The Siege of Jadotville

Conor Quinlan, who plays P.J. in the movie, is the real-life grandson of Commandant Pat Quinlan, one of the main heroic characters in the movie. Conor (as P.J.) gets to utter the line, "Quinlan doesn't know what he's doing. He's going to get us killed."

The film's director, Richie Smyth, was adamant that the cast should all be given proper military training. The actors went through weeks of intense training at a boot camp in South Africa, undergoing the same kind of training that the original soldiers would have gone through. At one point, Smyth even put Jamie Dornan in charge of the other actors, so he could "create the dynamic" of leading men.

The commandant's son, Leo Quinlan shared a radio log with the film's director--a radio log the commandant had smuggled out of the Congo containing information that even the Irish army had not seen.

The old, hard-to-come-by-but-historically-accurate, Swedish Carl Gustav m/45 sub machine guns, used by the actors portraying the Irish troops in the movie, were procured in South Africa. By checking the serial numbers, it was confirmed that some of the firearms were the very same guns used in the Congo conflict.

The battle at Jadotville has long been fodder for conspiracy theories due to controversial U.N. leadership errors. Jadotville was easily isolated from the main force in distant Elizabethville by closing the Lufira bridge, and the total absence of U.N. combat aircraft in the theater made air cover impossible; these two factors were easily deduced and proved critical during the siege. The stated purpose of the mission was to safeguard white settlers in the Jadotville area, but Commandant Quinlan discovered not only that the settlers didn't want protection, but that many of them were hostile towards the U.N. presence. U.N. leaders rebuffed Quinlan when he tried to discuss the precarious tactical situation and ambiguous mission objectives, and did not notify him in advance of the raids in Elizabethville. Once the siege began, a hastily assembled and lightly armed U.N. force sent to the Lufira bridge was prematurely withdrawn even though the enemy gendarmes they encountered were poorly prepared and were taking heavy casualties; the respite allowed Katangese forces to dig in and stop the U.N. relief column that subsequently arrived. Finally, the water airlifted to the troops by helicopter was contaminated with diesel fuel and was undrinkable.Although these errors may have been the result of simple (and pervasive) incompetence by U.N. leadership, some conspiracy theorists have accused the U.N. of purposefully undermining the Irish contingent.