Battlefield 1 is in no way shape or form a historically accurate depiction of WW1, if it were, we’d have less Tanks, less fully automatic machine guns and a lot more French and Russians. So I am aware of this when I say that the racial diversity shown in the game is completely inaccurate, here is why.
I will primarily be focusing on Britain and Germany as they are the two who have the least accurate depictions in the game. The Otto Man Empire is correctly displayed as Turks and Arabs, DICE has stated that the Harlem Hellfighters is what the the American faction is based upon and therefore are all black, Austro-Hungaria is was infact the most diverse amry in WW1, with ethnicities such as solvaks, slovinians, romainians and even some italians, but all of them were white, DICE did seem to get this right though.
The British did have colonies in Africa and they did use Africans in the war, but not in Europe. They were in fact opposed to the idea of using africans, but the idea of using a 1 million black man army was actually presented, but never followed through. Next up is the Indian Medic, over 100 000 Indians did serve in France and Belgium, but when you take into count the 8.9 million troops that Britain did use during the war, they are still a minority.
Next up is the German Empire, which also had colonies in Africa, the Caribbean and Asia. Little is know about how many Blacks actually served in WW1 for Germany, but what is known about them indicates that they were of such a rarity that you’d have a very hard time finding one with a rifle in hand. DICE did only make one of the 4 classes black, but this is still an incorrect representation as the uniform that the Scout uses is that used in the Western front, there are 5 known cases of Germans serving in Europe, of which 2 of them were kettle drommers and one one part of one such band. Germany did in fact use blacks to keep the peace in its African colonies and even then they were a minority compared to the 11 million in total sent there to defend all of it’s colonies.
In conclusion I have no idea who did research into the races of each of the armies in the game, but they should be fired. If you did it to show how progressive you are as a studio I want to congratulate you on being being very disrespectful towards the actual soldiers of World War 1.
A very easy solution to this issue is to simply have us as the player choose what race we want to be for each of the classes in the game you had the option in the Alpha and Beta.
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