Yes, but only the other way around. You can have frontline soldiers send pidges from wherever to home back to their trained roost(s) at HQ ; you can’t dispatch pigeons towards the latest front hotspot because the pigeon doesn’t know what that is.
They didn’t. The Germans merely happened to lose it even faster.
Ah, reading further it appears Northern Piper had already addressed the bird issue. Which of course *they *would have. Apologies.
That didn’t really help the thousands of paratroopers who got completely lost all over Normandy the night before ; and that’s even without getting shot down and having a (relatively) orderly drop.
A ton of small scale actions were undertaken by ad hoc groups of guys from like seven different units who’d bumbled into each other in the middle of the night and kind of made a go of it while trying to figure out where the hell everyone else had landed. Quoth wiki :
(Gen. Taylor was the guy in charge of the 101st AD ; Ryan’s division). Meaning 4,000 odd dudes were still out there, unaccounted for. Plenty simply dead of course, but mostly just… “certainly somewhere, sir”.
So a small group of random paras stuck in the middle of The Suck without one working radio among them doesn’t really ping my “well ain’t that awfully convenient” radar.
Not that I recall, but there was a dead dog on the front yard and it seemed fairly “fresh” to me. Unless the farm family fled without their dog (unlikely, while the cows can’t run too far or ride in a wagon, a dog can), they were still there when the Germans came and shot the dog and most of the cows, trashed the orchard, etc.
Which reminds me: one of the characters (I think one of the soldiers on the truck) mentions that the cows were machine-gunned. How did the Germans manage to miss the surviving cow with a machine-gun? 
It’s merely an interpolation, based on the hero’s reaction to the scene at the farm house being somewhat ominous, and that this film didn’t seem particularly interested in portraying anything like “honor on both sides.” Not that I’m particularly upset by the depiction of the Germans, just noting that this film defeated from the customary trope of treating war as an atrocity of generals and leaders, while showing “common soldiers” to vary little across national boundaries. Here we had a clear and unambiguous villain (the German army) that did villainous things without exception and a clear and unambiguous hero with a noble quest. There were shades of gray along the way, but not where the main hero and the main villain were concerned.
But I digress.
I assume if the Germans had been milking the cow, they would have taken the fruits of their labor with them since it was a planned withdrawal rather than a forced retreat under fire.
Available via variety.com.
Based on what I’ve seen and understand about the British military of that time period, part of what makes this so bizarre is that the General himself is talking to the very junior enlisted men. That was probably extremely unlikely in that era, or even today.
Instead, an order to have runners go to notify Cumberbatch’s battalion to call off the attack would have been issued, and probably a company commander would grab two guys (or tell his Sgt. Major to) and send them off with the message for Cumberbatch.
So from the perspective of the two main characters, they’d have got orders from their own officer or senior NCO and be sent to go do the same job. Which I suspect wouldn’t have been as dramatic, but would have obscured a lot of the plot holes. And might have even allowed for some Fog of War type discussion among them about what exactly was going on.
I’m with you, and I’m not. I mean, if this film were meant as a strictly realistic and historical portrayal of WWI, then I think your point would hold, but I believe (more and more as I think it over) that this film is more concerned with being a realistic portrayal of a story from WWI than of WWI itself.
Which explains (to me) the unmitigated villainy of the Germans, the interspersing of clear/recognizable set pieces within an otherwise uncut/seamless narrative, and even the at times head-scratching nature of time and space which I myself have brought up more than once.
What do people do when they tell a story and want to embellish a little (or a lot) to make it worth listening to? The Captain who told the lance corporal that the Colonel told him the General needed a couple of runners to go back and forth between a couple of companies becomes “The General called me into his command post and told me that if my mate and I didn’t get this message through the lines, a whole regiment would be cut down the next morning.” You and I? We’re like that guy in back, where one guy is telling the story, and he’s got the audience captivated with his oral storytelling technique, and we’re sticking our hands up going…
“Wait a minute, you mean to say the General called you in and told you himself?”
“Wait a minute, you mean to say there was a whole regiment—and only a regiment—somehow alone and unsupported on the other side of the old German lines, and they didn’t get cut off and obliterated already?”
And so on. Dubious history, questionable geography, brilliant representation of a soldier’s story, drawn out to feature length, plot holes and all. They’re the sort of plot holes most such stories, akin to urban legends, would have. They fit within what I believe to be the genre.
Also, the fact that they chose for the mission probably the one guy who had a vested interest in seeing the message get through (because his brother was in that group). Of course, any soldier would have been expected to do the job, because that’s what they’re there for. But adding that element and having the order come directly from the general falls under dramatic license.
Joke:
In Sandhurst one year they thought of a interesting final exam. Each cadet was given a sitrep: “You have a rifle company of 80 men with a 60mm mortar , two light machine guns, and a sergeant major. The enemy has 40 men , dug in on a hill. What orders do you issue to take that hill?”
All the cadets but one came up with scenarios with suppressing fire, flanking, and so forth.
Only one cadet came up with the correct answer: “sergeant major- take that hill!”
“Sir!” said the Sergeant Major as he obediently snapped to an attention and offered up a salute.
The cadet then stiffened and raised his hand in reply, but was felled by an enemy sniper, bullet through the temple.
“Alright, lads,” said the Sergeant Major, turning to his men, “have a spot of tea, and when it’s done we’ll call in for another officer, one who knows his business. If anyone asks, we tried to take the hill and were repulsed—he was the only casualty.”
I think a lot of you are grossly misusing the concept of a plot hole. This is a fairly common mistake.
A plot hole is not “I can think up a better way they could’ve done this” or “their plan was sub-optimal”
Using runners to deliver messages in WW1 was extremely common. Using planes to that effect was uncommon. It is not only completely plausible that a mission like this would’ve been assigned, but a novel solution like air dropping it would’ve been the unusual scenario that required special set up.
Additionally, this movie is very much explicitly told from the perspective of a couple of low rank enlisted men. We are only shown their perspective. For all we know, in the general’s tent before we got there there could have been a discussion about how to best deliver the message. Maybe they did consider air dropping it, or trying to find a unit in the area with a radio, or some other method. Maybe there were perfectly good reasons to rule them out. Since we only see what the grunts see, there’s no way to know.
Additionally, maybe they actually are trying to reach the attacking force via other methods, but feel as though using multiple methods would yield better results. They wouldn’t necessarily tell that to the runners, to impress upon them the importance in their part in all this and motivate them.
You guys are vastly underestimating the complexity of running an army of millions of men. Organizing them and keeping them all on the same page is enormously complex. Communications are broken all the time. Even today, you can have two military units right next to each other who can’t talk to each other because they’re not part of the same chain of command and have incompatible radios or some similar reasons, let alone a hundred years ago. Armies at war are enormously complex beasts and WW1 was extremely early for a lot of modern communication methods and techniques.
The process of getting recon from planes and then disturbing that recon, acting on it, and then communicating with random moving unit on the attack is way more complex than you think. There are chains of command and communication that dictate the use of assets like airplanes. The general we saw may have first have had to contact a general up his chain of command who could then contact someone who liaisons with those planes who could then send the message to those planes who could then use rudimentary air navigation skills to try to find a unit they can’t communicate with to drop orders that might land in no mans land or get lost in the mud. Or shot down or even just driven off along the way. In no way is that a trivial mission to arrange and pull off. And depending on how many command chains you had to through, and what the status of the communications at the rear were, it may not even be faster.
Sending runners may have been the best plan available, or only plan available. Or maybe he did try both, but our grunts think there the only method as to increase their motivation to complete the mission. So no, this isn’t even remotely close to being a plot hole, and it may have even been the best plan given the constraints.
So you’re saying, then, that this thread is one giant plot hole?
Just saw the movie so only looked at this thread now. Frankly, I did not read all the posts but wonder if anyone has mentioned the following.
Sure, a plane could have dropped the order to stop the attack, but as Mark Strong’s Captain Smith warned, some commanders, desperate for glory, want the action for its own sake - ‘orders be damned!’ He told Lance Corporal Schofield to be certain that his delivery of the order and its contents were witnessed. Otherwise they might well be ignored.
If a plane dropped the orders, the dropped package might be considered “too difficult to retrieve”. Or, brought back to the commander who then files it in the fire.
Bottom line is that only a witnessed, in-person delivery of the order would be sure to be carried out.
Saw this movie this weekend and enjoyed it very much. Since this thread has evolved into a general chat about the movie and WWI tactics, I’ve got a question.
Since Scoffield has completed his mission, what does he do? He is separated from his unit by some distance and his unit has likely moved by now anyway. The enemy still has elements operating between his current position and wherever his actual unit is operating. Asking him to head back from whence he came seems a bit unreasonable. The movie ends with him leaning against a tree. So, to whom does he report? Is he formally transferred to another command? Does he wait until his old unit catches up to him?
In a more general sense, how does an army in the field keep track of its assets and personnel in the fluidity of battle?
In the real world? The more cynical part of me thinks he gets court-martialed, tied to a post, and shot for throwing away his rifle. A very serious offense, don’t you know?
True story : a French soldier was put up against the wall in 1915 for “defeatism” and “insubordination” for refusing to wear the pair of torn, bloodsoaked trousers he’d been issued that had evidently been taken off a dead body - he’d initially been convicted to 8 days in prison, but his regiment commander decided he needed an example for the fresh recruits, and happened to be both judge and prosecutor at the court martial.
Yeah.
I haven’t seen the movie, but it sure sounds like the mission he was sent on was to move laterally from one battalion/regiment, to another nearby one to warn them to call off their attack, presumably because that was faster than sending a guy from regimental HQ.
So once he’s done, he could go backward to the rear, and once back in relative safety, make his way back to his own unit. There’s probably a regimental headquarters that he can go back to, and they’ll direct him to his regimental HQ, who will point him to his battalion, and they’ll point him to his company, who’ll point him to his buddies in the line.
I have yet to see the movie, and that’s basically the reason why. The whole premise strikes me as ridiculous.