How realistic are battle scenes shown in movies?

Cafe Society
1

My son and I watched Hacksaw Ridge last night. Good flick.

The battle scenes were complete chaos, with thousands of bullets whizzing around every second and people getting shot left and right. The battle scenes in We Were Soldiers are very similar.

I am not a student of military history, nor have I ever served in the military. But the infantry battle scenes in these and many other movies just seem, well, over-the-top. Perhaps I am ignorant/naive, but I have a hard time believing that actual battles during WW I, WW II, Vietnam, etc. were that chaotic and violent. Can someone give me the straight dope on this?

2

There is a lot more boredom and a lot less action in battles in real life wars.

3

A former Navy swift boat crewman relayed to me a story about his time in Viet Nam. They were cruising up river on a quiet patrol, sunbathing. He was sitting on the superstructure next to the turret, with his buddy on watch manning the turret gun. He suddenly heard a muffled crack and looked around but didn’t see anything, and then called out to his buddy, who stood unmoving for a few moments and then slumped forward over the gun. He climbed up to discover that a substantial portion of his friends head was missing from a sniper shot.

That’s the reality of combat. No amount of bravery is going to save you from getting shot and just being alert and following orders may well not protect you. You can die for any reason at all including no reason whatsoever, and you often don’t know where fire is coming from or who to shoot at.

As for the experience of full battlefield combat, it has been described to me by veterans as mostly confusion with occasional horror, and after the first couple of engagements they were more or less at peace with being killed, but lived in constant fear of being severely maimed, especially losing a leg, vision, or testicles. No cinematic experience can replicate the environment of the battlefield (fortunately, because then significant portions of the public would be suffering from the same incidence of PTSD as many veterans of warfare) but battle scenes like those in many movies from Saving Private Ryan onward, portraying warfare as being confusing and random, are probably as close as it is practical to get.

If you want to see a really horrifying film about war, look for the Russian film Idi i smotri (“Come and See”). There is nothing particularly bloody or gory about the film but the immersive environment it creates for the viewer is one of the most intense and visceral I’ve ever seen in film.

Stranger

4

A common trope is ‘The Empty Battlefield’, nothing is obviously happening and no one is visible, and yet death arrives seemingly randomly at random intervals.

5

It’s on youtube, FWIW. More stylized than documentary in tone, similar to Apocalypse Now in feel, IMHO. I’m told by vets that the artillery barrage in the film is one of the most realistic they’ve seen. As long as you’re on youtube, you might as well compare that scene to the (armored) GoPro footage of Finnish Army artillery conducting a live fire simulated counterbattery exercise. The cameras are miked for sound, and let’s just say that those cameras are tough, and it must really suck to receive incoming artillery.

As to the two films the OP mentions, both deal with battles noted for their intensity, duration, and large casualties produced. I have not seen Hacksaw, but I want to, and I will just note that the battle to take central and southern Okinawa produced a staggering number of casualties. Similarly with the Battle of the Ia Drang Valley, though that was much shorter, smaller, and involved many fewer combatants.

Still if you were one of the poor bastards ambushed at LZ Albany, I don’t know if it’s possible to make a film that could adequately convey the intensity of fire both sides endured.

Again, not having served, but IMHO, beyond what Stranger already mentioned, where film fails to convey the experience of combat is the relative lack of noise, the smells, and the pacing. Combat is simultaneously much quicker—a machine gun burst of six to twelve bullets takes at most a second and a half to arrive, and can change your experience from “we’re doing O.K.” to everyone is screaming—and much slower than movies can show. Plus, we’re watching the movie in air conditioned comfort, not hungry, not filthy, and we probably got more than two hours of fitful sleep the night before. None of which is true for the guys doing the fighting.

Anyway, go see Come and See. Expect to be disturbed.

6

I remember reading that the opening 20 minutes of Saving Private Ryan were so realistic that WW2 vets watching it had to leave and that PTSD counseling went up afterwards. I remember another comment that a WW2 vet made about how realistic it was, to the effect that the only thing missing was the smell.

7

Oh gods, Come and See.

It’s an awesome film, but not one that gets watched twice! At least, not by me.

The cinematic version of experiencing PTSD. The horrifying part is realizing that the nightmarish world depicted, while highly stylized in parts, is essentially historical fact.

Makes most horror movies seem tame and childish by comparison. What fictional horrors can really compare to what actually happened in Eastern Europe during WW2?

8

I have also heard that every single distinct event within that sequence was taken from film, photo or eyewitness accounts. The moment where a soldier has a round ring off his helmet, takes it off and stares at the dent in wonderment and catches the next one right in the head, for example. All “real.”

9

When we were walking out of Saving Private Ryan, DesertRoomie said, quietly, “I’d read how bad Utah beach was but I’d been thinking bullets, not body parts.” I just laughed grimly and told her that since the Napoleonic era, the terror of the infantry was not small arms, but artillery, “the inhuman way it doesn’t punch a small hole in you, but tears you up.”

And regarding Come and See, like Shoah, and Grave of the Fireflies, it’s in my Glad I Saw It – Never Again file.

10

The six-hour Gettysburg movie had a lot of very luscious battle scenes.

In one opening bit, you can see troops moving from right to left, across their enemies’ front. It is, I think, the first time I ever saw lateral deployment in a battle scene in a war movie. Maneuver is usually depicted as moving directly toward (or away from) the enemy.

Gettysburg was sanitized, of course: people are sent flying from artillery strikes, but there aren’t any fountains of blood. Still, given that limitation of the ratings system, it’s a pretty doggone accurate movie.

11

It’s worth nothing that official visual records of battle are largely sanitized of corpses and less attractive elements like detached limbs. There are whole histories of WWII that show casualty-free battlefields and only select corpses like Mussolini’s. Museum images show corpse-free scenes as well.

12

WW1 was pretty bad. In the first day of the Somme Britain suffered 57k casualties. In some of the battles there were millions of artillery shells fired in a couple days, turning the countryside and forests into moonscapes. There’s stories of artillery craters filling with rain and mud and soldiers packed down with equipment slipping into them and drowning.

From accounts I’ve read, what movies tend to leave out is how disgusting everything is once things bog down. Mud mixed with bodies, excrement, plus clouds of flies, rats, lice, maggots, mosquitoes, leeches, and all sorts of other bugs. Plus horses crapping everywhere. Even in WWII there were a lot of horses still being used.

One of the more stomach turning stories I remember is a guy in WWII on a pacific island with really steep hills. His side of the hill was covered in excrement, rotting bodies, all in the tropical heat, but he was above it, until he slipped and fell into it and it smelled so bad he vomited all over himself as he tumbled down.

13

Even the scene where the guy reaches down and picks up his own arm with the other hand?:eek:

14

The artillery bombardment at Bastogne in “Band of Brothers” was pretty harrowing, and likely close to reality.

15

Yeah, even that one, according to Spielberg:
We had several conversations. The one I remember most significantly was when Steven related a story. Ian Bryce was there. Steven had either spoken to someone or read a story about a guy in the First Infantry Division who had his arm blown off and he picked up his own arm and walked back toward the surf. Steven said it was such an extraordinary image and somebody said, “Jeez, I don’t know how much of that we can show, we’re already looking at an R-rating and we don’t want to go X.” (Combat Films: American Realism, 1945-2010, 2d ed., page 240)
I still consider it apocryphal without more details but apparently Spielberg didn’t just invent it out of thin air.

16

I saw Hacksaw Ridge last night - and one thing that struck me as over the top was the standard Hollywood trope of gasoline shells. Band of Brothers and The Pacific more or less perfected the “air bomb” shell impacts that look closer to reality in my eyes than the giant flame balls that was used in Hacksaw (and many others). Having (thankfully) never been subjected to a arty barrage, nor taken part in a war of any sort, I obviously have no personal experience one way or the other - but the giant fireballs look really unrealistic to me.

Also, during the heavy arty bombardment our protagonist runs along with explosions going of a few meters to either side of him at one point - I very much doubt having big shells exploding just to the right and left of you while running in the open wouldn’t even scratch you. (The pressure alone would be lethal, let alone the shrapnel).

17

At the WWI museum in Kansas City – which, BTW, is an incredible museum! – there is a display that shows the affect of a 75mm shell. You walk into the bottom of the crater, which is about 15 feet in diameter and about 18 feet deep. Up at the top of the crater, you can see the floorboards and plumbing of the farmhouse that used to be there. Impressively sobering.

18

I found Hacksaw Ridge’s battle scenes bizarrely unrealistic.

abel29a has already pointed out the “gasoline bomb” phenomenon, where apparently the battleship guns were firing giant bags of gasoline. Artillery doesn’t look like that.

More pertinently, though, is that the impression one got of the battle is that it happened in a very small space. Guys were basically shoulder to shoulder; it felt as if the Americans and Japanese were fighting over a space about the size of a track and field stadium’s playing surface. Consequently, in a weird way, the battle feels almost indoors, and seems much more constricted than, say, the epic “Battle of Stirling Bridge” scene Gibson directed in "“Braveheart” (that battle scene bore no resemlbance whatsoever to the real thing.)

Soldiers fighting should to shoulder die very quickly, in fact. Modern warfare tends to be spread out a bit more than you saw in that movie, though hand to hand fighting did take place.

It is also worth noting that the battle included tanks; indeed, at one point Desmond Doss (the protagonist of the film) had to hide from a tank.

I could pick apart the movie a thousand other ways - for one, Doss and his unit are implied to be very green, when in fact they had seen lots of action elsewhere. But the impression of the battle is one of a very confined space where gross things happen; battlefields are bigger than that. Things also don’t happen that fast, of course; the battle for the Maeda Escarpment, aka Hacksaw Ridge, went on for days, and there’s a lot of pauses in battles as soldiers regroup and try to call down artillery.

What is definitely true is the casualty rate. Both sides were devastated; American forces suffered heavy losses, and most men did not escape without at least serious injury. Japanese losses were almost total. Ninety percent of all Japanese troops on the island, of whom there were almost 90,000, were killed. Only 7,000 were taken prisoner.

19

I haven’t seen the movie but from this video of a battleship firing it’s 16-inch guns, there seems to be a lot of ‘fire’ coming out of the barrels. Did it look worse than that?

20

What about the magical cargo net? In the movie, Doss’s unit scales a cliff wall by climbing a cargo net. At the top of the cliff, they find the battle and engage in the mayhem therein. Doss rescues wounded soldiers by gathering them up and lowering them down the cliff face, eventually to waiting Americans below. What I want to know is what is so magical about that cliff and cargo net? Why didn’t the Japanese advance to the cliff and fire down at the soldiers below? From a storytelling point of view, it provided a clear “on the battlefield” and “off the battlefield” delineation, but I don’t see how that would work in real life. The soldiers below the cliff appear to be in relative calm and were not worried about attack from above. Why not?