“I have no doubt that history will remember…” – Medal of Honor: Airborne

**Medal of Honor: Airborne** (EA, Xbox 360, 2007)

[For this guest post, I once again welcome back Oma Keeling! Oma is a freelance writer, artist and art historian. They run GlitchOut, a blog dedicated to altered and alternative game experiences. Find them on Twitter @GlitchOutMain and @OKthanksgames.]

Speaking about attitudes to history in Britain, historian and broadcaster David Olusoga states that, “If history is a soft play area, there is no place for histories that explain how we all came to be here on these islands together, because those histories cannot be enjoyed purely as recreation, they cannot always be heroic.”

Public attitudes to history are shaped by many different forces, and his words are specifically a reaction to recent highly conservative approaches to the historical framing in the UK, that attempt to preserve the mythic “soft play area” he talks about.

There are many video games that have taken on the opposite attitude, in regards to the historical, using it to design areas of play in which the historical is malleable, soft and conforms to the shape given to it by myth.

Medal of Honor: Airborne (2007, EA) is the 11th game in the Medal of Honor series and like those that came before takes place during World War Two, putting you in the shoes of an American paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne Division, Boyd Travers, being dropped into missions that Airborne soldiers took on during WWII. Opening the missions with a quote from Benjamin Franklin describing his vision of soldiers descending from the sky, saying what fresh hell it might be, the game ties directly into American mythic history.

The tenor of the Medal of Honor games in general is one of reverence for the struggles endured by American soldiers on the frontline in WWII. They originated out of Steven Spielberg’s Dreamworks Interactive with the intention of producing something similar to Saving Private Ryan, as a video game, for both entertainment and education.

The game presents itself as a realistic representation of the Airborne soldiers’ trajectory during WWII. There are map room briefings in a tent before each mission, and sequences in the planes leading up to the drop that humanise the parachutists. If you don’t jump, you’ll get a shove that sends you out of the plane. You’re getting the highlight reel of ‘real’ military service.

You progress in this way through the several years of war, taking on hard objectives scattered across captured towns and tight labyrinths with high levels of enemy force packed in. Travers’ has only a small amount of health he can lose, similar to the way it would be in battle, and must stay alive by moving towards objectives while scrambling for health packs (different to the way it would be).

It’s gruelling, there is a pretty high amount of accuracy required to make an aimed shot land, and the different types of Axis force, categorised by their difficulty to kill, may just run up and punch you to death if you get too close. The difficulty and ugliness of fighting in Medal of Honor games is always underscored by the fact that you are making a difference, winning the war.

The third mission of the game takes place in Audoville village in France, as American paratroopers land to overwhelm the occupiers. It takes place on “D-Day”, the 6th of June, 1944, the day of the Normandy landings in Northern France by Allied forces and the launch of the successful invasion of German occupied territories. Travers and his fellow soldiers have the job of disabling threats to the landing force in Audoville before moving to the shore to provide further cover. It is one of the many, many pieces of historical fiction based around this network of events.

The game presents this entire mission as a heroic American effort, with Travers and the gang effectively enabling the successful landing on D-Day and subsequently, the winning of the war.

“I have no doubt that history will remember the Airborne on this day.” So goes the commanding officer’s statement on the matter as the mission ends.

The game’s designers leave us here, our vision of American grit on D-Day intact. The recorded history of this day, and this specific mission, as reported most extensively by Antony Beever and Peter Lieb, shows a more desperate picture.

During the real mission, as described in memoirs and interviews with soldiers, sourced by Beever for his book D-Day: The Battle for Normandy (2009), and other historical records, the American paratroopers of the 101st Airborne were instructed to “take no prisoners” by their commanding officer. Alongside a landing that was confused and scattered, the day ahead led to several recorded instances of members of the 82nd and 101st Airborne executing or attempting to execute prisoners of war. In the case of Audoville-Le-Hubert (the actual small village the game is based on) this led to the reported massacre of up to 30 wounded German soldiers captured near Audoville.

These are actions as described by the soldiers that took them or were witness to them, and it is not as if these are histories that those dedicated to chronicling or memorialising the war wish to leave out of the record either. This is from the historical website dedicated to one of the Lieutenants of the 101st Airborne involved that day, which after listing the events they are associated with, spells out what it meant to execute prisoners of war.

“These actions were at odds [with] the Third Geneva Convention which, in 1929, decreed that Prisoners of War were due special protection. The United States of America was one of forty-four countries which signed this document – which also included Germany. Provisions in treaties and other international agreements are given effect as law in domestic courts of the United States.”

It is here that the game rewrites a moment of atrocity into organised heroism. This is, we can argue, our received wisdom about the Allied forces in WWII, as heroes. Yet, as told by those who were there however, it’s ultimately a way of sanitising and evading the reality of the way that the war was fought and the totality of human cruelty that was involved.

Similar things happened on several other occasions in that war, and we have become at least familiar with reflection on the war crimes committed by countries like the U.S and the U.K in more recent years. There have been big games that have, in rare cases at least, adopted a more reflective lens on the ‘total good action’ of military violence, and today developers working on games like Call of Duty seem acutely aware of their position in the charged conversations around gun violence and entertainment in the US. But, even games that didn’t take on a reflective approach, post-2007, were making the wars instigated in Iraq and Afghanistan an integral part of military fiction, inspired by public attitudes about the so called ‘War on Terror’ and the long shadow of the Cold War and the 1990s. The fictional battlegrounds of Normandy were being replaced with ambiguous cities in North East Africa, Eastern Europe and Central Asia. The new theatres of war and morality. 24. Jack Bauer. Global threat.

In that respect Medal of Honor: Airborne feels and plays like an ancient relic, a straight down the line bit of America the Great propaganda about a time of unequivocal good, with its complications ironed out by a perception of history that can’t allow complications to stand.

Of course, it’s fiction written before the investigation and publication by Beevor and others into these things and in that way a document of how people saw these events without the further input of stories like those from soldiers’ recounting those crimes. But, let’s remember that fictional accounts are most often how people get their sense of history, and that by presenting this in this fashion, a popular document like Medal of Honor: Airborne (available on EAplay) now tells this specific story with the goal of lionising the Audoville mission. It was, after all, the intention of the series to be educational, which defined its approach, but unlike educational texts, there will be no revision here.

It is definitely unsettling to the core principles of ‘good’ in the imaginary taught about WWII in the UK to write or read about the Allies in WWII as anything but the ones fighting the good fight, since we are so aware of the devastation and totality of the crimes against humanity committed by the Axis forces, and the rise of ideologies of supremacy even now. Yet a more complex history is of course the case, and of course a game like Medal of Honor: Airborne is a wish fulfilment fantasy about the ways that its intended audience would hope that American soldiers would be heroes.

Not only that, it also facilitates that vision by removing the aspect of prisoners of war from play entirely. Soldiers can’t have committed those crimes in Medal of Honor’s vision of that day, because the game has no concept of the prisoner of war. It’s a vision of WWII unburdened by the reality of the Geneva Convention. Boyd Travers doesn’t take prisoners, not because he is cruel, but because that’s not even part of the language of play. That is the soft play area of history that David Olusoga describes at work. The field of war is flattened. Anything is made permissible. How many headshots did you get?