Wonder Woman (2017)'s portrayal of World War I in particular has significant differences from the historical record.
- There's a boat named "Édith Piaf" at one point when the team gets close to the front. She was nearing three years old in November 1918, so certainly not famous yet.
- It is mentioned throughout the final act that the Armistice Negotiations were taking place with Imperial Germany under Kaiser Wilhelm II. What isn't mentioned is that Germany was in the middle of a revolution by the end of 1918 (inspired by Red October that had broken out in 1917) and that the armistice was actually proclaimed and negotiated after the abdication of the Kaiser and the proclamation of what came to be known as The Weimar Republic under Social Democrat President Friedrich Ebert. Indeed this was the very source of the infamous propaganda used by Nazis of the "stab-in-the-back" myth (spread by Erich Ludendorff, incidentally)note .
- The film also implies, via Ares, that the Armistice negotiated and imposed on Germany was of such a magnitude that it would create another war by itself. This is considered Dated History by most historians, and it was indeed part of Nazi propaganda as they wanted to write-off the Weimar Republic, and democracy itself, as doomed to failure. Most historians today no longer consider the Armistice and the later Versailles Treaty as being decisive determining causes of the next war.note The Armistice was necessary because of the Hundred Days Campaign that brought great advances to the Allies and put them on course to occupying Germany, and likewise a revolution and mutiny had broken out inside Germany in 1918 that led to the Kaiser's abdication.
- The film's context and background is implied to be the time of Erich Ludendorff's Spring Offensive, Imperial Germany's last smash-and-grab to defeat and conquer the Western Front, making their greatest advances. The film implies that the armistice and peace negotiations are what is leading to the end of the war, rather than Ferdinand Foch's Hundred Days Campaign, the great Allied counteroffensive that brought them to the gates of Germany and actually caused them to surrender, alongside the collapse of Austria-Hungary which left Germany exposed from the south and a revolution within Germany itself.
- Prisoners of war were treated fairly in the Great War, much better than in WWII. They definitely weren't experimented on by Imperial Germany.
- The plot of the film revolves around German use of poison gas, helped along by Ares. In real life Germany was the first nation to use intentionally Deadly Gas as a combat weapon, at Second Ypres on 22 April 1915. However, the French Army had attacked German positions the previous year with tear gas containing ethyl bromoacetate and chloroacetone, which though relatively ineffective due to the delivery method, actually are almost three times more toxic than chlorine. British newspapers reported German casualties to chemical attacks as early as November 1914. The French also pioneered the use of phosgene gas, which the French and British often blended with chlorine to make a load called "White Star"; the Austrians also used a phosgene-chlorine blend against the Italians in 1916. Even the United States had made its fair share of chemical attacks by the end of the war.
In short, Germany's notoriety for gas attacks is mostly Moral Myopia on the part of the Entente Powers: the only major participants with clean hands when it came to chemical weapons were Italy (which went on to use chemical weapons in its colonial wars under Mussolini), Russia (which lacked the industry to even supply gas masks in sufficient numbers until after Stalin's industrialization programs took effect), the Balkan and Eastern European states, and the Ottoman Empire. - The German plane Steve steals and eventually crashes near the Amazon Island is a Fokker E.III. Though the E.III dominated the skies of WWI in 1915, by November of 1918 (when the movie takes place) it was obsolete and was no longer in service.
- Erich Ludendorff is depicted as a murderously ruthless commander whose only thought is winning the war, no matter the cost to civilians or his own men. He's also killed by Diana near the end of the film under the mistaken assumption he's her enemy Ares. The real Ludendorff was a highly competent but incredibly ambitious officer who ignored others' opinions and micro-managed things, but enough of a realist to know that Germany would at best hold expanded territory after the war. It was Ludendorff who gave the German Navy authorization to begin unrestricted submarine warfare in February 1917, which had the direct effect of bringing the United States into the war, and his desire to have command of everything meant that he was ultimately made the scapegoat of Germany's surrender. In his later years he became a pagan, actively worshiping the Nordic god Wotan (Odin) and co-writing several books with his second wife that blamed most of the world's troubles on Judeo-Christianity, and lived until 1937 as a fairly major player in postwar German politics.
- While Etta Candy claims women are expected to earn voting rights that are simply given to men, many British men were also denied the franchise at the time the movie is set. There were still property requirements for the franchise in 1917, which left around a third of men in the United Kingdom without a vote; the extension of voting rights to all women 21 or older one year later in 1918 also granted men 19 or older the vote, explicitly as a reward for military service.
