of these “quick draw” gun battles would be rendered relatively silly if a common outcome was that one combatant was fatally shot, and then took careful aim and fired back, fatally wounding the opponent. There’s a reason there were never many experienced gunfighters; the Instant Death Bullet makes for a better story, though.

[mlees]

@BrainGlutton

And they always gloss over [url=]this.

That URL goes nowhere for me.

But the quote sounds spot on.

[Marley23]

@mlees

Lot’s of stuff in the movies about the American West set in the last half of the 19th century are… embellished in the interests of making an entertaining story.

The classic stare down/quick draw gunfight, for example.

Cecil took on this subject a while ago. Shortly after we started watching Deadwood I read this Wikipedia entry with interest. This duel - not depicted or discussed on the show, by the way, so no spoilers here - is described in the entry on Hickok as the first “quick draw” duel and in the linked entry as “one of the few recorded instances in the Wild West of a one-on-one pistol quickdraw duel in a public place.” Even with that in mind, it doesn’t look like it does in the movies: “the two men faced each other sideways in the duelling stance, drawing and aiming their weapons before firing.” The circumstances around the duel come off as almost ludicrous, with both guys provoking each other and then looking for a way to avoid shooting. Shortly before the duel they said they didn’t want to fight, had some drinks together, and then wound up duelling anyway.

[BrainGlutton]

@silenus

Well, they could have been semi-accurate if they’d told the story of the USS Pillsbury’s boarding and capture of U-505.

Oh, yes! I’ve seen that boat! In a museum in Chicago! (According to the exhibit-signboards, capture of U-505 and its crew led to a documented instance of the Allies violating the Geneva Convention – by double-secret sequestering the POWs, and failing to report their vital and captured status to their government; the Allies were getting good tech-intel from that boat, so they didn’t want the Germans to know that, so they wanted the Germans to believe the boat was lost with all hands. That could be a good movie! Ethical dilemma, military honor, German POWs trying to sneak out word that they were still alive (as some did) . . .)