I'm going to preface this by saying that this is not a discussion about how Marvel is an alternate universe. I realise this, because we do not have super powers.

But there have been multiple attempts to try to put Captain America into a cohesive timeline, and it just doesn't work. There was some really weird, really basic knowledge fail somewhere along the line, and none of it makes sense.


Let's start with this, which is what I'd originally been using: http://www.filmbuffonline.com/FBOLNewsreel/wordpress/2012/05/13/a-marvel-cinematic-universe-timeline-2-0/

7 December 1941: The day that will live in infamy. This happens, we assume, as it did. The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour, and the US ends its neutral stance in the war.

24 December: Bucky enlists.

March 1942: Schmidt finds the Tesseract in Tønsberg, Norway.

14 June 1943: Steve successfully enlists. Finally.

Now, here's where it starts to get really wonky.

15 June 1943: Steve arrives at Lehigh. That's less than twelve hours later. He would have been shipped off quickly, but not THAT quickly. Even if a platoon was going out to Lehigh the very next day, Steve would not have been in that one. He'd have been in the next, whenever that was. He'd have had about two or three days to get his affairs in order before disappearing into the cause.

Not only that, Bucky only just now gets shipped out. That's eighteen months of training. The 107th (which didn't even exist during the war) was infantry. Infantry trained for ten weeks during this time. There were divisions that spent two years in training, but those were experimental divisions, like Airborne. What was Bucky doing Stateside for so long? I really want to know!

21 June: Steve's been at Lehigh for a week when Erskine picks him. That week... really doesn't match up with what we've seen. You don't just go straight into the assault course; you learn how to drill, how to march, how to fold your shirts and make your bed. The first week is when you learn how to follow orders. There would be some basic physical training and evaluation, but no assault courses. No weapons training. What the hell were they doing at Lehigh?

22 June: Steve gets all super-soldiered up. We know this, because the newspaper article we see, with him holding the cab door, is dated 23 June. So, he's undergone a week of training, saves a kid, and then gets the choice to become a lab rat or a dancing monkey. Did Steve even finish basic? I'm not so sure that he did, since the very next thing we see is the USO show.

After this, the time jumps up to

2 November 1943: The 107th goes up against Hydra. Two hundred men go out, fifty come back. First off, no. Not even a timeline thing, but this makes no sense. The 107th, if it were a real thing, would have had about 3000 guys at minimum. Perhaps it was Baker company, first battalion, of the 107th that went out. Still, where's the rest of them?

3 November: Steve and Phillips have an argument about rescuing the people trapped behind enemy lines. Thirty miles behind enemy lines. In Austria. In 1943. That's a lot earlier than we ever got to Austria. We finally made it that far in April 1945. Less than a month later, VE-Day. VJ-Day followed in June, and then the war was over. But this was 1943. Yes, there are superheroes and supervillains, but up until this point, the only super powers were Axis. That should have kept us even further from Austria, rather than letting us rock right up to Hitler's doorstep a year and a half early.

4 November: Steve leads everyone back to the base, wherever it is. Italy? Austria? I don't even know. Then they spend the rest of the war taking down Hydra.


Either way you look at it, it doesn't really add up. Either the Allied forces had some other super soldiers we didn't know about, or Steve and the Howling Commandos won the war in less than a month. One would assume that, since the key dates (Pearl Harbour Day, VE-Day, VJ-Day) are in the comics as they are in real life, then they're the same in the movies. I don't think there's really any way to fix or fanwank this, but it's just really weird that the writers would change so much like this. It seems to me that if they were already that far into Austria when they were, the war was basically won.

As a war movie, Captain America makes absolutely no sense at all. It's a great comic movie, but I don't actually know what's going on in it.