THE PATRIOT is the latest summer blockbuster from Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich (Independence Day, Godzilla). Written by Robert Rodat (Saving Private Ryan), the film pits Mel Gibson as a Southern landowner turned reluctant revolutionary against impossible odds and some cartoonishly nasty British soldiers, or Redcoats, during the American war for independence.
Director Emmerich’s unique brand of Francophobia is again on display, the film’s main thesis seeming to be that Mel Gibson would not have had to lose most of extended family if only the French had not been so slow in providing long-promised reinforcements to ragtag Southern militia groups.
A whopping success at the box office, the film has nevertheless been attacked by everyone from Spike Lee to the British for its alleged historical inaccuracies. Here’s just a brief sampling of the tip of the iceberg:
David Hackett Fisher (Prof. of U.S. History, Brandeis University):
“The Patriot is to history as Godzilla was to biology…. The film is also heavy with anachronism. The dialogue alternates between 21st century slang and loose quotations from irrelevant historical materials. Mel Gibson is made to say ‘I prefer one tyrant 3,000 miles away to 3,000 tyrants one mile away’—a garbled quote from Boston Tory Mather Byles—and then lapses back into slang.”
Adam (aderenne@uvm.edu):
“The film’s portrayal of battles is also an absurdity. One is loosely meant to depict Camden and another Cowpens—but the attempt to realistically depict history goes about as far as demonstrating that in the first battle the Americans got their butts kicked while in the second the tables were turned. What is meant to pass for history is instead two extended sequences of gratuitous violence—endless hand-to-hand melees—a virtual annihilation fest. None of this serves to advance the storyline, nor does it bear any resemblance to actual combat.”
The Liverpool City Council, incensed by what it called the “character assassination” of native son Banestre Tarleton—a former Liverpool lawmaker and Green Dragoons leader on whom main villain Col. William Tavington is based—has fired off a letter to Columbia Pictures demanding a public apology.
“Hollywood has a habit of taking away the character of notable English people and demonising them,” Liverpool Mayor Edwin Clein said. “We know it happened with Braveheart and it is readily accepted with Titanic. It’s annoying this happens when Americans make a film purporting to be factual…. Yes, Tarleton was a ruthless soldier, Clein added, but the film goes a lot farther than that and assassinates his character altogether.”
No evidence exists that Tarleton was involved in infanticide or any incidents such as the church arson and murders, said Scott Withrow, historian at South Carolina’s Cowpens National Battlefield, where the Redcoats were defeated in 1781.
“Paul” (posted to www.leisuresuit.net):
“The film’s historical inaccuracies are legion. Political correctness rules. A minor one involved the wedding vows between Gabriel and Ann Howard; the minister left the ‘obey’ out of ‘love, honor and obey.’ Is this the Disney-ation of American History?”
Andrew Roberts (Daily Express):
“With their own record of killing 12 million Indians and supporting slavery for four decades after the British abolished it, Americans wish to project their historical guilt onto someone else.”
The Natal Witness (South Africa):
“I won’t bother to enumerate all the historical inaccuracies of this film… they are legion.”
“Nathan” (comment on www.JoBlo.com):
“A legion of historical inaccuracies prevented my enjoyment even of the good parts.”
[Actually, that comment was in response to Gladiator. Note, however, that the hyperbolic usage of the word “legion” is at least appropriate in this case.]
from The Daily Telegraph:
“Truth is the first casualty in Hollywood’s war.”
The Mel Gibson character (Benjamin Martin) is actually based on Francis Marion, the legendary “Swamp Fox” played by the lovable Leslie Nielsen in a 1950s TV series.
Marion’s irregulars may have mercilessly harried the British, but he also hunted Cherokee Indians as if they were game and was given to the serial raping of his slaves. In the movie, Ben has a nasty wartime secret in his past, but this SC plantation-owner has no slaves. Instead, the black people working his land find him a model employer. This at a time when even the drafters of the Constitution were slave-owners.
Peter Mill (petermill@yahoo.com):
“I am disappointed by the biased inaccuracies which the film The Patriot presents, not just because I’m British but because it sows seeds of hatred in the hearts of individuals towards the U.S. I am concerned, as History shows that those who sow hatred will also reap it’s harvest…. Why is hatred being sown? … Individuals are responsible for their responses, but in this imperfect world, we need movie producer’s who speak the message of reconciliation not sowing bitter hatred among nations.”
Spike Lee (in a letter to The Hollywood Reporter):
“The Patriot dodged around, skirted about or completely ignored slavery…. ignoring blacks and Native Americans…. For three hours, The Patriot dodged around, skirted about or completely ignored slavery.... How convenient was it for screenwriter Robert Rodat to have Mel Gibson’s character not be a slaveholder?
“Let’s not forget that two of ‘the framers,’ founding fathers George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, owned numerous slaves. The Patriot is pure, blatant American Hollywood propaganda. A complete whitewashing of history, revisionist history. While holding myself back from shouting at the screen, I kept wondering where are the slaves? Who’s picking the cotton? … Size does matter... but shouldn’t truth matter more?”
John Andrews (responding to an even more bizarre internet “petition” seeking to have the film shown to U.S. soldiers stationed in Bosnia):
“After reading this sight i have to say the film is completely inaccurate, so to all american producers especcially you Mel Gibson get your facts straight and to all americans who have signed this petition go back to the holes you crawled from you dumb ass SCUM’!!!”
And finally, the semi-official response from Centropolis (the production company behind The Patriot) to criticism of the film:
Mel Gibson’s character was renamed from Francis Marion to Benjamin Marion; this was among the first changes made to Mr. Rodat’s script when Devlin and Emmerich came aboard the project. Similarly, Jason Isaacs plays not Col. Banastre Tarleton but rather Col. William Tavington (still the leader of the Green Dragoons). THE PATRIOT is in no way be a biography of Francis Marion a.k.a. The Swamp Fox, and instead is a complete work of fiction.
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Meanwhile, the PATRIOT AIR-DEFENSE MISSILE SYSTEM was originally contracted for in the mid-70s by the Redstone Arsenal. Intended as an anti-aircraft missile, the system was then re-modified in the 1980s to be capable of intercepting/destroying the Russian SCUD missile.
The US Army later contracted Raytheon to develop the program. Raytheon took the existing Patriot missile system and modified it to be capable of dealing with the situations faced in the Gulf. The new Patriot system was redesigned so that the new PAC-3 missiles could be integrated with it. This new system was then “combat proven” during desert storm. Since the new system had never been in a combat situation prior to the Gulf war, it had much hype to live up to.
On February 25, 1991, during the Gulf War, a Patriot battery in Dharan, Saudi Arabia, failed to intercept an incoming Iraqi Scud missile. The Scud struck an American Army barracks, killing 29 soldiers. As a result, the Patriot system’s Gulf War performance was attacked by everyone from public TV news shows to computer-arithmetic-tragedy buffs.
A General Accounting Office report (GAO/IMTEC-92-26, “Patriot Missile Defense: Software Problem Led to System Failure at Dhahran, Saudi Arabia”) on the cause of the failure determined that it was due to an inaccurate calculation of the time since boot due to computer arithmetic errors. Specifically, the time in tenths of second as measured by the system’s internal clock was multiplied by 1/10 to produce the time in seconds. This calculation was performed using a 24-bit fixed point register. In particular, the value 1/10, which has a non-terminating binary expansion, was chopped at 24 bits after the radix point. The small chopping error, when multiplied by the large number giving the time in tenths of a second, led to a significant error. Indeed, the Patriot battery had been up around 100 hours, and an easy calculation shows that the resulting time error due to the magnified chopping error was about 0.34 seconds. (1/10 equals 1/24 + 1/25 + 1/28 + 1/29 + 1/212 + 1/213 + …. In other words, the binary expansion of 1/10 is 0.000110011001100110011001…. Now the 24-bit register in the Patriot stored instead 0.00011001100110011001100, introducing an error of 0.00000000000000000000000110011… binary, or about 0.000000095 decimal. Multiplying by the number of tenths of a second in 100 hours gives 0.000000095 * 100 * 6060 * 10 = 0.34.)
A Scud travels at about 1,676 meters per second, and so travels more than half a kilometer in this time. This was far enough that the incoming Scud was outside the “range gate” that the Patriot tracked. Ironically, the fact that the bad time calculation had been improved in some parts of the code, but not all, contributed to the problem, since it meant that the inaccuracies did not cancel.
An excerpt from the aforementioned GAO report:
“The range gate’s prediction of where the Scud will next appear is a function of the Scud’s known velocity and the time of the last radar detection. Velocity is a real number that can be expressed as a whole number and a decimal (e.g., 3750.2563… mph). Time is kept continuously by the system’s internal clock in tenths of a second but is expressed as a whole number (e.g., 32). The longer the system has been running, the larger the number representing time. To predict the next Scud, both time and velocity must be expressed as real numbers. Because of the way the Patriot computer performs its calculations the conversion of time from an integer to a real number cannot be any more precise than 24 bits. This conversion results in a loss of precision causing a less accurate time calculation. The effect of this inaccuracy on the range gate’s calculation is directly proportional to the target’s velocity and the length of time the system has been running. Consequently, performing the conversion after the Patriot has been running continuously for extended periods causes the range gate to shift away from the target center, making it less likely that the target will be successfully intercepted.”
Further, many analysts concluded that the inaccuracy may not have been entirely a problem with the Patriot, but rather due to the poor design or redesign of the Scud and the fact that many Iraqi Scuds broke up reentering the Earth’s atmosphere leaving the Patriot without a firm single target. The Iraqis changed the configuration of their Scud Missiles from their original Soviet designs in order to make them move faster. They were successful in making them faster than the original Soviet Scuds but this also caused them to break up upon reentering the atmosphere thus causing problems for the targeting system of the Patriot.
And finally, an excerpt from Raytheon’s response to a PBS WGBH “Frontline” report critiquing the Patriot’s performance during the Gulf War:
“The segments on the Patriot missile system’s performance during the Gulf War included on the WGBH “FRONTLINE” website are inaccurate, incomplete and misleading. This type of inaccurate and unbalanced reporting is not what the viewing public should expect from WGBH.
“The true story of Patriot’s performance in countering tactical ballistic missiles during Desert Storm is far more complicated and complex than WGBH’s one-sided version, but one simple truth emerges from the totality of available evidence—the truth of a major success story in countering, for the first time in history, hostile wartime attacks on civilian population areas from tactical ballistic missiles. Based upon detailed U.S. Army assessments of Patriot’s intercept success, the overall success rate was greater than 60 percent…. And from a human perspective, Patriot reduced the potential damage to civilian property and lives far below that which could be expected without a defense.
“The relevant facts were not included in the Patriot segments because they are inconveniently at odds with what appears to have been the central premise of the program—the ‘debunking’ of the so-called ‘myths’ and icons of the Gulf War. It also seems that the producers, in distorting the facts, are doing their best to provide tacit support and credibility to foreign governments, individuals or organizations with their own agendas who have argued from the beginning that U.S. defenses against tactical ballistic missiles are impractical, unwise or not in their national interest.”
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Ïðèêîë :) - Âàñèëèé Ôîôàíîâ11.09.2000 17:20:19 (584 b)
