r/wwi • u/AtticusRex • 14d ago
Are WWI tactics historically accurate in Journey's End (2017 movie)?
At the end of the movie the Germans launch an offensive to take the British trench. It begins with an artillery barrage, during which the British soldiers stay above ground, even though they have a bunker. Tons of them die. Is this accurate?
It seems like the worst way to hold the trench. The Germans wouldn't charge until their own barrage had finished, so the British should have waited underground until the shells stopped, then popped out to stop the charge.
Is this just bad writing for an uncritical audience, or is it a depiction of something historically accurate that's missing the context to explain the British's tactical decisions?
I know it's based on a play from 1928, but I haven't seen it.
2
u/flyliceplick 14d ago
No. One of the things you need to bear in mind with WWI in media is that it is largely written in the post-war period, where memory of the war was rapidly being whitewashed with whatever themes were politically palatable at the time; the largest one that endured is 'sacrifice' which is why you regularly see troops being massacred on screen, when in real life, no such thing happened, because the production does not have the knowledge to show how loss of life actually happened.
Shellfire against troops in a trench led to a slow but constant flow of casualties, so troops would withdraw to more protected positions during a bombardment. The race then was to work out when the bombardment had ended and resume positions as the enemy assaulted (they could typically get very close with proper co-ordination between artillery and infantry), and defend successfully.
The problem is that once films show these things, people take them as gospel.
"Oh, millions of men just marched into machine gun fire and died." - They did not. Artillery was by far the biggest killer on the battlefield all the way through the war.
"They just charged into artillery fire and died." - They did not. The artillery fire one would hear when assaulting as infantry, was your own, carrying out a barrage on enemy positions. Walking behind a rolling barrage could be terrifying, and enemy artillery certainly could start shooting once they were informed your troops were assaulting, but that took time.