Anyone - which is almost everyone who is reading this - should be able to understand that this film was made in a biased way in which it persaudes the viewers to sympathise with the characters such as Morant, Witton, Major Thomas and Handcock (to some extent).
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Biased? Must not be a bad thing. Look at the votes this movie's received. Too bad so few have voted.
shareI've been reading some of these posts, and I'm going to chime in and remind some folks of a few things.
First, this is an over-looked movie for certain, and the ensemble cast and Mr. Beresfords film adaptation of the play is really well done, in my opinion. But this was an obscure Australian movie (by Hollyweird standards) and it is only an accident of history that this film played very much in the U.S. at all. Michael Cimino's "Heaven's Gate" tanked at the box office and all the pre-sold theaters were scrambling to find a movie to replace it and they happily snapped up this little gem. Looking back, this movie is a real jewel from the recent 'Golden Age' of Australian Film production....and rightly so, but don't expect a lot of Americans to have seen it and comment on it. I myself am an amateur historian, and therefore an war film buff, so I will exclude myself from the reckoning.
(Don't mistake me for one of those Americans who denigrates things 'American' to imply sophistication; I'm proud of my country and my heritage, but the liberal media and the workings of Hollyweird and Los Angeles give lots of people the impression that ALL Americans are vapid, shallow and have NO sense of history, which is simply not true.)
Second, this film deals with a little known war at the turn of the century in South Africa, that fore-shadowed the way things were going to be done in later wars. (imagine the carnage of World War I...these poor guys had NO IDEA what was coming) The Boers of the Northern Transvaal were wily Dutch Farmers who were outgunned and outnumbered by the Brits but managed to give a good account of themselves only by determination and some creative thinking in warfare. Guerrilla warfare was born in this war and the previously frowned upon methods of sabotage, camoflage, ambush, sneak attack and terror tactics were standard procedure for desperate men that were defending their homes and farms and always short on supplies. The Brits replied in kind with forming their own flying brigade of 'bushmen' by recruiting Australians and New Zealanders to form the Bushveldt Carbineers.
Thirdly, atrocities were committed by both sides, and the Carbineers were given express orders NOT to take some surrendering Boers prisoners. The general consensus amongst most troops was merely to ignore the white flag and shoot them down when they came into range. The fact that Morant took them into custody and then executed them is splitting hairs, in my opinion, unless the issue was 'plausible deniability'.
You can argue that Morant, Witton and Handcock were following orders and fighting the enemy the way that he fought them, and you'd be right. Many folks argue that committing atrocities and hiding behind legal orders is not a defense, but when you consider that this all happened in 1900-1901, fully 45 years before the Nuremberg Charter, Following orders from legal authority was a defensible argument at that time, so judging them by TODAYS standards is unfair. Morant had a defensible argument.....provided that he could PROVE he had orders to this effect. Unfortunately he couldn't, and THAT is why he was on trial. That, and the fact that an example had to be made.
Which brings us to the next point.
Fourth, after the Boer conflict was over, the Brits were eager to put the whole mess behind them. The Boers were making a stink over how the Brits treated their men of the Kommando units with summary executions and General Kitchener had to back-pedal and claim that he never ordered his men to do that. The three Australians were hung out to dry as an example and to appease the Boers who the Brits wanted to develop close ties to instead of the Germans who were more racially akin to the Dutch Boers and had ambitions in Africa also.
Fifth, the trial was a farce at best. The conclusion was a foregone one from the highest levels from the start, and only the stubborn and remarkably able defense given by Major Thomas kept the trial going for as long as it did. The Defense team was stymied from the beginning: Witnesses for the defense were unavailable, Petition to the Crown was not allowed, Codonation was declined despite the fact that Witton, Handcock and Morant likely saved the Courts Martial staff's lives during the Kommando raid, and Kitchener himself declined to appear to be questioned despite the subpoena.
Ultimately, we all KNOW that the three, in fact, did what they were accused of; They did kill the Boers and Handcock knocked off the Reverend who was likely a Boer spy. The point is, that they were given permission by Kitchener to fight the Boers as they fought them and later were summarily used as scapegoats when the results of the orders became known.
Where does ultimate responsibility lie? Should General officers like Kitchener be allowed to run for cover while the soldiers sworn to carry out orders pay the price in the aftermath? And the real, bitter irony is, is that had they refused to follow orders, they could easily have faced a courts martial identical to this one and received the same sentence for 'dereliction of duty in the face of the enemy': death. What's a soldier to do?
Lastly, it was revealed in official documents after the war that Kitchener's own BROTHER was guilty of similar 'crimes' of summarily executing Boers, but he was never brought up on charges. Legal analysts argue that 'Two wrongs don't make a right', but clearly executing one set of men for 'crimes' and turning a blind eye to another case is not exactly justice either.
Morant, Witton and Handcock did WRONG, no question about it, but why and who was really to blame is another issue. Morant was mad with grief over the murder and mutilation of close friend Captain Hunt, and only too happy to shoot Boer after that. Handcock was a wild fellow with a checkered past who had a simplistic view of the whole war: fight the Boer the way he fights us. Following rules while the enemy does what ever he wants is crazy. And Witton, well he struggles with doing the right thing, but once he is told that they were ordered by Kitchener to do the deed, he follows his orders.
I think that all of this was taken into account at the trial, which is why Witton is given 'life in prison' as his sentence. Witton was eventually pardoned by the intervention of the Australian government and one of the results of this trial, is that Australian soldiers were henceforth only to be tried by Australian courts. This statute stood for nearly 100 years before being recently overturned.
Nice post. It gives a good summary of a lot of the relevant issues...
One comment I have is regarding the execution of prisoners. According to the Manual of Military Law (I think the 1901 edition was used in the trial) there is no issue with ignoring a white flag or refusing to accept a surrender.
If a surrender is accepted though, the prisoner is entitled to the full protection of those to whom he has surrendered etc. etc. Surrenders were generally not accepted as the Boer were known to either:
-Say they were surrendering... then shoot those accepting the surrender as they got close, or;
-Surrender and get a hot meal into them or have their injuries treated before being let go since most units had no capacity for prisoners.
The issue with the Visser case was that the prisoner was taken and held for the night before being executed as a spy. This was in itself 'wrong' since:
-He'd been taken into custody as a prisoner already, a day earlier.
-The required ranks weren't present to come to a legal verdict on that front and;
-The evidence of being a spy was flimsy at best and fabricated at worst (Morant accused Visser of wearing Hunt't pants or tunic or whatever... at a time when he was wearing them himself!).
A similar issue arose with the 12 Boers he, Witton and Handcock were accused of killing. They had been taken into custody sometime earlier and were, at the time of their meeting with the missionary Heese, reportedly digging their own graves.
Morant was, in my opinion, deserving of the punishment he received... however the legal basis of it was as flimsy as his own verdict and execution of Visser.
Great movie though
B
I think it comes through well and even if the film is 'biased' toward the Australians it does bring out the grey areas quite nicely. Morant as rightly pointed out by Major Bolton was not present at the death of Captain Hunt and could not have known how, why or WHO desecrated his friend's corpse (apparently African witchdoctors who were known to take body parts for use in their potions - the owner of the farm, Vijoen, who had also been killed was apparently mutilated in a similar way!) The issue of killing prisoners is difficult - similar to stories of sadistic NCO's or hated officers being 'accidentally shot' during battle by vengeful rankers but woe to a soldier who shot his NCO or officer outside of battle. In the heat of battle the death of the surrendering enemy can sometimes be excused (though apparently it didn't and hasn't helped British cavalry general Banastre Tarleton) but to take the enemy prisoner and then execute them afterwards creates extremely difficult complications. The issue of the court stacking the deck against the Australians is matched by Morant and Handcock holding back the truth about Handcock shooting Hess/Heese. I think what comes out is that no one is really innocent - all are guilty but some behave with seemingly more honor than others.
"It is not enough to like a film. You must like it for the right reasons."
- Pierre Rissient
It's hard not to sympathize with three low ranking officers being executed by their own government for following orders, especially since that same government started the war in order to grab the gold and diamond mines in Transvaal.
shareThose guys pretty much did what they were accused of. Their defense was however, based on the idea that it was an unfair guerilla war and the enemy didn't follow 'rules of war' and also that they were ordered to do it by much higher command. They may have taken this order a little too seriously, but I don't think so myself. It was the missionary incident that really got them and I think it could have been handled better if the missionary were simply detained until the news his cohorts gave him went stale. Those guys weren't clean, but were they fighting a war or not? It's pretty unblievable that Witton got a stiff prison sentence for only defending himself. He was very bitter afterward (I don't blame him) and didn't speak of it much, but he did write the book. Even guilty it can't be denied that they were singled out to make a public show for the world opinion poll. "See how fair we English are? We executed our own men for breaking the rules."
shareI'm not going to read through all of the replies to your posting before replying myself. I apologize if I say what has already been said by someone else.
As brilliant a film as 'Breaker Morant' is, I think it is to a degree anti-British polemic. By making us sympathize with the poor fellows on trial, we feel angrier towards the British brass who want scapegoats.
Yes, we know that.
shareTrue, but I didn't buy into it because killing is always wrong, who cares what orders they were given, they shouldn't have been there in the first place!
shareOf course it's biased, it's basing it's material from biased sources!
That doesn't detract from the film at all. In fact Witton is the only person you could claim is "innocent" as his only crime was shooting a Boer in self-defense. (Which honestly he should have been cleared on all counts)
Despite the bias, the film still asks great questions. Major Thomas is right that in a guerrilla war, they should be given specific instructions. If you have little to no outside control then barbaric things will happen. I would argue that Morant's actions, as wrong as they were, was no worse than burning farmhouses, and putting people to die a slow and miserable death in a concentration camp.
The movie was also relevant to what happened in Vietnam. Where similar atrocities happened by soldiers of both sides. Cases of red cross marked helicopters dropping off ammo to soldiers in the field under the joking title of "preventative medicine".
It's an outstanding movie on all aspects. I feel that Woodward should have earned an Oscar for his performance.
Sorry for returning to this one but probably worth clearing up on what Witton was convicted of. As an officer of technically the same rank as Morant and senior to Hancock he was deemed to have been party to the executions. Morant didn't join the firing squad either but he was convicted for ordering it, as Morant's peer Witton was held responsible. This was also why Captain Taylor was dragged into it, as an officer he was deemed to be in charge of what was happening. The only reason he got off was because as the intelligence officer he didn't have a command role so couldn't have it pinned on him. The other 3 were leading the troops. The fact Witton was locked up and Morant/Hancock shot is the proof everyone takes that although acquitted of the Hesse shooting, it was that shooting they were really punished for.
shareI don't see it as biased at all. The film shows that they were guilty.
share