Welcome to another Great War Battlefield 1 trailer analysis.
You guys liked the other one so much and we figured we do another one
about one about the two new expansion packs, the French and the Russian
content which are called "They Shall Not Pass" and "In The Name Of The Tsar"
This is really fun to talk about lesser known aspects of the war anyhow.
And as a little sort of insert here: Markus and I actually wrote a whole bunch of the codex that pop up on
on the screen for DICE.
Just want to put this out there.
Russian First
Our Trailer begins with the words of Andreevna Akhmatova, a famous Russian poet:
You will hear thunder and remember me, And think: she wanted storms.
The rim Of the sky will be the colour of hard crimson, And your heart, as it was then, will
be on fire.
A knife is drawn in anger.
The knife is actually a dagger, a Caucasian Cossack Dagger, so our protagonist here might
be a Caucasian Cossack.
We see an Armoured Train rushing through a snowy landscape.
It appears to be the Zaamurets.
The Zaamurets was a monster, even for an armoured train with up to 16mm of armour, powered by
two 60-hp gasoline engines and armed with 76.2 mm Putilov guns.
It saw a lot of service and redesigns, first developed for the Imperial Russian forces
in 1916, then the Red Guards captured it and in the end it was used by the Czech Legion
to cross Siberia under the name Orlik.
Now, you might think that Armoured Trains are a pretty weird idea but in World War 1 and the
Russian Civil War they played a major role, and no you can not just blow up the tracks
and walk away if the tracks are the only supply line for you and your enemy.
Another thing we can spot are the roundpole fences, which are typical for Scandinavia
but are also common in some Baltic regions, mainly in Estonia.
Two Russian Sikorsky Ilya Muromets are flying through the clouds.
The Russian air force had those powerful four-engined bombers pretty much from the start of the war.
Those planes could transport up to 16 passengers, they had a bedroom and even a toilet.
The biggest versions could transport a bomb load of 800kg – which is a hack of a lot.
That's like 1800 pounds –
And defend themselves with 9 machine guns.
With an armour of up to 5mm those were the first flying fortresses.
It was also the first airplane with an enclosed cockpit.
We see the Galician battlefield and what looks like Putilov-Garford armoured cars.
They had a 4x2 wheeled chassis they were more like trucks than cars.
Around 48 saw action on the Eastern Front and were used as shock troops, with a single
76mm mountain gun and two Maxim Guns on the sides.
They might be going a bit too fast here, since their underpowered engines really only allowed up to
10mp/h, that's 16km/h - on good roads and not the muddy Galician countryside.
Generally, armoured cars played an important role on the Eastern Front, you might've heard
of the illustrious Belgian Armoured Car Division that served there for example. The Germans
also used them in Romania.
Galicia itself was an extremely important battlefield several times during the war.
At the beginning, the Russians and Austro-Hungarians suffered hundreds of thousands
of casualties there at the Battle of Galicia
In 1915, 1916 and 1917 the war would return to this important region.
Some Lancers coming up.
One on the right is wearing a so called a "papakha hat". Those were widespread among
troops from the Caucasus, so we might see a Circassian lancer or a Kuban Cossack here.
Cossack cavalry was used against the Germans during the Gorlice-Tarnow offensive and had
a psychological effect but they were also very skilled riders just in general.
And Cavalry, naturally, played a big part on the huge open spaces of the Eastern Front.
Cavalry could be used for surprise attacks, to rout the enemy, or for scouting ahead.
Armoured trains actually would have cavalry support scouting ahead for example.
This is actually the General Liu rifle.
A Chinese design.
You might be thinking what does China have to do with the First World War
But apart from the Siege of Tsingtao in 1914 and the Chinese Labour Corps on the Western
Front, there was a lot of stuff going on in China during the war.
So much stuff that it’s already confusing just thinking about it, you guys should definitely
look it up. And we did a special about it, so you can check that out. Just use the search function.
We see someone working the German MG 14/17 light machine gun.
The Parabellum MG14 was a redesign of the MG 08: The water-cooling system was replaced,
the recoil was reduced and instead of a belt-feeding system, the ammunition was enclosed into a
drum-magazine.
It could fire 700 rounds per minute.
But that doesn't necessarily mean that it was any good to be used in ground combat.
The choice to replace the water-cooling system meant that the it would overheat fairly quickly.
Which is one reason why the MG 14 was generally used in aircrafts.
Next to the powerful double-barreled shot gun, we can spot French 155mm “de bange”
artillery in the background.
Those were effective, but also pretty old artillery pieces from 1877.
Close to 180 of them were given to Russia.
We see a quick German advance towards an artillery position.
The wide angle of the guns tell us of foes far away, maybe at sea, and we see two radio
towers, which indicates a substantial position.
From the other released promotional material I would guess that this is a scene from Operation
Albion, the German Amphibious operation in the West Estonian Archipelago.
This happened around 100 years ago, and of course we will talk about it on our show really soon.
You can also see a biplane attacking. The Russians actually used a variety of planes on the Eastern
Front and the German Luftstreitkräfte were also used extensively.
Mainly for recon operation.
You can see the imperial Russian emblem on the Sopwith.
Interestingly enough, during the battle of Riga, a lot of Russian pilots were arrested
by the Bolsheviks for being part of the upper class.
So the Russian Air Force was pretty much diminished before the actual landing of the German troops
had even begun.
And the landings didn’t look much like this.
This all looks a bit too much – to me – like Omaha beach which was some 30 years later.
The woman we heard speaking earlier is revealed here.
From her military haircut she seems to be a member of one of the Russian Women’s Battalions
of Death.
The first one was founded by Maria Bochkareva in 1917 and fought in the Kerensky Offensive,
another women’s battalion was in Petrograd during the October Revolution.
Listen to the sound in the fields.
The howling of these fearsome soldiers.
They are coming into our midst.
To cut the throats of your sons and consorts.
To arms citizens Form your battalions.
March, march.
Let impure blood Water our furrows.
And, as you no doubt guessed, this was the Marseillaise, so we are now talking about the French.
The French soldier is wearing the standard field cap and not the obligatory modern Adrian helmet.
He looks pretty ragged, and maybe he symbolizes one of the veterans that fought from the beginning
of the war all the way to the end.
The medic running past him his wearing his Adrian Helmet, the French were actually the
first to come up with a military helmet in World War 1 and introduced this in 1915 already.
The medic is holding a Fusil Automatique Modèle 1917 semi-automatic rifle.
Initially, this rifle was not well received by the French soldiers but a later version
in 1918 improved on these drawbacks.
We see some soldiers engaged in underground warfare, probably at Fort Vaux.
Those clean conditions were actually perfect for the "Chauchat" machine gun, that was so
vulnerable to mud and dirt because of its open magazine.
A soldiers is blown sky high, or ceiling high, as high as the ceiling allows it.
That underground warfare at forts like Vaux was fighting at the absolute limits
of what humans could endure.
The gas and the fumes from all the grenades and flames would make it hard to breathe and
most of the time it was dark as night in there, because electricity was gone, and oil lamps
could not be lit because of the smoke and gas.
The hand grenade was the weapon of choice here.
Fort Vaux was one of many forts that made the so called Iron Belt in the Verdun Area.
The Germans wanted to take Verdun in February 1916 and so they needed take all of these
forts one by one.
Fort Vaux was one of the most contested ones and the French fought there without any resupplies,
they actually had to lick water from the walls to survive.
That dip towards the ground was actually one of the St. Charmond’s most dangerous exercises.
France’s second tank was pretty cumbersome, and nose heavy due to its 75mm field gun at
planted at the front.
It performed pretty poorly during the French offensives in 1917, many fell prey to the
German defensive artillery.
They were redesigned in 1918 and they also changed their role from the typical tank to them being
more of a mobile artillery platform, in which they were actually quite effective.
But many were just scrapped as supply and support tanks at that point.
It was running on a gasoline-electric engine actually and was very, very slow.
One St. Charmond actually exists today and you could see it at Tankfest 2017 or
at the 2017 military parade in France.
We see a large tank advance.
One of the smallest tanks of the war, the Renault FT, alongside one of the biggest,
the Char 2C.
The Char 2C, or the Char d'assaut de grand modèle was not only grand in name.
It weighed 69 tonnes and was over 10m long, that's over 30 feet long, right.
It sported 4 hotchkiss machine guns and a powerful shortened 75 canon.
It was in production since December 1917 and was supposed to lead the charges of the 1919
offensives, which of course never happened.
But a few prototypes existed.
There are similar designs by the British and if the war would have continued
it likely would have transitioned to these rolling fortresses.
Such a tank offensive as we can see it here would be something happening in the final
months of the war, after say Hamel
when a real combined arms doctrine was developed, when the true
when the true purpose and strategy for the tank was developed
and when the tank was reliable enough to be fielded in such big numbers
Still, this all would happen much slower.
All these explosions actually remind of one of my favorite WW1 poems.
Written by probably my favorite World War 1 poet, Private Baldrick.
I think I remember his poem "The German Guns"
Boom Boom Boom
Boom Boom Boom Boom
Boom Boom Boom
Boom Boom Boom Boom
Ils ne passeront pas.
They shall not pass, the famous sentence spoken during the Battle of Verdun, is often associated
with Philippe Petain, but was apparently said by General Robert Nivelle.
It was the slogan for the defiant French defense of the region.
You can actually see it written on the monument at the Mort Homme in the Verdun Region
which is a very powerful monument and if you are anywhere near there, you should definitely check that out
A field of poppies native to the countryside of Flanders.
The poppy soon became the symbol of the fallen British soldiers, and is nowadays one of the
official symbols of remembrance in Great Britain.
This gun seems to be the Ribeyrolles 1918, or Carabine Mitrailleuse . It was one of the
first automatic rifles designed by the French, using a new experimental calibre in a straight
blowback system.
It was a mix between a carbine and an automatic support rifle like the Chauchat but it came
too late to gain a distinctive role.
A heavy shell is loaded.
People underestimate how heavy those shells were.
For those howitzers it could be from 130 up to say 340 kilos.
and this howitzer seems to be an Ordnance BL 9.2 inch howitzer, a British model,
not used by the French, at least as far as I am aware.
The French artillery did not use such siege howitzers, at least not in large numbers,
They prefered heavy mortars, field artillery, and train artillery instead.
That medieval looking guy actually has a real life counterpart.
He resembles a Nettoyeurs de tranchees, a so called trench sweeper.
They were special forces of France, ordered to destroy nests of resistance after a successful attack.
Very few pictures of them exist and they show some of them wearing hardened leather or steel
plates as body armour.
Those goggles in combination with the scarf are either a primitive version of a gasmask
or protection against splinters.
Since they engaged the enemy in close combat, they relied on large amounts of hand grenade
and a wide variety of knives and clubs.
But overall the French never really deployed these super specialised assault troops like
the Germans or Italians.
They pretty much developed modern infantry tactics throughout the war and were relying more
on universal platoons.
And the final shot also resembles a very famous propaganda card of the time.
The defiant stance of the French soldiers in front of a burning and devastated landscape.
A cool detail here is the Black French soldier on the right.
He would probably be a member of the Senegalese Tirailleurs.
These soldiers from Senegal but also other colonial soldiers from the Maghreb region
would be on the very front during some of the attacks at Verdun,
Algerian troops also experienced the first German gas attack on the Western Front.
You can see them on a lot of propaganda cards as well.
Again, the defiant stance of the French soldier is also from this time and comes back to the
“They Shall Not Pass” that became famous after the Battle of Verdun and also spread
to other fronts afterwards.
Alright, well that is it for now. I am sure I'll hear loads and loads of things in the comments below.
And feel free to write just about anything.
If you like to see our first BF1 trailer review, you can click right here for that.
And I am sure I will hear lots of things from you in the comments and me and Flo and the gang.
we really look forward to it. Alright, see you soon.