Quote:
Originally posted by Lifetime:
Their rewritting of history is probably why most American kids are grossly..uninformed about what really goes on outside of the continent..
The Patriot was a damned good movie but it was so untrue that well..its just improbable. It just paints the British in such a bad light.
Saving Private Ryan also convieniently covers up most of the American blunders that made Omaha and Utah beaches what they were, and instead potrays Soldiers bravely and gallantly charging pillboxes. While not untrue, it was certainly not faithful at all to history..
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Hmmm .. . I have to disagree with your comments above regarding The Patriot and Saving Private Ryan.
After seeing the Patriot I was actually impressed that, for a Hollywood movie, it portrayed the war in the South in the American Revolution in a historically accurate way.
Mel Gibson's character was actually based on a combination of 3 historical rebel leaders in South Carolina -- Francis Marion (whom the British called the "Swamp Fox" for his skill at striking unexpectedly and then disappearing without a trace into the extensive swamps on the coastal plain), Thomas Sumter, and Andrew Pickens. All three were leaders of irregular guerilla bands.
The war in the south in the american revolution was very different from the more tidy, traditional battles between regular armies as occurred in the north. The main strength of the American continental army was in the north, under the command of George Washington.
The American effort in the south relied much more on irregular bands of partisans who operated by what we would call "guerilla" methods today: hit and run tactics, avoiding traditional stand up battles in which the regular British army forces would have the advantage, relying on the cover of forest and swamp to befuddle the British forces trained in the tactics of orderly European professional warfare.
The war in the south was every bit as savage, if not more so, as portrayed in the movie. This grew out of the irregular nature of it. When opposing armies of regular forces fought, they could operate according to accepted traditional rules -- but this was not the case in the south. There, the British found themselves frustrated by an enemy of ghosts, who refused to fight "fairly" according to traditional methods of war. The enemies the British were fighting did not wear uniforms to distinguish themselves from non-combatants, indeed they often hid themselves among the civilian populations when they weren't harassing the British (actually it would be more accurate to say they WERE the civilian population, not merely hiding in it). Against such a hostile civilian populace, who refused to identify themselves by regular uniforms or operate according to "civilized" methods of warfare, naturally the British were tempted to take throw the rule book out of the window themselves and take extreme reprisal methods against that population itself. And so they did.
The war in the south was barbaric, often savage and inhuman, compared to the more "civilized" war in the north. The savagery and barbarism was by no means all on the side of the British. Indeed, the civilian population in the south contained a large number of people loyal to the British crown who wanted no part of the rebellion and who actively supported the British cause. The Rebel forces committed atrocities against those loyalist civilians just as savage and barbaric as any committed by the British and loyalists against the rebels.
Often the "war" would involve incidents like a bunch of rebel minded men gathering together one night and going to the house of a suspected loyalist and butchering his entire family and burning his house down, or vice versa with a band of loyalists doing the same thing to a suspected rebel.
The British cavalry commander in the movie was based on a historical figure -- the dragoon leader Banastre Tarleton, who was hated intensely by the rebels for his particularly ruthless methods.
Many of the scenes in the movie are based on actual incidents in the war, such as the scene where Gibson fakes out Cornwallis with fake wooden cannons -- Francis Marion did as much on more than one occasion; or the climatic battle in the movie which is based on the crucial rebel victory at Cowpens, which saw the irregular guerilla bands join forces with a segment of the Continental army sent south by Washington under the command of Nathaniel Greene. The battle developed much the same way as portrayed in the movie, with the rebels faking a retreat to lure the British forward out of their formations and then counterattacking and winning the day.
Of course, obviously parts of the movie are fictional, and it does not claim to be a documentary of the war. Mel Gibson's character, like all his characters, had to have superhuman fighting skill, for example
-- but all in all the movie does a good job of portraying the nature of the war in the south during the american revolution.
Regarding Saving Private Ryan, it is unfair to criticize the invasion scene in that movie for not telling the overall strategic picture. That is not what the movie was about. It was about the war experiences of a small group of soldiers, who realistically would not have been privy to the overall view. For an excellent movie showing the overall picture of the invasion of Normandy, see "The Longest Day."