Battlefield 1, the Colonial Soldier and Historical Whitewashing

Note: A huge thank you to Reddit user LitZippo for their /r/BadHistory thread on the matter, which inspired this article. I suggest you check it out.

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Okay, so I’ve written about Battlefield 1 and historical accuracy before. But there has been a growing number of complaints about the game – very specific complaints – prior to its release that I feel need to be addressed. WW1 is a conflict that is continuously misremembered by people and is mired in tropes like ignorant generals, pointless battles and a focus on the Western Front. While these irk me, the complaints emerging about Battlefield 1 adding “too many” people of colour to the game has made both my historian’s brain and writer’s fingers itch. I’m going to warn you here: there’s a lot of history and not a lot of game in this article, so if that isn’t your thing feel free to back out now. Similarly, before we jump straight in, it needs to be said that the reactions discussed in this article are mainly to a map set in the African theatre of war – we have no idea what the in-game character demographics might be for battles set on mainland Europe. Still with me? Good.

The Great War is a conflict that is shamefully murky in the minds of many people in the modern era. Despite its devastating imprint on the national consciousness of Europeans, most Americans (and the newest generation of Europeans, too) seem to not know too much in detail about the war – something that can lead to drastic misconceptions, especially when it comes to the combatants.

In case you were unaware of the issue, posts on social media sites and image boards like Reddit have attempted to point out how “hilarious” and “politically correct” it is that there are a number of black and Indian soldiers in the British and Ottoman forces in the Battlefield 1 alpha and beta stages. People have been claiming, among other things, that the Western Front (and I’m using this as a catch-all term for battlefields in which the western powers fought) was a “white front” and that colonial troops played only a minor role. Some added that it’s disrespectful to “real” black regiments like the Harlem Hellfighters to “randomly” scatter black troops throughout other factions. Others have said that since the Hellfighters were fighting for “liberty” and “freedom” it demeans their sacrifice, obviously not knowing that the Hellfighters came from an America deep in the Jim Crow era and were at times loaned to the French so that other American troops didn’t have to interact with them.

Let’s just chuck some numbers out there for you to chew on. The British Expeditionary Force fielded some 70,000 at the start of the war. The Indian Army, which rose in support of the Empire, called on 150,000 volunteers immediately – out of a total of 240,000. By the war’s end 64,000 would have died. Around the Belgian town of Ypres, one of the bloodiest sections of the Western Front, the line was held by Indian regiments backed up by some 37 battalions of colonial French troops. The French deployed some 450,000 of these soldiers over the course of the war, of which just under 200,000 lost their lives. 100,000 colonial troops died fighting on the side of Germany, too, from Rwanda, Cameroon and Namibia. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to get figures on British colonial losses as they’re added to the Empire’s overall total of 744,000.

Reddit user LitZippo, in their thread on the matter, adds that when you google “WW1 soldiers” to prove your point about them being white in the majority, the images you see are just of front line soldiers – “a tiny proportion of the huge [war] machine that operated in the theatre”.

“Ironically,” they continue, “the Western Front during those four years of conflict was probably the most ethnically diverse place on Earth at that time.” Muslim prayers were heard in the fields of Flanders and Indian soldiers observed Eid before sitting down to celebrate with their comrades of Buddhist and Muslim faith. Ramadan and the Sikh festival of Vaisakhi were marked in the trenches. A Chinese labour force 100,000 strong entertained troops behind the lines with displays of martial arts and dragon festivals.

Historian David Olusonga, writing about the period, says: “By the time the manoeuvrings of 1914 had fizzled out and the Western Front had stabilised, the fantasy of “The White Man’s War” had, like other assurances of the war, been exposed as naïve … The Great European War – as it was then still called – became the greatest employment opportunity in history. Hundreds of thousands of men, from some of the most beautiful lands and islands on Earth descended upon Flanders and Northern France. They came from Bermuda, Macedonia, Malta, Greece, Arabia, Palestine, Singapore, Mauritius, Madagascar, Vietnam, Fiji, the Cook Islands and the Seychelles.”

LitZippo draws upon another powerful piece of evidence – the Halbmondlager – a German prisoner of war camp which housed 5,000 captured Muslim prisoners and was even part of a German High Command plot to convince Muslim units to declare Jihad on the Empire and fight with the Central Powers. The first mosque constructed in Germany was built in the camp’s grounds. A propaganda book published by the Germans during the conflict named “Our Enemies: 96 character heads from German prisoner of war camps” shows the faces of men captured during WW1, and is stark evidence as to the diversity of men on the front.

“This problem is really a bigger one than a video game,” concludes LitZippo, and I agree. DICE has increased the number of black and Indian characters in its title as much to appeal to its audience as to reach a level of historical accuracy. To call the inclusion of non-white combatants in a game set in one of the world’s great melting-pot events “inaccurate” or “political correctness gone mad” is a stark symbol of historical whitewashing, something that has plagued the Great War since its last shot was fired. “It’s no surprise or secret that the contributions and sacrifices [of] many colonial soldiers are forgotten and overlooked,” adds LitZippo. “It’s downright dishonest to try and claim that the Western Front was a theatre only fought by white Europeans.”

Now we get onto something a bit more videogame-y. What can DICE do to combat this kind of view? I’m hoping that on release the game will come with an expansive bank of information on the conflict – on the battles it is purporting to convey and of the forces involved. If they can find the time to partition off both the French and Russian factions as DLC then they have the time to add a small wiki or tooltip for each soldier type, map and weapon. Battlefield 1 is a unique vector that can be used to teach people about a war that is slipping depressingly into the fog of the past, obscured by hearsay and urban legend. I hope DICE can make the most of it.