"They Shall Not Grow Old" WWI Content

[NY65912]

Take a look at the beautiful film restoration, colorization and modernization of WWI footage. Make sure you click on the link for the video.

If you are a follower of history you will get the chills. Outstanding

They Shall Not Grow Old Movie Official Website

[stuartj]

A labor of love for Peter Jackson, very much looking forward to seeing this.

I wonder what happened to his WW2 remake of 'The Dambusters'. Years ago, after the success of Lord of the Rings, it was well advanced in pre production, but it seemed there was one sticky problem to do with the codeword for mission success, which was the name of Guy Gibson's black Labrador. Never really resolved and the project sort of just disappeared.

[drcoastline]

WOW! The trailer sent a chill down my spine. I can't wait to see this. Thanks for posting Mike.

[craigster59]

Amazing documentary, Peter Jackson is one of the finest directors when it comes to CGI and special effects. Glad that he could use his connections to make The Great War come alive.

I saw him interviewed, they brought in "lip readers" to decipher what the men were saying and then dubbed in actors voices, it really brings things into focus.

[Nickshu]

I saw it last night at the theater...It's being shown across the country in two showings by Fathom Events....One showing was last night, the next is on the 27th if you can still get tickets. I'd imagine it's all sold out.

It was excellent. Really impressive what Peter Jackson did with all the footage. It was striking the mix of mechanized technology in WW1 coupled with medievil conditions, diseases, and emergency medical care. It was striking to me how far we came between WW1 and WW2. Most interesting was the British stats....500K died in battle, 600K died of non-battle diseases and injuries. Wow.

One of the best scenes IMO was an artillery cannon firing and the shingles falling off the adjacent building with each shot. So cool.

I'd expect it will be available for streaming soon from somewhere.

[Seahawk]

Thank you so much for posting about this - I was faintly aware. I will find the documentary.

My grandfather was a pilot/observer in WWI - he left college and joined the RCAF before the US entered the war. He eventually flew for the Army Air Corps and was shot down, he says on take-off, losing a lung.

He smoked all the rest of his life, passing away at 93.

[varmint]

The European powers put 100 year embargoes on all their classified information. Keep waiting for the secrets to come out.

[mfiazzo]

Unbelievable what these men endured.

It is also amazing how far we have come in 100 years

[NY65912]

I remember as a kid, my grandfather who was with the NY 27th Div in France, said to me, "what I saw, no one should see".

[tabs]

The way they can figure what the Lads are saying is by reading their lips...

WW1 was unbridled slaughter...carnage and mayhem. If the machine guns or artillery didn't get you the poison gas would. The Brits suffered 60,000 casualties in ONE DAY on the Somme in 1916. Every battle was like that..the US AEF was losing 1000 men a week in the Meuse Argonne offensive. Compare that to what America has lost in the Sand boxes since 2001.*

The American ACE Raoul Lufbery flying for the Lafayette Escadrille said that if his plane ever caught fire rather than burn he would jump and he did..the Balloon Lads used parachutes but the fliers did not until near the end of the war. The life expectancy of a British flier on the Western Front was 2 weeks.

Hitler joined a Bavarian Regt at the beginning of WW1 serving as a in the trenches courier through out the war. He was awarded the Iron Cross for bravery and was temporarily blinded by gas towards the end. He had numerous close calls, once just having left a dugout when it was hit by an Artillery shell killing everyone who was in it.

The Red Barron Von Richthofen on his last sortee was chasing a novice British airman by the name of May over the front lines when an Australian on the ground machine gunner hit him through his side. He was able to bring his plane down, where an Australian soldier helped him out of the plane where he said "Kaputt" as his final word before he died. What is totally amazing is that Australian soldier was interviewed around 2007 on TV relating his experience.


* The Russians lost 1,000,000 killed at Stalingrad in 1942. The Germans lost an Army of 250,000.

[sammyg2]

Originally Posted by Nickshu

. It was striking the mix of mechanized technology in WW1 coupled with medievil conditions, diseases, and emergency medical care. It was striking to me how far we came between WW1 and WW2. Most interesting was the British stats....500K died in battle, 600K died of non-battle diseases and injuries.

The Influenza Pandemic of 1918

The influenza pandemic of 1918-1919 killed more people than the Great War, known today as World War I (WWI), at somewhere between 20 and 40 million people. It has been cited as the most devastating epidemic in recorded world history. More people died of influenza in a single year than in four-years of the Black Death Bubonic Plague from 1347 to 1351. Known as "Spanish Flu" or "La Grippe" the influenza of 1918-1919 was a global disaster.


In the fall of 1918 the Great War in Europe was winding down and peace was on the horizon. The Americans had joined in the fight, bringing the Allies closer to victory against the Germans. Deep within the trenches these men lived through some of the most brutal conditions of life, which it seemed could not be any worse. Then, in pockets across the globe, something erupted that seemed as benign as the common cold. The influenza of that season, however, was far more than a cold. In the two years that this scourge ravaged the earth, a fifth of the world's population was infected. The flu was most deadly for people ages 20 to 40. This pattern of morbidity was unusual for influenza which is usually a killer of the elderly and young children. It infected 28% of all Americans (Tice). An estimated 675,000 Americans died of influenza during the pandemic, ten times as many as in the world war. Of the U.S. soldiers who died in Europe, half of them fell to the influenza virus and not to the enemy (Deseret News). An estimated 43,000 servicemen mobilized for WWI died of influenza (Crosby). 1918 would go down as unforgettable year of suffering and death and yet of peace.

https://virus.stanford.edu/uda/

[flatbutt]

sold out everywhere I looked

[Jims5543]

Many empty seats here it only plays during the day when I am working no evening shows.

I guess I will have to wait until it comes out on video. I prefer to watch movies at home anyway.

[Nickshu]

Originally Posted by sammyg2

The Influenza Pandemic of 1918

The influenza pandemic of 1918-1919 killed more people than the Great War, known today as World War I (WWI), at somewhere between 20 and 40 million people. It has been cited as the most devastating epidemic in recorded world history. More people died of influenza in a single year than in four-years of the Black Death Bubonic Plague from 1347 to 1351. Known as "Spanish Flu" or "La Grippe" the influenza of 1918-1919 was a global disaster.

WW1 ended 11/11/1918, so not sure how much of a factor the flu outbreak was on the war itself, if any.

Definitely killed a lot of people after the war was over, but the non-battle deaths data was in reference to the war years 1914-1918, not after.

[74-911]

Originally Posted by tabs

..... WW1 was unbridled slaughter...carnage and mayhem. If the machine guns or artillery didn't get you the poison gas would....

Once read some historian (can't recall who) saying much of the slaughter of WWI was due to the generals using the same basic tactics used in the U.S. civil war but against machine guns and long range rapid fire artillery and learning nothing from it.

Liddell Hart and Guderian learned a lot from it...


and I now have tickets for the 27th and am really looking forward to it after watching the trailer.

[drcoastline]

Got my tickets for 1:00PM on the 27th. Can't wait.

[sammyg2]

Originally Posted by Nickshu

WW1 ended 11/11/1918, so not sure how much of a factor the flu outbreak was on the war itself, if any.

Definitely killed a lot of people after the war was over, but the non-battle deaths data was in reference to the war years 1914-1918, not after.

in the fourth dreadful year of the war, as the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) assumed fighting strength and prepared their first great offensive against the Germans, the flu struck. By the War Department's most conservative count, influenza sickened 26% of the Army—more than one million men—and killed almost 30,000 before they even got to France.
On both sides of the Atlantic, the Army lost a staggering 8,743,102 days to influenza among enlisted men in 1918. (p. 1448)
The Navy recorded 5,027 deaths and more than 106,000 hospital admissions for influenza and pneumonia out of 600,000 men, but given the large number of mild cases that were never recorded, Braisted put the sickness rate closer to 40%. (p. 2458)

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2862337/

[stealthn]

There was a good write up of how and why he did it, British museum asked him but said he could only use original footage. He gave it to the CGI guys that did Lord of the Rings and it apparently came out really well. They he got hundreds of hours of interviews and added them to it.

Looking forward to it

[Jims5543]

Just discovered a showing at 4 PM local to me, just grabbed 3 tickets for myself and my 2 sons who are both history buffs.

Wife not interested so buys night out.

Thanks for posting this thread, watched trailer with younger son and he is excited to see this. I am so busy working all the time I miss stuff like this, glad I saw this thread.

[Jims5543]

For anyone interested. This cat puts up pics and letter from soldiers, many from WW1 and a lot from WW2.

https://www.instagram.com/zulufucxs/

i.e.

"From the darkness on all sides came the groans and wails of wounded men; faint, long, sobbing moans of agony and despairing shrieks.

It was too horribly obvious that dozens of men with serious wounds must have crawled for safety into new shell-holes and now the water was rising about them and powerless to move they were slowly drowning.

The cries of the wounded men had much diminished now, and as we staggered down the road, the reason was only too apparent for the water was right over the tops of the shell-holes.

Down the road we staggered, shells bursting around us. A man stopped dead in front of me, and I cursed him and butted him with my knee. Very gently he said, 'I’m blind, sir,' and turned to show me his eyes and nose torn away by a piece of shell.
He then he asked for a cigarette. I produced one and put it between his lips; I struck a match and held it across, but the cigarette had fallen and he was dead.

I hardly recognised the boilerhouse for it had been hit by shell after shell and at its entrance was a long mound of bodies.

I had to climb over them to enter HQ. I was alone in my tent which I entered soaked in mud and blood from head to foot." - Captain Edwin Vaughan, 1/8th battalion, Royal Warwickshire Regiment, Battle of Passchendaele, Belgium, September, 1917. #reality #ww1

“To die from a bullet seems to be nothing; parts of our being remain intact; but to be dismembered, torn to pieces, reduced to pulp, this is the fear that flesh cannot support and which is fundamentally the great suffering of the bombardment. Men were squashed. Cut in two or divided from top to bottom. Blown into showers; bellies turned inside out; skulls forced into the chest as if by a blow from a club. You eat beside the dead; you drink beside the dead, you relieve yourself beside the dead and you sleep beside the dead. People will read that the front line was Hell. How can people begin to know what that one word – Hell – means.” - Unknown French Soldier, diary entry, conditions in Verdun, France 1916. #ww1 #reality #ww1 #war #zerofoxtrot #stayzero

"There were bodies, both our own and German, from the first wave. It was sickening to see your own dead and wounded, some crying for stretcher-bearers, others semi-conscious and others beyond all hope.
.
We were sitting amid a sea of shell holes, up to our knees in gluey, sticky mud. The stench of rotting bodies was terrible. The bodies of the dead and of the wounded would sink out of sight. This was all mud, mud and more mud, mixed together with blood.
.
You just had to go forward through all that mud and blood. It was absolutely sickening. I remember one lad from our regiment in particular. He was in a pool of blood, ripped open from his shoulder to his waist by shrapnel. When we got to him he said, 'Shoot me. But before we could draw a revolver, he was dead. And the final word he uttered was 'Mother'. It wasn't a cry of despair, it was a cry of surprise and joy. His mother was in the next world to welcome him and he knew it. .
We lived hour by hour. You saw the sun rise, hopefully you'd see it set. If you saw it set, you hoped you'd see it rise. Some men would, some wouldn't.

At the end, we fought for a few yards of soil and that cost the lives of so many, including my three best friends. There was no excuse for such slaughter for so little gain." - Pvt. Henry John Patch, Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry, Passchendaele, Belgium Sept 22, 1917.