On “realistic” war stories

An astonishing true story from the Battle of Suomussalmi, recounted in William R Trotter’s A Frozen Hell: The Russo-Finnish War of 1939-40:

In one such skirmish two Red tanks attacked a Finnish squad caught in lightly wooded terrain near the village [of Suomussalmi]. A lieutenant named Huovinen taped five stick grenades together and crawled toward the tanks; his friend, First Lieutenant Virkki, intended to provide covering fire, despite the fact that he was carrying only his side arm. At a range of forty meters Virkki stood up and emptied his 9 mm. Lahti automatic at the vehicles’ observation slits. The T-28s replied with a spray of machine-gun fire, and Virkki went down. Those watching felt sure he had been killed. But he had only dropped down to slap another magazine into the butt of his weapon. That done, he jumped up and once more emptied his pistol at the tanks. Altogether this deadly dance step was repeated three times, at which point the Russian tankers seemed to become unnerved. They turned around and clanked back to the village. Meanwhile, Lieutenant Huovinen had been crawling closer to them from the rear and now had his arm cocked to throw the grenade bundle. Just at that moment the tank nearest him put on speed and retreated. He lowered his grenades in astonishment. Surely there were not many instances in modern warfare of tanks being repulsed by pistol fire.

Beyond the obviously astonishing outcome of this incident, there are lots of factors that can “explain” what happened. The Finns attacked in the way they did because, though the Finns had the Russians surrounded in this incident, the Russians were still vastly numerically superior. The Finns had no armor and very few effective anti-tank weapons, hence the improvised anti-tank grenade mentioned here. And the Russians had little coordination between their armor and infantry, hence the lack of infantry support for these tanks. It was desperate on both sides.

But put this in a movie and you’ll hear howls about “realism” and what either the Finns or Russians or both “would never do.”

I think it was in an episode of Core Curriculum on the Iliad some while ago that I observed that there’s almost no such thing as a “realistic” war story, true or fictional, owing to the bizarre and random things that happen in the chaos of warfare. Read any war memoir and you’ll come across incidents that defy imagination—things that, again, if you put them in a movie, would get people crying foul.

So I’m always a little forgiving of war movies that do “unrealistic” things, because in real life soldiers are seldom at peak performance, seldom operate in ideal tactical conditions, seldom do the 100% correct thing in the heat of the moment, seldom have the knowledge granted to a moviegoer by an omniscient camera, and seldom have the kind of training we modern couch potatoes expect of SEALs. Even soldiers that are lucid and cool-headed when the unforgiving minute comes sometimes do the opposite of what their training drilled into them if the situation demands it. And that’s not even accounting for the random, the coincidental, the improvised, and the unpredictable—like a lone lieutenant’s pistol fire scaring off two tanks. But these are the things that make real life interesting.

I should finish Trotter’s book later today and highly recommend it, both for its excellently presented history of a conflict little known outside Scandinavia and for its continuous parade of hair-raising stories.

I conclude by deferring to two authorities on fiction and weirdness:

Per Mark Twain, “Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.”

Per TV Tropes, reality is unrealistic.