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.
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