[Milsurplus] "1917"

[Hubert Miller]

I was listening to Michael Savage radio talk show over KKOH radio in Reno, some distance from Oregon, one night last month 
and he was commenting on the movie. He said this unaddressed  question had spoiled the movie for him. 

I thought, now if I was writing the movie, I would have some explanatory scene up front. Like this: this unit is too small to be
equipped with wireless. As for dropping a message, as Dr. Savage suggested possible, I might have the officer explaining, 
the Germans have that area heavily patrolled by air. If one of our planes descends to drop a message, it will be distracted 
from the danger and also open to ambush as it descends to that low altitude. "We cannot risk losing another plane in that
area". 

Yes, I know this is "iffy". This might require rewriting the later scene, where a Brit plane shoots down a German. 
But also, consider this problem with that anyway, maybe: from what I have read of WWI aviation, an aviator who has just
crash landed is unlikely to feel up to it physically or by aviator character  to try to kill one of his rescuers. This was not quite WW2. 
For me, this was a second big problem with the movie. But your average viewer is not going to be well informed about WW1
and will watch  untroubled by any doubts about the storyline. 

I mostly wanted to get the "experience" of the trenches in WW1 and for me, the movie succeeded in this. From what I have
read and still photos seen, the producers were quite well informed about the realities of trench warfare. 
In the abandoned German trenches there was a sign with 4 items listed. I missed the words printed on the sign and if anyone
here recalls those, please tell me. The only word I recollect was 'Eimer', bucket, and the list of 4 items might have been 
anti - gas supplies. 

Around 1985 a man up in Stanwood WA answered one of my QST ads and offered me some WW2 items free. Nothing 
remarkable; there was a jammer transmitter and maybe an FM transmitter. It turned out he was a WW1 veteran. He also 
gave me a Signal Corps book and in its back section is a chapter on ground - laid cloth panels which they  used to communicate
with aircraft in lieu of radio. About the same time I met another man, a British immigrant 93 years of age at the time. He
said he had been an aviator and had flown a plane from Amien south ( I think ) and flown around a certain farmhouse where
he took down a wireless message. The range from the farmhouse ( spy observers, I suppose ) being too far for the wireless
to reach back to base. For a long time I thought it was a single seater, but now I think that would have been impossible and
if in fact this occurred, it had to have been a two-place plane. He told me the plane's "call letters" were " NR5 "and that he
had no idea what that represented. He said the wireless set was about the size of a brick - but that may have been memory
not quite right, or maybe he actually meant shaped like a brick, or like a large brick.....who knows now? He said after he came to
the U.S. he worked as a radio man on a Great Lakes freighter. Name was Ted Rees. Now you know as much as I do of this story.
After I moved from Seattle some years later I tried to look him up, but all I could find was someone else with as coincidence 
had it, had the exact same name.  Now, some veteran stories are just BS, and I have in fact run across a couple men who
could stream fresh BS as fast as I could listen, but this aviator fellow had no reason to glorify his role and seemed to me to
be a 100% straight shooter. 
-Hue Miller