coBattlefield V: A corruption of history
History can be anything. It can be a dust-softed book, it can be rediscovered archives, it can be an interview with a survivor, it can be the sudden silence from your grandmother when she stops talking about a sore subject. History is the way we remember memories that aren’t our own, which helps us understand them. Remembrance is an activity. So, history is not only alive, it is retroactive. By remembering, we start seeing the arrangements of relationships and events, struggles and victories, powers and victims that led to the present. Memories live on. But original memories aren’t always accessible: the way we remember is produced. For instance, in how we remember war.
In 1998, journalist Tom Brokaw released his World War 2 book The Greatest Generation. Oversimplified and sentimental, it posited America as the single driving force that defeated the Germans. Later that year, Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan came out. A monument to the hardships the Americans faced and a laurel to the cameraderie of the ‘squad’. These productions about World War 2 coincided with a massive boom in WW2-inspired fiction, a widespread cultural trend known as ‘The Greatest Generation’ (GG from here on). GG-style memory production is characterised by: 1) the novelisation of military history by romanticising each breath and bullet; 2) using a handful of soldiers as microcosm for the expanse of global war, and; 3) a portrayal of war as a teleology of victories rather than an ideological-political-logistical context.
With that preamble out the way, let’s talk about DICE’s Battlefield V (BF5) — and World War 2 games in general. A video game is not a historical document. But this one is a cultural production about a historical event. This offers a certain way of looking about the past — that is, it offers a memory. World War 2 as a historical event is about the surge of fascism and its reach for victory. With studio DICE’s stated devotion to historical realism, a very reasonable expectation is this:
Developers of historical games have a responsibility to contextualise the situations that are being presented to the player. No war lacks a historical context or a clarity of purpose, so neither should their retellings.
My research question is this: how does BF5 produce a memory of war, of its context, and of its fascism? For this I will be examining its opening movie, its French campaign, and its, yes, Nazi campaign.
My Country Calling: the soldier’s struggle
From the cold skies above Norway in the earliest raids of the war, to the rocky passes of Algeria, to the mud of Eindhoven, Netherlands during Operation Market Garden, World War 2 is established as a truly global, all-encompassing war. In these pastiches of gameplay, we take on the roles of various soldiers fighting — and dying — to protect the country dear to them. Notable is the fact that before you jump into someone else’s hide, the body you inhabit first has to die. It symbolises war as this great engine, and is its fuel (a message that Battlefield One also carried with its Harlem Hellfighters intro). Every (any) soldier’s death is a great sacrifice, and we have to grieve and respect each one.
“In the silence, we forgot”,
is the quote supposedly reminding us of our ignorance. It hints at the weight of history and the importance of its vivacity. We should be doing so by memento-ing the mori, but only the military ones. See, the ‘soldier’s sacrifice’ is an interesting narrative trick. It is only able to be constructed within a certain national context, because it relies on an enemy and the dehumanisation of that enemy. Decisive to the soldier’s struggle, in this kind of memory, is victory — every action is justified, because it leads to victory, which is a patriotic landmark. If the enemy is shown also having friends, family, virtues, beliefs, dreams, etc., it becomes a moral problem to believe in the supposed righteousness of the soldier.
“Suffering is the same in every language.”
However, in its haste to memorialise the lives lost to end the war, it seems DICE has included literal Nazi soldiers. The second soldier you play as in the intro, is a Nazi tank commander firing at British vehicles in Tobruk, Libya. In another vignette, we become a Luftwaffe pilot as they intercept a British bombing raid over the Netherlands. These glimpses strip the nationalist premise from the soldier’s struggle — does it even matter who’s fighting as long as they’re fighting? If the soldier’s struggle is the end-all, be-all for whom to offer our respect, is the idea then to also sympathise with the Nazis? The game cowards out of an answer by never explicitly identifying the German soldiers as Nazis, or showing the symbols of their hate. More on this later.
The third characteristic of GG becomes even more dumbed down: war is a series of battles devoid of context. Death as the great equaliser, i.e., ‘people die’ is both truism and moralism. The melodrama suggests we should respect the Nazi without asking why the Nazi is on that battlefield in the first place. (The objection of “not all individual Nazi soldiers agreed with Hitler” is critically pointless: it never suggests Hitler or the Third Reich even existed.)
No game developer may assume that their players know their history. An overwhelming portion of DICE’s playerbase is either too young to know or otherwise too disinterested in history and politics. With how popular FPS games are and how well Battlefield, Call of Duty, etc. do as video game franchises, this could be feasibly be anyone’s first exposure to this particular history.
And, for the demographic on the farthest right, this may well serve as the fascist escapism they have been longing for: an affirmation and absolution of what they memorialise as glorious and honourable.
Tirailleur: A misunderstanding of (anti)colonialism
‘Tirailleur’ is BF5’s French campaign, where the player takes on the role of a Senegalese conscript, drafted into the French army. The opening cutscene emphasises four times how many of these men would be fighting for a country they had never seen before. Indeed, virtually none of sub-Saharan Africa saw battle during this time, but its men of age did — solely through the coercion of colonialism. At first, admittedly, I was pleasantly surprised. Hardly any narrative acknowledges the role that colonised peoples played in the second World War. This impression turned to disappointment fast.
The opening cutscene is a voiceover talking about “what history has been erased”, which is oddly relevant to this article. A photo is shown of an all-white French platoon. Then player-character Deme and his brother Idrissa, both Senegalese, arrive in France. They are anxious but proud to be able to serve ‘their’ country. When they arrive, their rifles are yanked out of their hands and replaced with shovels — they’re assigned to do corvée duties while the white French soldiers may do the real fighting. The situation is at least cognisant of the racist realities that took place (for instance, most Black soldiers in the US army were assigned cargo and transport duties, kept away from the frontlines out of racial distrust.)
Eventually, Deme and Idrissa are allowed to join the battle. The white French soldiers failed to capture a certain château, so the commanding officer ‘caves in’. Giving the brothers a serious nod, they’re given the greenlight to do some fighting as a last resort. This comes as a huge honour for Deme, who is eager to prove himself. This isn’t an uncommon character trait, but the question of ‘whom does he prove himself to’ has a difficult answer.
The theme of this story is clearly ‘we should be colour-blind when it comes to war’, which is echoing one of my favourite tweets. Deme’s victories in battle are to be seen as analogous victories over racism and colonialism. After all, he, an African man, is able to do what the ‘superior’ white men couldn’t, right? Throughout the campaign, more and more of his squad members discover what it means to fight and sacrifice oneself for France as death stalks behind every tree. Deme’s brother Idrissa, too, sacrifices himself. In the end, only Deme and two other (unnamed!) Senegalese squad members survive the battle for the château. A squad of white Frenchmen line up next to them, and a photograph is taken — the same as the one from the intro! Wow!
The last cutscene of the campaign ends with an older Deme being interviewed. The ‘real’ photograph from the beginning is revealed to have been doctored: any proof of black soldiers at that chateau was whitewashed away. Deme ends the scene by saying “I was proud.”
What isn’t shown in this campaign is how Deme would be shipped back to Senegal where he would have to continue to abide white French masters until 1960.
The erasure of black soldiers’ contributions to the war effort is a historiographical fact and one that is consciously unremembered. DICE has done a good thing in tackling this sore subject. But, ultimately, this isn’t the story they wanted to tell, about colonised subjects being forced to labour, kill, and die for an abstract, imperialist dominator. Deme’s proof of ability doesn’t contest French colonialism, but in fact tests how good it works in order to win wars. Deme seems to cling to a patriotism that isn’t his, making him eager to synchronise all ideals with his racist oppressors. He may be personally invested in stopping fascism, but the narrative scope of his struggle ends at his encounter with whiteness, not at that with Nazi soldiers. They’re not the main enemy in this story.
It is an acknowledgement of colonialism that is not anticolonial. It’s more in line with, “thank goodness France had all these colonies to conscript from, which allowed these men to sacrifice themselves for their coloniser.” The dramatic frame of this being a story ‘lost to history’ constitutes a pro-colonial sentiment. According to Battlefield V, the truth that was erased was that tirailleurs loved to fight and die in a conflict that Senegal had nothing to do with. Because in the end, their conscription allowed them to be ‘proud’ of that fact? Despite being slashed from all historical record afterward?
The logic here is that military participation is equal to abolition, and that the army and the battlefield are apolitical. Identities and histories disappear and only one’s abilities becomes relevant. This simultaneously contributes to the legacy of GG, as well as to the myth that the army is the only way out. This reflects a reality faced by many children of colour all over the western world: army recruiters organise predatory visits to high schools or tech conferences, hoping to convince minors with a lure of free college.
If the thesis of Battlefield V is that the battlefield is a meritocracy, then its inclusion of a Nazi campaign starts making more and more decrepit sense.
The Last Tiger: “both sides”-ing Nazism
In the spring of 1945, Tiger I commander Peter Müller and his tank crew participates in the defense of the Rhine-Ruhr line against invading American forces. High Command has ordered that all German soldiers must fight to the death. Old and grizzled, his sunken face suggests authority and capability. A cookie-cutter example of the ‘experienced, war-skeptical lieutenant’, he follows orders out of a sense of duty but not out of moral conviction. The lamentful soldier-philosopher, a difficult personality that simultaneously signifies the cycle of war as a production of victims and a perpetuation of villains. His crew is straight out of a war movie, maybe Generation Kill: an experienced driver, a starry-eyed, überpatriotic youngster and a diffident, yet eager rookie.
(Let’s interlude this by saying that nowhere in the entire game, you can find reference to these people being Nazis or even the bad guys — they are just ‘enemies’. BF5 just brands them as ‘Germans’, part of the soldier’s struggle that GG-style storytelling hinges on. There is no evidence of the genocide, the racial extermination, or the class decimation that the Third Reich actively pursued. The Germans are just another faction, like you’re choosing between Alliance or Horde in World of Warcraft.)
When the crew is forced to abandon the rookie, they later find his body dangling from a rope. High Command accused him of desertion and executed him by hanging. The scene nourishes sympathy for the regretfully-surviving Müller, and casts resentment at his military superiors responsible for executing a ‘blameless’ victim of circumstance. (Really? We need a reason to resent the Nazi command?) By that same narrative trick, the crew’s ‘righteousness’ is reinforced — they’re not the ones doing this. They’re not the real bad guys.
This trick is echoed near the end of the campaign when the crew’s tank driver expresses his disillusionment in the ‘German cause’ (which cause is that again?). He decides to deserts. This choice isn’t easily made, as we remember that deserters are summarily executed. It is then that the patriotic youngster takes matters in his own hands by killing the driver. As commander Müller cradles the body of his fallen friend, the Americans they’ve been fighting the entire time arrive and demand his surrender. Müller does so, and the patriot flies into a fit of rage. He aims a gun at him. The screen cuts to black and gunshots are heard.
In The Last Tiger, we are forced to play as/empathise with a representative of the worst, foulest regime in human history. And there is only one character’s hysterical patriotism to suggest a line has been crossed. But this patriotism is never linked to its historical truth, Nazism. Rather, this ideology, quite normalised among wartime (including civilian) Germans, is presented as a radicalism only purported by zealous psychopaths. Like the game is saying, “oh, but he’s one of the bad Nazis.”
At the very core, this campaign echoes the idea that GG is premised on: ‘we few, we band of brothers’. It tries its hardest to engender the kind of cinematic camaraderie that defines HBO series like Band of Brothers or The Pacific. It is World War 2 as told through a single squad, their plight unimaginably dire and hopeless. DICE, when asked about their reasons for including this controversial story responded:
“[W]e had to figure out how to tell a story that’s authentic to the values of War Stories, like we’ve done before — something that’s driven from the German perspective, but that isn’t apologetic, that isn’t propaganda. (…) [You] get to experience the chemistry within the crew as you find yourself trapped and start to reflect on your actions.”
The tone here identifies the player with the player-character, and the use of ‘reflection’ indicates a sense of regret or guilt. It implies the devs know that Nazis are bad, at least. These actions, obviously, are not ‘ours’, but we are made to feel as if we are taking on the role of someone on the wrong side of history. Yet, at no point does the game stop and explain to the player this is what the Nazis did and what they believed in — it does not suggest villainy. Hell, it doesn’t even mention that they are Nazis. Nonetheless, we should question these actions as if they’re our own, despite the fact that the game is fundamentally missing a moral compass or even a cogent language by which we can measure and reflect on these roles and actions ascribed to the player. The shortsighted conclusion that is reached is, once again, all parties had it rough.
Lacking text, even subtext, the game doesn’t provide a meaningful critique by way of negative empathy, i.e., wearing the hide of evil to understand that evil. The single-player campaigns are too short and too sanitised of commentary to achieve that. Instead, it is an aesthetic simulation. The only thing that’s concretely different between the Allies and the Axis forces are their faction icons, reducing the enormity of war and the plurality of combatants to a design decision. It refuses to identify an aggressor that actually existed in an event that happens to be the most researched historical topic on the planet. The German side is absolved of blame and the ideas on which their aggression are built remain unnamed. Like sandstone, eroded of any ethical scrutinies, they become abstracted into meaningless aphorisms like ‘even Nazi soldiers had things to fight for’. A kind of humanising melancholy thinking that wants you to see the Nazis in a better light.
In GG-style history, acrew’s individual battles supercedes that of the bigger, much more important picture. Their struggle is forcefully separated from their military function or political function. BF5 repeats that soldiers are mere pawns, tools to be used, but never expounds what they are used for. Phrased differently, sympathy for the soldier is more important than their military situation.
Yes, Nazi soldiers fought, bled, and died. But each and every bullet they shot was to establish the Third Reich in its fascist and genocidal totality. They were shot at to prevent this from happening. In the fiction about them, we cannot reduce their ‘struggle’ to the sensationalistic melodrama of ‘do they not bleed?’ ‘Respecting the troops’ is a common moral token spent on all situations military — we must not afford it a foothold in Nazi memoranda.
Conclusion: God, DICE really fucked up
Memories as they pertain to war are fundamentally fragile. From maps and troop movements, to the jotted-down numbers of destruction and loss, to the quivering hands of a soldier, what do we tell? Such colossal moments where death is the only upheaving force must be understood, because they must be avoided for the future. But remembering wars, only possible by their survivors, is an awful act. So time passes, generations that don’t know war emerge, their access to direct memory severed — it becomes second-hand. The more a society’s remembrance relies on second-hand memories, the more we want to monumentalise it. In this form, it becomes part of history, though not through its intent to avoid further war. War becomes culturally synonymous with ‘winning’, not with ‘warning’.
All this unnecessary storytelling is the result of DICE’s refusal to ascribe an ideology or a political reason to any of the soldiers featured in BF5. They storify their existence through their participation on the battlefield, treating all of their fictional soldiers as extreme equals. Ergo, no one can ever be right or wrong, good or bad. Regardless of which army they belong to, all are victims in the sense that they were sent out fight each other. A revisionist World War 2, an eternal gladiatorial arena without culpable participants. This isn’t moral relativism, it’s stanning all militaries.
Despite its superficial antiwar message, the game is obscenely pro-war. Battlefield V is another link in the shackle of commodified World War 2 stories. From fiction to film, these ‘War Stories’ are not based on anyone’s true experience of war, but on sensationalised cultural images. Striking visuals which acts as their own reason; war games that try to be war films that try to be war novels, revisiting the same scene over and over to try and produce the coolest image.
The emphasis on the graphical realism of war as a bloody struggle goes hand-in-hand with the deterioration of memory. The game showcases technical detail, not historical reality. In these narratives, World War 2 isn’t ‘caused’. There are no political actors, there is only the Soldier. Meanwhile? Battlefield V wants us to fight as a Nazi, but never names them. Everyone who fought is included in the soldier’s memorial.
That isn’t history. That’s apologia.
