Everybody is just rushing
forward headlessly. Where are the NCOs? Where are the officers guiding
them, controlling the units, doing their best to keep people together? I'm Alexander Watson.
I'm professor of history at Goldsmiths, University of London. I'm an expert on the First World War. I've written three books. And today we're going to
be looking at battle scenes in First World War movies
to judge how real they are. In August 1914, cavalry plays
quite an important role. We tend to think of the First World War as being entirely static, but
it did start off very mobile. The Germans storm through Belgium, and they occupy a large
chunk of northeastern France. Some of the cavalry was
equipped with swords. This was one of the things
that they were trained to do. Key omission from how
these British cavalrymen are presented is that
none of them have rifles. And that's a big mistake. Because while British cavalry
were trained to charge like they're portrayed doing here, they were also trained to scout, and they were also trained
to act as mounted infantry. So they would dismount, and they would be able
to defend a position or work around to the flank of a position. So they've got multiple roles, and that was actually
what made them so useful. So this idea that the film is
going to hammer into our heads that cavalry are obsolete at this point is actually not true. All right, so this is the point that everything gets ridiculous. What they have done is they've
taken their machine guns and they've put them in a
forest all aimed at their camp. And there are six machine guns here. Six machine guns was the allowance for an entire German regiment in 1914. German regiment was around 3,000 men. So this is the number of machine
guns that would be expected to support 3,000 men. In reality, in 1914, you
had about seven machine guns for every 2 kilometers of ground. You wouldn't have
arranged six machine guns behind three trees. This is the literal
definition of overkill. As a cavalryman, if you're confronted by an entire regiment's
worth of machine guns, or even just one, which
would be sufficient, why would you keep on charging towards it? That makes no sense. What you would do is you
would veer off to the left or to the right. You would get into cover. There's plenty of forest here. And then you would use your
training as mounted infantry to dismount and try and take these machine guns from the flank. Also, as well, cavalry in a forest, if you charge into a forest on a horse, you're going to break the horse's legs. This is a really, really bad idea. Three out of 10? This is a great opening. It's really good to see the smoke that they've got in no man's land. This is 1916. The French infantry
are going in to attack. In order to screen their infantry from machine-gun fire, rifle fire, the French would lay smoke. They'd put smoke shells into no man's land so that their troops could come forward without easily being seen and
without easily being aimed at. And we've got an officer who
is actually leading the men. This guy is desperately trying to maintain control of
his troops, to guide them, to show which direction they need to go. It's great to see. It's so often missed from
First World War films. So, the uniforms in this
scene are very authentic. And what he's wearing on his
head is an Adrian helmet. The French army was
the first of the armies to introduce proper head
protection for its troops. And that was because head injuries in the first year of
the war were a really, really serious strain on manpower. And so having this head protection lowered injuries, lowered fatalities. It's a pretty light helmet. A bullet would penetrate it.
But it would protect soldiers. It could protect soldiers from shrapnel. This is an Adrian helmet
from the First World War. This is a medical corps helmet. The badges on the front were different depending on what arm
the soldier belonged to. You can see this is a medical corps one because it's got a
snake and a staff on it. Key thing is the ridge. The ridge, it turns out, was really useful for protecting against
the airburst from shells, for, like, concussion. I think it was deliberate. I think they were basing it
on a fire brigade helmet, but it turned out really, really well. So, this attack is
realistically portrayed too. The men are trying to keep spaced out. And that was really, really important. All armies told men, when you go forward, you need
to keep space between you, because if you clumped together, then you presented a perfect
target for a machine gun. So keeping spaced out was a
really key aspect of survival. The other thing that you see
these French soldiers doing is using the terrain for cover. They're going in and out of the dips in order to move forward and protect themselves
from machine-gun fire and the really
violent-looking artillery fire that's coming down on them. The one thing that it misses, it's got the French infantry
all armed with rifles. And by this point in the war, by mid-1916, the French had already
developed a light machine gun. I'd give this an eight out of 10. We don't think of watches
as weapons of war, but they really, really
were in the First World War. If you were going to have a
successful attack by 1917, everything had to be synchronized. The first wave needed to go over together, followed then afterwards
by the second wave. But above all, you needed to synchronize with the artillery behind you. That's something that a
lot of filmmakers forget, that infantry didn't
simply act on their own. They acted in combined arms
with an artillery bombardment. So getting that timing right
was really, really crucial. And we see that with the
officer looking at his watch. That's a great start to the scene. Officer: You can't possibly
make it that way, mate. Are you bloody insane? There is some historical
context to this scene. The battle of the Somme, huge battle. Half a million casualties on both sides. Took place in the second half of 1916. And the Germans really suffered badly. And they decided to withdraw their lines back to stronger positions in early 1917. And the backstory here is that the British army is pursuing them. This is a temporary trench, so that's why there aren't any sandbags. It's simply been dug to
protect the assaulting troops. This is meant to take place on the Somme or just beyond the Somme battlefield. And the ground there was really chalky. It was known to be white and chalky, and they've really represented
that well in the film. Officer: No, no, no, no! I never understand why
he goes over the parapet. In a First World War trench, you've got kind of two mounds of earth, one behind it and one in front of it. The one in front of
it's called the parapet. That's the one that
soldiers will shoot over it. The other one is called parados. And that was actually
built slightly higher than the parapet, and the reason for that was that if a soldier put
his head up over the parapet and if there wasn't any earth behind him, then he would be --
you'd have the horizon. He'd be easily seen. Now, there's going to be an attack, and all of these troops are
going to go over the parapet. Why doesn't he just
climb over the parados? There's nobody there. He could simply run unimpeded
without any problems. He'd even get some cover from the guys going over the parapet. If you send your men forward
without any artillery support, everybody is going to die. They didn't send men over like this. The guidelines that the
army releases in early 1917 is that when you advance, you need to advance with the artillery, and you have what's
called a creeping barrage. And what a creeping barrage
was, was a line of shells, which would pummel the ground
in front of the infantry and move forward at set times. And they did that in order
to clear no man's land of any defenders, so you
need to be rid of them, and then moving into the trenches to keep the defenders' heads down, which you desperately needed to do if everyone wasn't going to
be machine-gunned to death. So, by this point, April 1917, you're going to only go forward with a creeping barrage, generally. You're not going to do it any other way. And that's just absent from here. Everybody is just rushing
forward headlessly. If they actually get to the German lines, which they're clearly not going to do because they haven't got
any artillery support, but what are they going
to do once they're there? Where are the NCOs? Where are the officers guiding
them, controlling the units, doing their best to keep people together? The helmets that they used
were called Brodie helmets, and they were above all designed to protect against shrapnel. Because if you think about the position that these soldiers are in, they're actually defended
very well on either side by the trench itself. Trenches really were very
effective at protecting soldiers. It's only when soldiers leave the trenches that they become extremely vulnerable. Where they are vulnerable, though, is on the top of their heads. And so that was why you had this kind of battle-bowler-type arrangement,
with the hardened steel and the rim around it to
protect the head above all. That was why they were designed like this. I'd give it a four. [officers shouting] You hear them shouting in
German, "To arms, to arms." And then this machine gun opens up. And that seems to me very, very plausible. And then they switch on a searchlight, which was pretty common
on the eastern front. You'd have searchlights
you could switch on to illuminate the front of your defenses. This is representing the
so-called Christmas battles of early 1917. And this is a unit called
the Latvian Riflemen. They were a nationalist
Latvian unit that were raised and that served in the
imperial Russian army operating up on the north
of the eastern front in what today is Latvia. And this was a really marshy area, so it wasn't possible to
dig trenches in this area. This is the eastern front. This
is different from the west. When the Germans took it in 1915, what they did was they built a long wall made of sand and wood,
which they fortified. And you can see that really well. The other aspect of this
scene that's authentic is that when the Latvian rifles attacked this part of the German line, they had to get through the barbed wire. You had to find a way without blowing the barbed
wire up using artillery. And what we're seeing here is what the British army would've
called a Bangalore torpedo, which was like a pipe bomb. It was pushed underneath the wire, and then it had a fuse going
back, and then you'd light it. And that's what these
two guys are doing here. They've got these hardened
metal plates in front of them to try and protect them from bullets. And it's their job to light the fuse, which will then send off the wire. You see this wave of riflemen coming out disguised in snow camouflage. They would've been bedsheets or any white material that
they could've got hold of. The other thing that's
great about this clip is it reminds us that the
winter could actually be a point of really huge activity. If you want to take an area
that's a marsh, though, actually you can't do
that for most of the year. The only point at which you can do it is when the marsh freezes over. And that's what happened in January 1917. And that was when these
Latvian troops went forward and attacked this German line. They could suddenly get over the marsh. What you see is the main character, he's dropping to the ground, he's taking cover behind a corpse as the machine gun moves towards him. And then you see a line
of soldiers falling, one after the other, from right to left. And it's clear that the machine gun is traversing back away from him. And he leaps up, and he moves to the left away from the machine gun's fire. And this is what gives him the opportunity to throw a hand grenade
and destroy the gun. And it's a really neat way of showing how an experienced combat troop would be very alert to what was going on, to where the machine gun was firing. And veteran troops did learn
ways how to deal with it. It's part of the learning process that goes on in the First World War. It's just such a nice human detail that they've managed to get
this far, right to the wall, in part thanks to the snow
because the marsh is frozen, but then they can't
easily get up this slope because it's icy. And so they're using
their bayonets as ice axes in order to carve some
sort of foothold in it. You can see the desperation there. And it's just this tiny little detail that just makes this scene
so totally plausible. I think this is fantastic. I give this a 10. So, this clip portrays
a fictional naval battle between a Russian destroyer and a German armored
cruiser in the Baltic Sea. What's hinted at in the clip but what maybe doesn't come
through as well as it could is that these two ships are
of a massively different size. There's literally nothing
this Russian destroyer could have done to hurt this cruiser. Some of them were equipped with torpedoes, and that potentially could have done. But as becomes clear in this film, this particular ship
is equipped with mines. So there really isn't any defense that this ship has got
against the Friedrich Carl. The cruiser has multiple guns, but the biggest on it, 21 centimeters. If those 21 centimeters
hit the Russian destroyer, it's going to sink, or at the very least it's going to have its
infrastructure wiped off it. It's going to be a huge amount of damage. Huge German shell hits this gun tower, and it's not even that
the gun tower goes down. The gun is still in working order. There's nothing realistic
about this at all. You'd be very unlikely to
have combat this close either. The German armored
cruiser would've destroyed the Russian ship before
it got anywhere near it. It is true that the Friedrich
Carl was sunk by a mine. If a German ship hit a mine,
you would get an explosion, but down near the waterline. There would be no reason
to have this huge explosion that they've produced on
the bridge or on the deck. That doesn't make any sense. There was an explosion, but
it sank really, really slowly. It didn't explode in flames. And in the end, the Germans managed to
rescue all but eight people. This idea that there was a
fight between a destroyer and the armed cruiser,
that's not the case. I'll give it a two. The battle itself is pure make-believe. Thanks so much for watching. If you want to see more
videos in this series, click on the link above.
