[MRCA] "1917"

[Kenneth Crips]

No they relied on wired field phones.  Radio technology at the time in field operations was very much experimental and very unreliable.  

Ken de W7ITC

Sent from my iPhone

> On Mar 9, 2020, at 08:25, Ray Fantini <RAFANTINI at salisbury.edu> wrote:
> 
> Movies are always a  problem aren't they! The wife and I stopped going to movies years ago. We can wait for them to come out on DVD and buy the Blu-ray for less than the cost of the ticket. Then only issue with that is it puts us a good six months behind everyone else. Looking forward to the 1917 flick around the fall maybe sooner. We just finished the "Midway" movie and imagine historically it was not that bad although they did hack up the battel of the Coral Sea and a lot of the instrument in the aircraft did not look right, still a lot better than the 1976 version that rehashed a lot of images from the Tora Tora Tora (1970).
> I liked Tora Tora Tora  because of all the scenes of the SCR-270 that as far as I can tell were somewhat what a real SCR-270 looks like, at least the one that I have seen. 
> My biggest complaint with the new Midway movie is every time they show a receiver it looks like a British R-1155 How does a Lancaster Bomber radio end up as the go to prop in a film about the US Navy?
> On the subject and just for fun they have a movie about the USS Indianapolis " Men of Courage" lots of sharks and stuff but the wife liked it. In part of the movie the I-58 is making a radio report back to Japan using a TCS set that can be clearly seen in the background. 
> Wind talkers (2002) had a lot of TBY sets along with a TBX but thinking that a TBY was able to work any distance beyond a stone's throw is a little hard to accept. Let's see, there is also Fury (2014) that has a scene in the front of the movie that includes showing a group of BC-1000 sets on a table, a SCR-543(BC-599) and of course the tank radio that stops working.
> But maybe one of the favorite non-working radios is in the 2005 movie "Jarhead" where the central character is trying to call off friendly fire with a PRC-77 and is complaining how the Marines get all this old junk to use where the Army has all new radios. Runs back to the company communications Humvee to get a new battery, runs back under fire to only discover the battery he has just risked his life for is dead also.
> Well that's a short list, just thinking about it can think of a bunch more like the use of a BC-611 in Thin Red Line (1998) but do have to say that in the last twenty years or so the uniforms, vehicles and ships look a lot better in some of the modern movies as opposed to a lot of the stuff produced in the sixties and seventies where they just threw anything into the movie like in the WW2 movies where they are using PRC-6 handhelds.
> 
> Ray F/KA3EKH
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: mrca-bounces at mailman.qth.net <mrca-bounces at mailman.qth.net> On Behalf Of Gene Smar via MRCA
> Sent: Sunday, March 8, 2020 3:45 PM
> To: mrca at mailman.qth.net; arc5 at mailman.qth.net; arc5 at ix.netcom.com; milsurplus at mailman.qth.net
> Subject: [MRCA] "1917"
> 
> SPOILER ALERT!
> 
> SPOILER ALERT!
> 
> If you haven't seen the movie "1917" and intend to, read no further.  Hit DELETE immediately.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Gents:
> 
>     My YF and I went to the local theater to see "1917" last evening.  It was riveting and an edge-of-the-seat experience.  
> 
>     However, being an experienced Ham radio operator and one who also collects milrads and is, therefore, familiar with the evolution of RF technologies over the past century-plus, the basic plot of the movie disturbed me a bit.  Weren't there wireless sets of appropriate capability extant during the spring of 1917 (the period during which the movie's action
> occurred) to enable one British HQ field office to contact another only a day's walk away and warm the remote forces of the trap being set for them by the Kaiser's forces?  Would it have been unnecessary to send two Brits on a march across No Man's Land to deliver a written message to the forces in danger?  
> 
>     I didn't mention anything about this conundrum to my YF who paid the
> $20 for the tickets until we were in the car after the movie.  Might the state-of-the-art at the time have made this movie plot more of a fantasy than it was portrayed?
> 
> 
> 73 de
> Gene Smar  AD3F
> 
> 
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