They shall not grow old - WW1 film

FarleyUK · November 2018

I think the parts that summed it up the most were when the Germans and the British troopers were just all sat together talking and laughing.

Senseless waste of life.

Also went to see the Shrouds of the Somme in London on Saturday - very poignant. Well worth visiting.

JezWynd · November 2018

lovestrat74 said:

There are so many discussion points but what I cannot get out of my head is why they were commanded to just walk - not run or crouch - over the trenches to, in most cases, their death. There were tanks there, why send over the men before the tanks. Sending them over to kill the Germans with their bayonets when they were up against machine guns and bombs. Even in medieval warfare they had shields and protection...

Tanks were first used in late 1916 and were very prone to failure for a variety of reasons. I believe the reason they walked over no mans land was that the high command believed that the heavy bombardment prior to the attack had knocked out the German front line and so the soldiers would meet little or no opposition. In fact the Germans were housed in deep bunkers below the reach of shells and emerged with their machine guns once the bombardment ceased. The fact that the Allies made it to the German lines and briefly occupied them is incredible considering the obstacles they faced.

Grumpyrocker · November 2018

ESBlonde said:

Garthy said:

ESBlonde said:

Looking forward to this. They came from a whole other world 100 years ago, most had never left thier own village/town before finding themselves in the exotic location of flanders! They would have been excited and scared at almost the same time, if they survived a few weeks the excitment went away to be replaced with fear. In those days it was rare to show fear so they (mostly) bottled it up and put on a face to carry on. We are in so many ways a blessed generation.

Well put, but if the same situation was repeated now where an officer told thirty 18 year olds to go over the top to face certain death by a pair of diagonally opposed machine guns strafing a battlefield I suspect that officer would have an unfortunate blue on blue accident. In essence they used kids to soak up bullets and those kids were as brave as they come but many commanding officers were criminally negligent by today's standards.

Those young officers blowing the whistle went over the top too, in fact they were disproportionatly killed compared to the rank and file. Many officers of this class were very protective of thier charges and took thier mens welfare very seriously. It was a different era and expectations on each class were different. The problem with WWI was that it was an industrial war which had yet to develop modern techniques of warfare, so the older senior officers just kept repeating the old method of attack on a front with lots of men because they knew no different. Later in the war the Australians first developed the method of cover fire while small units crept forward and then they provided cover while the next unit crawed past them. In essence the way of modern fighting. The machine gun was a big killer in the advances, but artillary probably killed more overall. It seems barbaric to us now (indeed to many at home then too) but context is everything.

Yes. If you were a "Tommy" you had a 12% chance of being a casualty in WW1. If you were an officer this rose to 17%. Nearly 200 British generals became casualties during the conflict. The "Chateau General" a la General Melchitt are largely a myth. A "Tommy" had a higher chance of being killed in the Crimean War than WW1.

The early parts of the war were blighted by old strategies and tactics coming up against new weaponry, massive scale - and perhaps most important - problems of communication. Rather than these being static for four years; tactics, communications and weaponry changed dramatically at a fast pace. By the end of the war "over the top" attacks closely behind very accurate curtain artillery barrages were hugely successful and led to the smashing of the German Western Front.

You don't have to dig deep to find evidence in the history of officers than cared deeply for their men, of rapid advancements and changes in tactics and equipment. WW1 was a horrible senseless conflict, but it was by no means a war of "lions led by donkeys" as the largely discredited myth has it.

JezWynd · November 2018

Grumpyrocker said:

You don't have to dig deep to find evidence in the history of officers than cared deeply for their men, of rapid advancements and changes in tactics and equipment. WW1 was a horrible senseless conflict, but it was by no means a war of "lions led by donkeys" as the largely discredited myth has it.

It's true that many line officers felt a deep responsibility and respect for their men but this reappraisal of the lions led by donkeys is a recent development as historical biographers try to make a name for themselves in a crowded field. The simple truth is that if the men on both sides had turned around and launched their attacks on their own staff and politicians then everyone could have met in no mans land as brothers. But that was never going to happen, society as a whole was saturated with propaganda at the outset of the war and later on the war machine had become so entrenched that victory was the only acceptable option.

ESBlonde · November 2018

Wow a small world.

There is a little old lady in our street and she's 90 years old. We take her shopping and look after her needs but she's a sharp wit and this weekend I'm helping her hook up Broadband for the first time, she's going to youtube some craft things!

Anyway I've just plugged in the new BT box and she shows me the paper with that promo photo from the film where the chaps are sitting at a table. The second from the left is her father! It's the only colour photo she has of him as a young man.

not_the_dj · November 2018

ESBlonde said:

Wow a small world.
There is a little old lady in our street and she's 90 years old. We take her shopping and look after her needs but she's a sharp wit and this weekend I'm helping her hook up Broadband for the first time, she's going to youtube some craft things!
Anyway I've just plugged in the new BT box and she shows me the paper with that promo photo from the film where the chaps are sitting at a table. The second from the left is her father! It's the only colour photo she has of him as a young man.

That’s great. In the Q&A at the premier Peter Jackson was hopeful that people would be recognised in his film, and names would be put to some of those faces.

ourmaninthenorth · November 2018

I watched it in complete silence.

Broke my bloody heart.

WindmillGuitars · November 2018

Watched this last night .. worth the annual license fee alone. Breathtaking account of life in the trenches,
My 10 and 12 year old boys thought it was fiction .. a good eye opener

gringopig · November 2018

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ESBlonde · November 2018

Much has been written about WWI and the analysis is quite eye watering. The American civil war had been half a century before and showed the early signs of Industrial warfare with mass killing weapons like shrapnel shells and gatling/machine guns. For the most part smooth bore single shot guns used en mass were the infantrymans weapon, they paraded to formate on the battle field and advanced to close quarters before gunfire became effective.

In the years between there and the opening of WW1 lots changed. Rifled barrels gave longer range accuracy, breach loaded cannon and a variety of shells available. Mostly Hiram Maxim invented the machine gun, the US didn't buy it so he sold it to a bunch of European states. Consequently at the outbreak of WW1 the French, German, Japanese, Russian, Austrian, Romanian, Italian and British armies (amoung others) each had thier own version of the Maxim. The british version being known as the Vickers gun.

The ineffective modernisation of troup advances and the very effective use of a pair of Maxim machine guns firing at angles in a 'X' format over advancing troops made it a killing ground. The senior officers of the day had no effective solution other than mass advances behind a rolling barrage, the killing kept on day after day.

Eventually the Canadians developed the now standard attack form of cover fire and move in sections so they crept forward mostly under cover.

Cirrus · November 2018

This is my third attempt at writing down a thought I'm mulling over, sorry if it sounds a bit muddled...

I find it hard to judge harshly the ruling classes and heads of the military who allowed this to happen. And I don't think it's entirely fair to feel pity for the regular people who died based on some notion that they were duped into laying down their lives or cynically tricked into signing up of whatever.

These things need to be seen in context. In 1914, you only had to go back 40-odd years to the last war where Germany laid siege to Paris. Well within living memory. The Boer war was only 14 years back. Even the Napoleonic Wars were only 100 years earlier. The century had seen imperialism from all European powers. The scramble for Africa, the Great Game etc produced a system where war was inevitable, but were themselves consequences of a world where people believed that it was their moral obligation to stand up for their country, the concepts embodied in the idea of a "state". There was the notion that nations were in natural competition with each other, scientific concepts such as eugenics that obviously post-ww2 are considered evil and thought of as being Nazi ideals, but at the time were quite normal, everyday beliefs, and were used as moral justification for, say, the colonization of Africa, and a belief in the superiority of some cultures over others. Notions of class were firmly embedded in society.

War itself, in that context, was seen as just another option to achieve national aims. Sure, it wasn't great and people died so you couldn't be callous about it, but there was nobility in war, honour, justice and even a sense that war was fair play. The institutions of the state - government, church, military, were much more closely entwined (which means that 100 years after the end of the war, we can stand in the street and be a bit confused about why the church gets to piggy-back remembrance)

So, when Germany got a bit too big for its boots, and it looked like we'd need to go and help stop them for our own national interest, well, let's have a war! Get it all out in the open, best side wins, gets it over with. And of course people wanted to sign up. It was their moral duty. They didn't want to die, but the feeling of insignificance of individual human lives when compared to the importance of the institutions being defended was I think found through most parts of society. And those institutions weren't just embodied in a remote, rich ruling class. They were embodied by their parents, their brothers and sisters, their home town. They went to defend that.

And so the First World War saw that world and its values flounder and die in the fields of Northern Europe, when it came face to face with the technological advances in killing power.

Without that war, I don't think we'd be where we are today. Because afterward war wasn't another card in the deck to be played when opportune. It was failure, horror, a last resort. And I think, without it, we wouldn't have began to place more value on individual human lives when compared to the value of the state, so now we're in a place where we might well tell Theresa May to shove it long before we'd lay down our lives for her government. Where we have a natural cynicism and distrust of power in whatever form. Where we began to believe that co-operation between nations was mutually beneficial.

That doesn't mean that the youth of today are more cowardly or of weaker moral fiber. It doesn't mean that the youth of 1914 were poor duped fools going to die for rich men. It's just that, in no small part due to the war itself, our two worlds are so different that there's no fair comparison.

jellyroll · November 2018

They may indeed not have been poor duped fools, but I wonder how many of those men would have volunteered again in 1918 with the benefit of hindsight. Not 100 years hindsight, just the hindsight of knowing what they were really letting themselves in for.

jonnyburgo · November 2018

Amazing film, 15yr old boys in some cases absolutely tragic.

Wolfetone · November 2018

I'm trying to separate enthusiasm for the technical brilliance of the film from the sad clarity of the devastating impact of WW1 on it's participants. To say that I 'enjoyed' it wouldn't be the right words but it brought home the detail of the war like nothing I have ever seen.

I was very surprised by the overwhelming respect shown by our soldiers for their German opponents and it was reassuring to see much footage towards the end of the film of Allied and German troops seemingly getting along and helping each other.

It may seem to be a strange thing to say but it appeared to me that towards the end, the biggest enemy was the war itself and the combatants were in a sort of brotherhood against the war.

It was also clear that the war started as a style of war from the previous century to end up in warfare that reflected many of the attributes of the second world war.

ChuckManual · November 2018

Available now, on the BBC iPlayer...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0brzkzx/they-shall-not-grow-old?suggid=b0brzkzx

quarky · November 2018

My daughter's Spanish teacher (who is German actually) spent 30 minutes the other day complaining about modern Britain, Brexit, and how disgraceful it is that we call The Great War, "Great". When one of the kids piped up that it means "big" rather than "good", she said most British people assume it means "good".

Quite funny and concerning at the same time...

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They shall not grow old - WW1 film

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