The First World War - The Complete Series
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Actor: Andrée Bernard, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Erich Ludendorff, Jonathan Lewis, King Ferdinand of BulgariaBrand: Image Entertainment
Writer: Arthur Ransome
Writer: David Lloyd George
Writer: Douglas Haig
Writer: Edward Grey
Writer: Georges Clemenceau
Writer: Harold Macmillan
Writer: Karen Blixen
Writer: Raymond Poincaré
Writer: Rudolf Hess
Writer: Siegfried Sassoon
Writer: Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg
Writer: Vera Brittain
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo; English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo
Format: Black & White, Box set, Color, DVD, Full Screen, NTSC
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 523 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2005-08-30
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: Image Entertainment
Product features:
- Condition: New
- Format: DVD
- Box set; Black & White; Color; DVD; Full Screen; NTSC
DVD Reviews of The First World War - The Complete Series
DVD Review: Euro Biased
Summary: 3 Stars
First of all, I like to say that it is good comprehensive narrative of the Great War. Except for the last episode. There wasn't enough narration of the U.S. involvement in the war and when there was it was negative at worst and critical and marginal at best. I know that the Allies, Britain and France fought and suffered much longer and enourmously than the United States which didn't effectively enter the war until the last year and the war is much more in the hearts of the peoples in those countries than the one across the Atlantic. Both Britain and France suffered more casualties in the First World War than they did in the Second.
Let's face the facts here: Allied victory (if one really calls it that)would not have been possible if the United States did not enter the war on the battlefields of Western Front. The documentary does a very poor job in portraying this. In one scene, Gen. John J. Pershing, head of the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) was called an idiot in the memoir of Field Marshal Haig, the commander of the British Expeditionary Force, for refusing to completely implement American units into the badly-depleted British and French armies under their commands. This was arrogance on the part of the Allies to make such demands and the documentary failed to show Pershing's or any American point of view on this matter such as the need to fight with cohersion.
In another scene, the documentary showed a Scottish officer training green American troops about trench warfare tactics and then an arrogant American officer telling his men during training that the Brits had fought this way for four years and got them nowhere. Later, it narrates a diary from a young U.S. Marine who described how they got slaughtered foolishly because they were charging like "wild Indians" in the open field in the face of Maxim guns as the Europeans did four years earlier.
OK. The documentary does have a point in this matter, but not entirely. Like the Europeans before, green U.S. troops did suffer heavy casualties due to lack of experience and even acceptance of the realities of modern warfare in which trenches can be very useful. What the film didn't bother to explain was that the aggressive offensive strategy committed by Pershing overwhelmed the German army because unlike the its Allies, the the United States had an seemingly inexhaustible reserve of manpower and material that gave the AEF a lot of initative on the field which the Brits and the French either didn't have at all during the entire war against the German army, the most powerful ground force in Europe. Or what chance they might have had of an inititive was clearly gone by 1917-1918 with the transfer of German forces from the Eastern Front after the withdraw of Russia from the war and which culminated in the largest German offensive (Michel) on the Western Front that drove mainly the British forces a hundred miles or so.
Which brings me to another disparity in the documentary. It said that the German Spring (Michel) Offensive later petered out and was later pushed back in a massive British counteroffensive in the Flanders that drove the Germans back to their original lines and more. This is true to a certain point. What the film again failed to mention that a more powerful and mostly American offensive took place in the south in the Argonne, all as part of a massive coordinated effort by the all the Allied forces under the new overall command of Marshal Ferdinand Foch. Because of this overwhelming numerical superiority of AEF forces in the south, the Germans were forced to deplete their reserves elsewhere on their lines, including the ones in the British sector, in which the British had the most successful offensive of the war.
Now, it is true that the German Spring Offensive in 1918 did lose momentum and failed in its overly ambitious plan to drive the Brtish to the sea. Afterall, this wasn't 1940 with more mechanized "Blitzkrieg" tactics. However, without American military intervention, it would have been unlikely that the Allies would have achieved anything resembling a victory. The Germans managed to capture more French territory than in any time during the war except for 1914. The Western Front would have been stalemated with the Germans holding an area a hundred miles deeper in Allied territory.
I think the makers of the documentary simply overlooked the important factor of the U.S. miltary involvement on the Western Front because American troops were effectively involved in combat only in the last months of the war and didn't participate in something "glorious" on a scale such as a Verdun or a Somme. However, massive American intervention was the key reason why the war ended after only few months of American intervention (which seemed sudden and less "glorious"). After four years of unbelieveable attrition, it would have been more likely that the British and the French forces would have physically and spiritually collapsed before the Germans and concede the war.
Tom, New Jersey
Description of The First World War - The Complete Series
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