Ugh. What are they doing?!
You might use them to help clear a trench,
but the main weapon you'd use would be grenades.
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.
of effort on their trenches.
They've brought their heavy weaponry to defend the trenches,
but they've forgotten to put any barbed wire down
at all in no-man's-land.
You would've had loads and loads of barbed wire on it.
These, kind of, shafts of light that are being fired
are tracer bullets, or incendiary bullets.
And there were tracers used in the First World War,
but they were mainly used for anti-aircraft work,
and by aircraft as well.
They weren't used by frontline machine guns.
They would expose your position,
which you really didn't want to do,
because you'd bring down artillery and mortar onto you.
And second reason, it would actually be a war crime.
Using incendiary bullets against enemy troops
was a war crime by the standards of 1914 to '18.
There's another error there.
You've got a church in the background,
and that would be the first thing
to be knocked down by heavy artillery,
because it would be a great observation post.
You just didn't have high towers directly behind the lines.
Three out of 10.
Come on, push forward!
One thing that I do appreciate about this scene is that
you do actually have an officer attempting to lead the men
and keep some sort of control
and tell them where they're going and direct them.
That's often forgotten.
Gas! Gas! [warning gong chiming]
Gas! [warning gong chiming]
OK, so this is all wrong.
I mean, firstly, who brings a warning gong
into no-man's-land when you're on attack?
You know, they did use warning gongs to signal
that there was a gas attack, but in the trenches.
Gas was used, famously, in the First World War.
It was used from 1915. They started with chlorine.
The Germans introduced phosgene, which was more lethal.
It's pretty light, slightly yellowish,
so it wasn't that easy to detect, either.
But gas was an offensive weapon, and that's because
both chlorine and phosgene are heavier than air.
So if you're trying to take a trench,
then if you plaster it with phosgene or chlorine,
that gas is going to sink down into the trench
and then down into the dugouts as well.
Very, very dangerous for defending troops.
Against attacking troops in the open, though,
you wouldn't use gas.
These troops are aboveground, not underneath,
but the gas sinks down.
And your own defending troops are, of course,
below the ground in trenches and dugouts.
So you're actually more likely to risk them
rather than hurt the attacking troops.
Phosgene, for example, it was lethal,
but it took a few hours
for soldiers to get really, really ill.
If you're being attacked by enemy soldiers,
really, you want an immediate impact,
before they get to your trench.
So as a result, you use shrapnel.
This isn't a plausible scenario that we're watching.
The scene is implausible, but we do get a really nice look
at a British PH helmet, which was a mid-war gas mask.
Unfortunately, he's wearing it wrongly.
You need an airtight seal for this to work effectively.
And the way that they did that was
they stuffed the bottom of the mask down their collars.
And he hasn't done that, so he's going to be in trouble
in a couple of hours' time.
This is really a three,
because they could at least get the gas mask fitting right.
You know?
You can feel the power
of these 1918 Saint-Chamond French tanks.
And on top of that, I love how they have them
looming through the smoke.
They're actually very vulnerable to artillery fire.
And so what the French did was
they would put down a smoke barrage, smoke shells,
in front of the tanks to obscure them,
and then they would come out toward the enemy trenches.
And that's really, really well represented.
So, there's problems as well
with how the Germans are behaving here.
The trench that they're defending
is actually a French trench,
and these French tanks are counterattacking.
And the thing about trenches is they were built
to defend one way.
So you'd have the fire step
opposite the enemy, facing the enemy.
You'd have the machine-gun emplacements
facing the enemy as well.
But in this trench, miraculously,
all of the fire steps, the defenses,
suddenly seem to be facing, if you like, the wrong way,
towards the French counterattackers.
And it wouldn't have happened.
In 1918, if you saw tanks coming towards you,
as a German soldier, the first thing you do
is you get your flare gun and you shoot a flare,
a signal flare, out over to alert the artillery behind you
to bring down a covering bombardment.
That's your best chance of survival,
the best chance to hold a trench.
And there's nothing of that here.
By 1918, the Germans have a number of nasty tricks
up their sleeves in order to fight tanks.
They've got light mortars, so-called minenwerfer,
which can be turned horizontal to fire directly at a tank.
They've even got specialized anti-tank weapons.
They've got anti-tank rifles, great, big, huge rifles
which would give this 13-millimeter shot out,
which could penetrate a tank's armor.
But these guys are just being presented
as pretty helpless riflemen.
Why would you stop and shoot?
These French tanks, they've got
a 75-millimeter cannon on them.
They're intended to take out strongpoints
and to take out artillery
which could be threatening the tank.
There's absolutely no reason
simply to shoot straight in front of them at this trench.
There's nothing really to be gained by that.
This is a 23-ton tank,
and it's got a 94-horsepower engine in it.
That's a smaller engine than your average modern estate car.
And that's pulling this huge, huge weight.
And if you stop, you might get stuck.
The thing about war in 1918
is that you keep moving all the time.
You keep moving, or you're killed.
So, this tank appears to be entering the trench network.
If a tank is that far down, it's very unlikely,
especially with these ones, which were very front-heavy
because of that big 75-millimeter gun,
it's very unlikely to get out again.
OK, now this is plausible.
If the tanks were separated from their infantry,
then German defenders were able to knock them out.
Now, what these guys are doing is,
they haven't got any weapon which can penetrate
the armor of the track tank.
So they're going for what's called a mobility kill.
They're blowing off the tracks using a hand grenade,
which will stop it, and then they're able to put
a hand grenade into one of the firing ports
and blow the crew to smithereens inside it.
That is how German infantry combated tanks in 1918.
It was one of the methods.
OK, stop. [sighs]
Ugh. What are they doing?!
The French have come in. They've got flamethrowers.
Flamethrowers were used. They were used from 1915 onwards.
The Germans introduced them.
The French had their own mobile flamethrowers as well.
They didn't carry a huge amount of liquid. That's one thing.
And they weren't used in this way, either.
You might use them to help clear a trench,
but the main weapon you'd use would be grenades.
But the bigger issue is you wouldn't have them
in the first wave like this.
What these French guys are doing is
they are creating an impenetrable wall of fire
through which no French troops can go.
Meanwhile, the Germans, who are retreating,
are going to get away.
They're going to re-entrench,
and they're going to shoot everybody down.
The chaos and the fear, there's a visceral sense here.
I mean, I think that is pretty realistic.
But this scene couldn't have happened in October 1918,
and that's actually misleading people
about the end of the First World War.
The fighting that's being portrayed here
may well have happened in the summer of 1918,
but for October 1918, it's gone.
The French and the British, they roll 100 miles
in the last three months of the war.
This is really, really mobile fighting,
but it's just not represented here.
So I'd give this, at most, a five out of 10.
So, here what we see is Manfred von Richthofen,
the famous Red Baron,
the No. 1 scoring fighter ace of the First World War.
He shot down 80 enemy airplanes.
And he's leading his Jagdgeschwader 1,
so his flight wing, fighter wing one.
And he was known as the Red Baron
because he painted his aircraft red.
This is his, I think, his final aircraft, a Fokker.
Fokker Triplane, the most famous aircraft he flew.
They did paint their aircraft
in these amazing bright colors.
The Germans had these wonderful reds
and yellows and patterns.
There wasn't any tactical reason for it.
It wasn't really about recognizing other pilots.
Some people say that Richthofen
painted his aircraft red to scare the enemy,
but really these German pilots did it because they could.
They liked it. So they did it.
It does give a sense of the sheer chaos.
In 1918, a quarter of the German air force,
of German fighter pilots, are shot down and killed.
That's how lethal this type of combat was.
You would see scenes like this in the Second World War,
particularly in and around,
I guess above, big cities,
with unmanned lighter-than-air balloons,
which were called barrage balloons.
And their purpose was to force enemy bombers
to fly higher,
because otherwise, they'd clip their wings
and get knocked out of the air
by the wires connecting these balloons to the ground.
You do get barrage balloons in the First World War,
but there's not so much use of them.
You wouldn't have them strung along
the Western Front like this.
So what you'd see on the Western Front
would be observation balloons.
The purpose was to
see over no-man's-land into enemy lines.
They had baskets underneath them.
You'd have an observer with binoculars.
And around the tether connecting the balloon to the ground,
there would also be a telephone cable.
And they were really, really important
in making sure that fire, the artillery fire, was accurate.
So it was really, really important to knock them down.
The thing is, is that
you'd only have two or three per sector.
Taking down these balloons
sounds like it should be pretty easy,
because they're full of highly flammable hydrogen.
But actually, it was really difficult,
and it was really, really dangerous.
If you fired a machine gun into one of these balloons,
it would pierce the balloon.
But the material was pretty tough.
And what you would get is simply
tiny machine-gun-bullet holes,
which a little bit of gas would seep out of,
but not enough to bring the balloon down in any way.
And it was very, very dangerous to do,
because around these balloons on the ground
were anti-aircraft weapons,
and First World War planes are vulnerable.
They don't have self-sealing fuel tanks.
So if the fuel tanks get hit, you've got petrol coming out.
They're made of canvas and wood.
It doesn't take a huge amount to bring them down.
With these anti-aircraft batteries
directly below the balloons,
most pilots would steer clear of them.
Very, very dangerous job, taking them down.
What this pilot is doing is firing a flare
at the balloon, a signal flare,
which then lights the gas
coming out of the machine-gun-bullet holes.
Now, I'm really doubtful that that actually would've worked.
It's kind of a nice idea, but flares are for signaling,
and I think most likely what would've happened
is that if you fired a flare at one of these balloons,
it simply would've bounced off.
It's a bit of a mix there,
but I was pleased that at least they show
that these balloons aren't easy to take down.
I'd give this a five.
There are around 85,000 Indian troops
who served on the Western Front during the First World War.
And they often get ignored,
so it's nice to see that recognized here.
The British Indian army
sent over an expeditionary force to the Western Front.
So in order to increase their manpower,
the British called over parts of
the Indian forces under their command.
Indian troops served on the Western Front,
actually, right through to 1918.
But the bulk of them in the infantry
were fighting on the Western Front in 1914 and 1915.
And this shows an action by the Lahore Division,
which had Sikh troops in it, in 1915.
Nice detail here, too.
This is a subedar-major.
Every battalion of Indian troops had one.
He was the highest-ranking Indian soldier
in an Indian battalion.
And these guys were very well-respected soldiers.
They would've been long-service soldiers
in their 40s or in their 50s.
And you can see him leading the soldiers on,
just as would've happened.
You have this aerial attack
which appears to come from behind them,
which in itself is odd,
by aircraft which are dropping bombs.
Now, there were ground-attack aircraft,
but not this early, in 1915.
There were aircraft which dropped bombs behind enemy lines
on things like rail stations
and targets of military significance.
But this idea that you had biplanes swooping down
at very low level and attacking ground troops,
it just didn't happen in 1915,
not least because these aircraft are very, very vulnerable.
They're very, very vulnerable to
machine-gun fire, rifle fire.
They're not moving that quickly, and they're not armored.
So airplanes kept pretty high up in 1915.
This just simply wouldn't have happened.
The Germans seem to be firing British weaponry.
There's a Lewis gun, a British light machine gun,
that they're firing, and they,
the Germans did use looted Lewis machine guns,
but not in 1915.
The Lewis machine gun still wasn't on the front
at the time this is going on.
The mortar, I think, is probably Second World War,
post-Second World War.
No one really knows. Even they don't know what's happening.
Oh, oh, and then the trench as well is rubbish.
You know, where's the parapet?
And where's the parados as well?
This is only going to bother someone like me.
I appreciate that.
But it's, nonetheless, this is not a good trench.
It's great to see Indian troops represented,
but they could have actually represented
what these men went through.
This is just fantasy.
This is a one.
This clip portrays
the morning of the 25th of April, 1915,
when Australian troops stormed ashore
on what later became called Anzac Beach at Gallipoli,
fighting the Turks, against a small band of defenders.
Not quite as small as shown in this film.
There were about 90 of them.
They've got the landscape right.
It was only a small beach these Australians ended up on,
and it was surrounded by high hills
with steep slopes and cliffs.
Attack!
The Turks only start firing
once the Australian soldiers get off the boats.
Why would you do that?
The Australians are in boats.
They've got nowhere to go. They haven't got any cover.
If they dive into the water, they're carrying heavy packs,
they are going to drown,
and they can't do anything to you at all.
So if you're a defender and you're facing an armada,
you start shooting before anyone gets out of the boat.
In reality, the Turks started shooting, of course,
when the boats came in rifle range.
The other big mistake are these machine guns
in the bows of these landing craft.
You're going to hit your own people!
Clearly, you're going to hit your own people.
Everyone is going to die,
and it's not going to be the Turks who kill them!
One thing about this scene as well
is that it exaggerates the bloodiness of the landing.
There were about 50 casualties on either side.
It wasn't as bloody as is being presented here.
So,
a three.
My favorite representation of the war
would be "Journey's End."
Not so much for any realism of battle scenes.
In some ways, that's actually less important.
But just for how
it so realistically represents
the tension and the claustrophobia
of waiting for an attack in the First World War.
Thanks so much for watching.
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