Musket - 05 Dec 14 - 11:31 AM

1: "Some of us wonder about sending men over the top in such numbers and executing them for cowardice for not doing so."

You have a line of trenches facing one another stretching over 400 miles from the Belgian coast to the Swiss Alps - The enemy are on high ground and can shell your troops at will to devastating effect along sections of that line - This theatre of operations is where your enemy is - The reality of the situation is that you cannot just sit back and take it, you have to attack this enemy and drive him out of the territory he has taken by force. OK then Musket how do you do it without sending men over the top?

As to your second point there - some 5.3 million men volunteered and were conscripted (~50-50) into the British Army during the course of the First World War out of that vast and never to be exceeded number 17 - yes SEVENTEEN were executed for cowardice.

2: "Some of us have read of the butcher of The Somme.

Really?? Where did you read of the Butcher of the Somme? He was never referred to as that by any Author between 1916 and 1928 and they "All had been there" and lived through it. So these works of yours where you read about "The Butcher of the Somme" post-date 1930 and span up to about the late 1960s - very easy to kick a man when he is down, easier still once he is dead and any defence is impossible for him to mount. The Jackals that mounted these attacks? David Lloyd George and Winston Spencer Churchill both keen to polish their own egos and reputations for political purposes and sweep their own shortcomings and failings under the carpet by exaggerating the supposed errors of a man who could not defend himself - Definitely NOT Churchill's Finest Hour. Had the British Government followed the advice and line suggested by either of these men then Great Britain would have lost the First World War. Post 1970 the bulk of historians writing on the subject of the First World War with the advantages of having at their disposal information not available to their predecessors form a consensus that Haig and Kitchener's detractors were wrong.

3: "We see the fields of graves."

Very glad that you have been to visit the First World War cemeteries Musket. Just the British ones or did you also visit the French and German ones? Now tell me why there are fewer of our dead in those First World War graves than say French or Germans - yet it was our troops who were badly led??

4: "Then we read your very black and White "well led and knew what they were letting themselves on for. It just isn't true. It doesn't fit the facts."

Generally speaking that claim in the first sentence is perfectly correct, it was something like 2.6 million men volunteered for active service in the great War and 2.7 million who were conscripted. Of the 2.6 million who volunteered about half of them did so between August 4th 1914 and December 1914. In that 5 months the British public knew of the holding/delaying action fought at Mons and at Le Cateau and they knew with total certainty about the reality of war and the sacrifice required from the First Battle of the Marne and Ypres. If you volunteer for active service in time of war Musket you are voluntarily putting your life at the disposal of your country - you do that in the full understanding that you will be put into harms way and that you may well be killed or badly injured. To suggest anything else is absolute lunacy. To claim that 2.6 million men from that generation of British subjects only went to defend their country because they were so dim and so misinformed that they were had to be duped and lied to is an insult to those men and their memory. Do you honestly think they were such fools?

5: "Your "disagreeing with me is a leftist plot" rubbish explains your stance more than any of your distortions of your so called sources."

Your sources are? Joan Littlewood's "Oh What A Lovely War"? typical 1960s CND, anti-war, anti-establishment satire? Described by it's "historical adviser" Raymond Fletcher (Labour MP and Editor of the Tribune) as being - "One part me, one part Liddell Hart, the rest Lenin" - "In the transformation from radio to stage, the play became more ardent in its expression of radical left wing views". It was Joan Littlewood who described the men as dupes and she did that and portrayed that to put across the political message that she wanted to put across. When it came to reviewing it - "very few reviewers perceived the play as an objective representation of historical truth." Unfortunately some in this forum actually believe that it did represent true history - Got news for you the original reviewers were right.

Blackadder goes Forth? Academics have noted that the television series has become a pervasive view of the war in the public's perception of World War I, with Max Hastings calling the common British view of the war "the Blackadder take on history." Military historian Richard Holmes commented in his book The Western Front: "Blackadder's aphorisms have become fact...A well turned line of script can sometimes carry more weight than all the scholarly footnotes in the world." Stephen Badsey, analysing trends in television programmes about the war remarked that Blackadder Goes Forth as a popular comedy series was subject to particular criticism from historians, remarking that the series "consciously traded on every cliche and misremembered piece of history about the Western Front, and was influential enough to draw a surprising degree of angry criticism from professional historians as a result."

Esther MacCallum-Stewart of Sussex University noted in her essay "Television Docu-Drama and The First World War" that "Blackadder Goes Forth is used as a teaching aid in schools; not as a secondary text that should be analysed and discussed for its own reliability, but as a truthful parody of the conditions of the First World War."

It is entertainment NOT History, NOT factual, NOT the truth.