More WWI battles in movies: how realistic are they, according to a world war expert.

According to Alexander Watson, a history lecturer at Goldsmith's University of London, they are just moving forward heedlessly; where are the NCOs, where are the officers guiding them, regulating the units, and trying to keep them together? We're going to examine fighting sequences in First World War movies today to determine how realistic they are because I am an authority on the conflict and have published three books about it. We like to conceive of the First World War as being utterly static, but it actually began as a fairly mobile conflict when the Germans rushed through Belgium and took over most of Northeastern France. Chicago plays a significant role in this.

The main admission from the way these British cavalrymen are depicted is that none of them are carrying rifles, which is a big mistake because while British Cavalry were trained to charge like they are depicted doing here, they were also trained to scout and to act as mounted infantry. They had multiple roles, which is actually what made them so useful, so the idea that the movie is going to drive home to us that the cavalry are no longer useful at this point is actually untrue. Consequently, this is the point at which everything becomes absurd, but what they have done is taken their machine guns and placed them in a forest, where they are all pointed at their camp. There are six machine guns present; in 1914, six machine guns were enough to arm an entire German regiment.

With a German regiment of approximately 3,000 soldiers, this quantity of machine guns is reasonable. In reality, in 1914, you had around seven machine guns for every two kilometers of ground to support three thousand men, thus you wouldn't have placed six machine guns behind Three Trees. As a cavalryman, this is the very definition of Overkill.

There is plenty of forest here, so you would use your training as mounted infantry to dismount and try to take these machine guns from the flank as well. If you were facing a regiment's worth of machine guns, or even just one, which would be sufficient, why would you keep charging towards it? That makes no sense. Instead, you would veer off to the left or right, get into cover, and try to take these machine guns from the flank as well. Cavalry in a forest: This is a really, really horrible idea because if you rush into a forest on a horse, you'll break the animal's legs. 3 out of 10,

This is a terrific start. It's really impressive to see the smoke that the French have created in No Man's Land in 1916 as their infantry prepares to launch an assault. The French would create smoke to conceal their troops from machine gun and rifle fire, allowing them to advance without being easily spotted or targeted. Here, we have an officer who is actually commanding the troops; he is frantically attempting to keep them under control while directing them and demonstrating which direction to move in.

It's great to see it so frequently overlooked in first-world war movies from abroad, and he's sporting an Adrian helmet. The French army was the first to equip its soldiers with proper head protection, as head injuries in the first year of the war were a serious drain on manpower, so having his head protection reduced injuries and fatalities. It is a rather light helmet that a bullet may pass through, but it would shield soldiers from shrapnel. This Adrian helmet is a medical core helmet from the First World War, as shown by the insignia on the front which is the essential feature of this one is the ridge, which it turns out was incredibly beneficial for preventing the air burst from shells like concussion, and indicates that it is a medical core one because it has a snake and a staff on it.

The men are attempting to keep spaced out and that was really important. All armies told men to keep space between you when you go forward because if you clumped together then you presented a perfect Target for a machine gun. I believe it was done on purpose, and I believe they were basing it on a fire brigade helmet, but it turned out really well so this attack is realistically portrayed. The other thing you see these French soldiers doing is using the terrain for cover. They are moving forward and protecting themselves from machine gun fire under really violent looking artillery fire that is coming down on them. The one thing that it misses is that it has the French infantry all armed with rifles and by this point in the war by mid-1916, keeping a wide berth was a really important aspect of survival.

A light machine gun was already being developed by the French. I would rate this an 8 out of 10. Although we do not typically think of watches as weapons of war, they actually were in the First World War. In order to launch a successful attack by 1917, everything had to be coordinated. The first wave had to go over simultaneously, followed by the second wave, but most importantly, you had to coordinate with the artillery behind you. This is saying that many filmmakers overlook the fact that infantry did not just act alone; they also participated in combined arms.

There is some historical context to this, such as the fact that the battle of the Somme, a significant battle that resulted in half a million casualties on both sides, occurred in the second half of 1916 and that the Germans suffered horribly as a result, and that they decided to withdraw their lines back to stronger positions in early 1917, the British army is after them, which is the background information. This was meant to take place on the song or just beyond the some Battlefield, and the ground there was really chalky. It was known to be white and chalky, and they have really represented that in the film. That is why there are not any sandbags; it is just been dug to protect the assaulting troops.

In a first-world trench, there are essentially two mounds of earth: one behind it and one in front of it. The one in front of it is known as the parapet and is where soldiers will fire over. The other one is known as the parados and it was actually built slightly higher than the parapet for the reason that if the soldier put his head up over the parapet and if there was not any Earth behind him then he would be you would be you would be dead.

Send your men forward without any artillery support everyone is going to die they did not send men over like this, they did not climb over the Paradox, there is nobody there, he could just run unhindered without any difficulties, he would even get some protection from the guys going over the parapet. The Army issued instructions in early 1917 that stated that when advancing, one should do it with artillery and employ what was known as a "creeping barrage," which was a line of shells that would pummel the ground in front of the infantry and advance at predetermined intervals; they did this to remove any Defenders from No Man's Land; hence,

By this point in April 1917, you are going to only move forward with a creeping barrage generally. You are not going to do it any other way, and that is just missing from here. Everyone is just rushing forward headlessly if they actually get to the generalizer, which they are clearly not going to do because they are moving into the trenches to keep the defenders' heads down, which you desperately needed to do if you were not going to machine gun everyone to death. They wear Brody helmets, which were primarily made to protect against shrapnel because of the position these soldiers are in, where they are actually well-defended on either side by the trench itself trenches were actually very effective at protecting soldiers. But what are they going to do once they are there? Where are the NCOs and officers leading them, controlling the units, and trying to keep people together?

The tops of soldiers' heads are particularly vulnerable when they leave the trenches, which is why this type of battle bowler arrangement with hardened steel and the rim around it was created. This was done to protect the head above all else, which is why they were made this way. I would rate it a four. You can hear them yelling "To Arms to Arms" in German, and then this machine gun starts to fire, which seems really plausible.

The Latvian Rifleman is a nationalist Latvian regiment, and this image represents the so-called Christmas clashes in early 1917. The imperial Russian army operated up on the northern end of the Eastern Front, in what is now Latvia, and this was a really marshy area so it was not possible to dig trenches in this area. This is the Eastern Front this is different from the West when the germs took it in 1915. Searchlights, which were very common on the Eastern Front, can be activated to illuminate the front of your positions.

The other authentic aspect of this scene is that when the Latvian rifles attacked this portion of the German line they had to get through the barbed wire and you had to find a way without blowing the barbed wire up using artillery. They built a long wall made of sand and wood that they fortified, and you can see that really well, What we are seeing here is what the British army would have called a Bangalore torpedo, which was similar to a point bomb that was pushed underneath the wire and then had a fuse going back and then you would light it. That is what these two guys are doing here; they have these, uh, hardened metal plates in front of them to try and protect them from bullets, and it is their job to light the fuse which will trigger the explosion. They relied solely on surprise;

The other great thing about this clip is that it serves as a great reminder that the winter could actually be a point of really huge activity if you want to take an area that is a marsh, even though you cannot do that for most of the year. The only time in which you can do it is when the marsh freezes over, which is what happened in January 1917 and that was when these Latvian troops were there.

The main character is dropping to the ground and hiding behind a corpse as the machine gun moves towards him. Then, you see a line of soldiers falling one after another from right to left, and it is obvious that the machine gun is traversing back away from him. He leaps up and moves to the left away from the machine guns fire, and this is what gives him the opportunity to, uh, throw a hand grenade. As part of the learning process that takes place during the First World War, it is a pretty cool method to demonstrate how an experienced combat unit would be keenly aware of what was happening in order to determine whether the machine gun was functioning properly.

It is just such a nice human detail that they were able to get this close to the wall in part due to the snow because the marsh was frozen, but they struggled to climb this slope because it was icy, so they used their bare Nets as ice axes to try to carve some sort of foothold in it. You can see their desperation there, and it is just this tiny little detail that just makes this scene so totally plausible. I believe this is wonderful. I give this a 10 for a fictitious naval fight between a German armored cruiser and a Russian destroyer in the Baltic Sea that is hinted at in the clip but may not actually occur. There was nothing this Russian Destroyer could have done, as much as it could, due to the vast size difference between these two ships to hurt this this Cruiser if 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 is not really any defense that this ship has against the Friedrich Karl. The Cruiser has several guns, but the biggest on it is a 21 centimeter gun. If that gun hits the Russian Destroyer, it will sink or at the very least have its infrastructure completely destroyed. Nothing about this is plausible; it would be quite unlikely to have action thus close, and the German armored Cruiser would have sunk the Russian ship. A massive German round hits this gun tear, yet the gun tag does not even fall off. The gun is still operational.

Although it is true that a mine sank the Friedrich Karl before it got anywhere near it, there would be no reason for such a massive explosion to occur on the bridge or on the deck when the ship would have been below the water line. This is why it does not make sense. This idea that there was a fight between a destroyer and the armed Cruiser is untrue, so I will give it a two. The battle itself is complete fantasy. There was an explosion, but it sank extremely slowly and did not explode in flames. In the end, the Germans managed to rescue all eight people.

The End.

Leshani