How accurate is the war movie trope of soldiers or entire units wandering around just sort of doing their own thing?

Cafe Society
1

There seems to be a common movie trope of soldiers or entire units who become disconnected from their chain of command, appear to have no mission or larger purpose, and often appear to be pursuing their own agenda or mission (which may or may not be strictly “legal”).

Now this can serve many purposes for telling a war story:

  • Making a war story more personal or intimate - about individuals rather than an entire brigade
  • Create a tense atmosphere of chaos and confusion as the larger picture may not be evident
  • Portraying a military organization in a state of collapse or dysfunction
  • Create sort of “Homer’s Odyssey” sort of tale where the hero (and his unit) traverse a surreal war-torn landscape people with odd characters
  • Setting the characters up for some heroic last stand against overwhelming odds

Now trying to think of specific examples was a bit hard because there lot of grey area between “our unit went AWOL to pursue some Nazi gold” and “we lost comms with Bravo company”.

For example:
In Civil War, the characters encounter a sniper team engaged with some unknown shooter in a building. They seem to be cut off from their command for a long time with no particular orders or mission. Nor do they seem to be part of a larger operation or defending anything particular.

Another example:
Pretty much everyone in Apocalypse Now - Capt Willard, Col Kurtz, the crew of the PBR, Col Kilgor’s Air Cav unit, the firebase defending the bridge that kept getting blown up. Sure, they weren’t all “rogue”, but at the very least they all seemed a bit “freelance” in the executive of their orders.

Final Example:
In last act of the movie Fury, why would Wardaddy and his crew decide the best course of action is to engage an entire SS infantry battalion from their busted tank? At best, they could only have expected to delay the Nazis long enough for them to encircle the tank under cover and then blast them with their Panzerfausts, and then continue on to their objective. Or just go around them as the tank was immobile. I feel like the actual protocol would have been to abandon the tank or at least sent a runner back to the higher command so a proper counter-attack could be mounted.

So how realistic is this? While war is often chaotic, militaries are typically well organized. They operate in units and hierarchies. Those units need to be resupplied and rearmed from time to time. Platoon leaders notice if one of their tanks is missing. Battalion commanders tend to notice if one of their companies hasn’t checked in. If a bridge is strategically important to the entire operation, command probably won’t leave its defence to whatever rag tag group of misfits happen to be in the area at the time. When soldiers or small units get separated from the larger army, I assume they try to link up with friendly units ASAP, not find some obscure objective to fight to the death over.

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2

My understanding is that it was actually relatively common. Individuals or small units often got separated from their parent unit. In most cases, the soldiers found another unit and unofficially joined that unit. That was seen as acceptable by higher commands.

In other cases, an individual or small unit which got separated from their parent unit simply started wandering around. They would stay in the vicinity of the war without participating. For a fictional example of this, you had Oddball’s tank company in Kelly’s Heroes. For a real life example, there’s Private Eddie Slovik. These soldiers were more likely to face charges of being AWOL or even deserting if they were noticed by higher command.

I think it was also not unknown for a small unit to be sent off on its own mission in a Apocalypse Now/Saving Private Ryan/A Walk in the Sun scenario.

3

This is a classic of the genre:

And of course the idea was well-explored for laffs in McHale’s Navy.

IME in the real world of conventional well-disciplined militaries it simply doesn’t happen. Now are their rogue bandit units in the Russian Army in Ukraine today? Decent bet.

In the black ops world there’s a certain value to each level of the chain of command having some deniability of what their subordinate unit(s) are doing. Give vague orders about what to accomplish, and leave them to do it without asking for details. etc.

If that game of “muffled telephone” is played to enough levels, what the actual operators are doing may be kinda far afield from what the Head Cheese really wanted. As long as their actions don’t come to public light, nobody (who matters) will be the wiser.

4

My grandfather did this in WWI His group got separated from the main unit and after a day or two they came across a larger unit of German soldiers .He expected to have a fire fight but instead the Germans placed their weapons on the ground and surrendered. The war had ended while they were lost.

5

I think there was another motive at work here. The theme of the movie was Wardaddy’s growing realization that the changes he had experienced in combat were irreversible and he was not going to be able to go back to a civilian life when the war ended. So he decided he might as well die during the war in a manner where his death would have some meaning rather than wait until the war was over.

The same was true for three of the others in the crew, even if they were less consciously aware of it. The exception was Ellison who had only recently joined the crew and had not completed the transformation. This is why Ellison didn’t need to die with the rest; he still had a post-war future ahead of him.

6

So this doesn’t make sense in the context of the movie (which is set in the final days of WW2 where the Germans were in tatters and on retreat everywhere, extremely unlikely to field an apparently full strength completely intact unit like the one shown) but I think it is at least partially based on real life accounts during the Ardennes offensive where individual US tank crews were isolated and had to face the offensive on their own. In particular I think the “putting their gun down to pretend to be knocked out” move comes straight from one of those accounts (though IIRC they were just hoping to have the Germans pass them by without noticing them, not about to ambush them)

7

Are you talking about the intelligence community (CIA, NSA, etc) or the special operations community (Delta Force, Navy Seals, Rangers, etc)?

Everything I’ve read about actual US special operations forces tells me these are highly trained, highly specialized units that are typically sent on very specific missions that are planned out to excruciating detail with the knowledge and authority of the highest levels of the US government. I assume it’s similar to what is portrayed in films like Zero Dark Thirty, Black Hawk Down, or Lone Survivor. Like if command loses contact or the mission goes awry, it becomes a BIG DEAL very quickly.

Congress may not micromanage every mission, but their missions aren’t just “hang out in Kandahar and cause trouble.”

8

There is also the action that is described in the Medal of Honor citation of Ernest Kouma during the Korean War. Not the exact same circumstances but it is a real life example of one tank taking on a battalion. He was commanding a M26 Pershing not a Sherman. During WWII he was in the Bulge and Bastogne and also had to fight separated from the larger army.

The name Wardaddy was also not an accident. The Army’s best tanker was Lafayette “Wardaddy” Pool who did survive the war but lost his leg.

9

A unique story is that of Major General William F. Dean. In the chaos of the early days of the Korean War, instead of bugging out he stayed behind to organize whatever resistance he could, and attended to his wounded. Knocked unconscious, he recovered and wandered alone for 36 days before being captured.

10

I think as general case it does happen, just not as often as Hollywood makes out. Whenever there is a large offensive individual small units get isolated and cut off from command and control. But IRL they don’t tend to decide to go on dangerous side quests on their own violation. It tends to be about desperately staying alive and uncaptured while they find their way back to friendly lines

11

The Czech Legion was a pretty badass anabasis.

12

Interestingly, according to the Wikipedia article on “A Walk in the Sun”, it says the Army requested they put a briefing scene in the movie to show that the platoon actually had a specific mission and wasn’t just “wandering around”.

From what I remember from the HBO miniseries Generation Kill, the unit actually did spend a fair amount of time during the invasion “wandering around” Iraq with their commanding officer trying to find actual missions for them to go on.

But that’s what I’m wondering with the examples you provided.
Did Willard ever have to check in with his superiors once they separated from Kilgore’s Air Cav unit? His bosses seemed to have enough wherewithal to get a courier to him at that firebase that just seemed out there doing their own thing guarding some bridge no one cared about.

What about Captain Miller’s Ranger squad? At any point was Dennis Farina’s character ever like “I wondered whatever happened to those guys?” For that matter, what did privates Ryan, Reiben, and Upham do at that the ending when they were relived by reinforcements? Try and figure out 2nd Ranger Battalion now was or just keep wandering around the “rear” until they could find someone not to busy actually fighting the war to process Ryan out of the Army?

I never saw Walk in the Sun, but it sound similar to most “send a platoon miles behind enemy lines to blow up a bridge” films. Like that’s the sort of operational stuff I’m wondering about. I’m sure there were dozens or hundreds of platoon and company sized units all conducting similar missions. So how close would one expect other friendly units to be? How far away is artillery and other support? Keeping in mind Italy is only like 50 miles wide near Salerno.

13

I have two friends who served in Vietnam. One was in the Army and drove an ammo truck. The other was in the Marines, and while he did see combat, he didn’t typically go out on jungle patrols.

But there were a lot of jungle patrols in Vietnam. We were fighting both the NVA (North Vietnamese Army) and the Viet Cong (VC). The NVA was a “normal” military, with uniforms and army bases and such. The VC was a guerilla force, hiding out in the jungle and fighting with guerilla style hit-and-run type tactics.

Rooting out the VC proved to be difficult. We would often send platoons out on seek and destroy type missions. A small platoon might spend 3 weeks or so in the jungle, meeting up at specific rendezvous points for resupply every few days or so. They would be searching specific areas, but from a practical point of view, they were essentially just wandering through the jungle.

Even in other wars, you still often had to send out patrols to look for the enemy. The “fog of war” is a real thing. You don’t have perfect intel on where the enemy is and what he is doing. You have to send out small groups to look for enemy activity. If your small platoon happens to run into an entire enemy battalion, well, oops. Now you have your typical small group against a massive enemy trope, only in real life. So yeah, it happened.

That doesn’t mean that every soldier went through this sort of thing. A lot of war is endless marching and troop movements, often described as 99 percent completely boredom punctuated by 1 percent sheer terror. That 99 percent boredom bit doesn’t tend to make for a good movie, though.

They aren’t going to make a movie about my friend who drove an ammo truck back and forth, even though he did have a bullet come through his cab and nearly hit him once. Your good movie moments come from things like when Dick Winters in WWII took a dozen men to take out some guns at Brecourt Manor. Unlike how it was depicted in the show, he had no idea how many guns there were or how many Germans were in the area. Those 12 men ended up taking out all four guns, while facing approximately 70 Germans. That’s the type of thing that makes for a good TV show or movie moment.

Band of Brothers didn’t show the battle of Carentan, other than a tiny segment of it where Easy Company took part. The show didn’t have the financial resources or the screen time to show the massive army on army type battle for one particular road that would end up being nicknamed Purple Heart Lane, which was only one part of that battle. I think the main reason you don’t see battles like this often in movies and TV shows is simple logistics. It costs too much to have that many actors and that many special effects, and the entire battle would take too long to show. Instead, Band of Brothers showed one small section of the town itself, and that was it, with no context about the overall battle and what they were doing. If you just watched the show, you might have thought they were just one small group doing their own thing in that particular town, but in reality they were part of a massive battle to secure Carentan so that they could unify their forces, condense down to a single front, and head towards Germany.

14

I’m reminded of a line from Three Kings: “They have half a million men in the desert and they send four guys to pick up all this bullion? I don’t think so.”

The second half of Full Metal Jacket is a good example of what you describe. It starts off with Joker as part of the “Big Green Killing Machine” where most of the combat he encounters is impersonal over long distances, surrounded by tanks and fellow Marines where it doesn’t even feel like he’s in any real danger.

By the time Cowboy is forced to take over the squad, it feels like they really are screwed. They’re lost (or at least way out of position). There’s no support available. And at least one sniper is slowing picking them off. It doesn’t matter that there are 20,000 American soldiers and Marines fighting in Hue (a city of 150000 people) close enough that you can hear their gunfire in the background. They aren’t in a position to assist so they mind as well be on the Moon.

15

Well we know what happened in real life. The story was inspired by what happened to Fritz Niland. He was found by a chaplain not a Ranger squad. When the orders come from General Marshall it’s not hard to find some who can take the time to get it done. Niland was immediately sent back to England and then back to the U.S. He wasn’t discharged but served the rest of his time in the states.

16

Because they’re soldiers, their goal is to fight the enemy, and every German they kill is one who won’t kill some other American tomorrow. They saw an opportunity to set up an ambush, and took it. Now obviously it was a suicidal action, and they had no obligation to sacrifice their own lives, but I can’t say that what they did wasn’t commendable under the circumstances.

And in the movie, they were successful - they took out about half a company in return for four men and an already disabled tank. In the arithmetic of was that’s a good tradeoff.

17

The classic of the genre:

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The inspiration for the book/movie The Warriors. More obvious in the book.

19

T E Lawrence might be a candidate. He spent a large part of WW1 roaming around the Middle East, keeping the Arabs onside.

Allenby said this after the war:

I gave him a free hand. His cooperation was marked by the utmost loyalty, and I never had anything but praise for his work, which, indeed, was invaluable throughout the campaign. He was the mainspring of the Arab movement and knew their language, their manners and their mentality

In 1941 David Stirling founded the SAS. Much of its work was independent of the British High Command, who disapproved of irregular soldiers.

20

Another example of the thread topic, which operated at the margins of the Ottoman Empire, was Dunsterforce.

Commanded by Lionel Dunsterville, it was a battalion-sized group of men, highly motorized (armored cars and armed Ford vans, the latter precursors to the modern “technicals”), originally commissioned to screen northern Iran against Central Power incursions after the breakup of the Russian Empire. They recruited from local peoples in the area, got an infantry brigade attached, and eventually struck north, winding up in Baku on the Caspian Sea in an attempt to keep local cotton and oil out of Ottoman control.

You could compare the outfit to the U.S.'s Green Berets in mission and methods, and not go too far wrong.