It's not just the airplanes, which we could pretend were flying recon (the Germans were doing that as early as 1914).
It's the tanks. The British didn't field them until 1916, at the Somme, and didn't field them in numbers until 1917, at the Battle of Cambrai.
This is rather important: if the British had launched the Royal Tank Corps a year early, the history of World War One and probably of the 20th century would have been rather different. For one thing, the German Western Front would have been under very heavy pressure 1916-17, which might have eased up enough pressure on the East that the Bolshevik Revolution would have been a non-starter.
No Bolshevik Revolution, Russia gets to be a victorious Ally, and neither the Fascist nor the Nazi Party get to use Lenin's Bolshevik Party as a model, which means the interwar rise of fascism is much-muted. For a weapons error, the artist sure picked one which does maximum damage to history!
and a gold sticky star for jordan!bellatrysOctober 29 2007, 03:38:46 UTC
who names it first. (If they were recon planes, they still should be eindeckers mostly, with a couple of early-model Nieuports maybe, at that point in '15.)
And this is not difficult research - I don't know if you bothered to click any of the links I supplied, but in the menu bar of the first non-wikipedia website that comes up if you google "WWI" there is an entry for "tanks" which covers it all in detailed chronology. So they didn't even do the bare minimum. (Frankly, given how familiar it looks, I strongly suspect they traced some stills picked for their visual interest rather than their timeframe and composited them, possibly of Chateau-Thierry fighting, given the trees; if I had time and transport to the area libraries, I know I could locate the identical shots in a day or two
( ... )
Re: and a gold sticky star for jordan!jordan179October 29 2007, 03:50:04 UTC
If several generations of demands for reform and protests both peaceful and violent had been met only with the increased secret police activities and sending people to Siberia or worse, there's no reason to think that this would change for the better just because.
You forget that the Tsarist regime fell over half a year BEFORE the Bolshevik Revolution. The Bolsheviks did not overthrow the Tsar, the Bosheviks overthrew Kerensky's Provisional Government, which was semi-democratic (very much a liberal democracy compared to all previous Russian regimes
( ... )
Yeah, I knew who Kerensky was when I was fourteenbellatrysOctober 29 2007, 04:02:15 UTC
and the Mensheviks - one of my relatives heard him speak, as a matter of fact, years after, and told me about it. If you really think that determined factions contending for the summit of power would have magically been disempowered by the lack of engagement on the Eastern Front, I think you're as optimistic as the Americans and British who thought they could overthrow the revolutionaries and restore a Romanov monarchy in '19 by force (precursor to Operation AJAX) - which had an awful lot more to do with making Russia what it was interbellum than most people realize (and no, traditional authoritarianisms don't allow loyal oppositions either, except tenuously and in so far as it serves them - e.g. Dostoyevsky ended up in Siberia.)
Well, they *are* WWI tanks, and planes, and uniformsbellatrysOctober 29 2007, 03:50:31 UTC
although I wouldn't go so far as to vouch that they're the right uniforms for the time, place, and country without checking a lot more closely! and the tanks are even the right side's tanks, they're just a year too early on the face of the earth. And it's frustrating, because if you're going to set a story so deliberately, with the utter chaos and grimth of the first serious use of chlorine gas as documented in horrifying detail by many sources, the amount of research by both writer and artist to get to that point, even if it's just encyclopedia reading, *ought* to have included just in passing the fact that it was too early for tanks. Flamethrowers, yes - those had just barely been invented and used months before, but the Mark I tank was still in the works. And like I said, I'm a *casual* WWI student - there are historical forums and reenactment units and all kinds of resources of people many of whom are quite willing to point the inquirer in the right direction
( ... )
Re: Well, they *are* WWI tanks, and planes, and uniformsrandwolfOctober 29 2007, 05:58:09 UTC
The tanks are right, but the deployment's all wrong for the period; there's some newsreel footage over at the Wiki World News that makes that pretty clear. (And of course they didn't exist at all at Ypres.) These drawings look like WWII. Other than that, I agree entirely--in many respects the situation that set up the current war begin in WWI. The whole thing puts me in mind of a nasty/charming Al Stewart song, League of Notions--if you haven't heard it, imagine a bouncy, simple tune to go with it.
Re: Well, they *are* WWI tanks, and planes, and uniformsbellatrysOctober 29 2007, 06:38:25 UTC
No I hadn't, but it's appropriate what with Lawrence "waiting in the wings" - the thing which gets lost in the whole Alsace-Lorraine thing is that for all the accrued mystical patriotic sentiment on both sides attached to the "need" to own the territory, it was really about energy - fossil fuel, in the form of coal. --Which you can see from the air where it's been/being mined, in places, like someone dumped a pailful of soot on the world.
(Where I live, the Scots-Canadian connection is strong, and this is a popular song at traditional heritage events, these days. But it's a more personal lament, like the old mining/train/shipping disaster songs, rather than a lament for the world burning.)
Like Randwolf, I saw the tanks and immediately assumed WW2. ^_^;
This is a more subjective matter, but I also suspect whoever wrote this crap had never actually heard a German person talk in real life. I worked with several German volunteers during my time at Librivox (here are their German-language recordings if you want to see for yourself), and found their accent graceful and soft-spoken. The "nasty-sounding language" is just a stereotype from too many Hollywood Nazis and Hitler newsreels, as far as I can see.
BTW, can you recommend a good primer resource type thing for WWI? I, like, totally don't understand its causes and significance. (Never took History at university, and public-school history tends to be worse than useless...)
The lozenge shape is the giveaway for WWIbellatrysOctober 29 2007, 04:54:38 UTC
afaik - and I'm sure someone will find an example of one still being used in some remote region in 1939, the way outdated biplanes were in Greece, because this is the net! and we're ALL pedants here! - the Mark I-IV style were never used in WWII. And there's also a later, less commonly-depicted model that looks like someone took a polygon with a wedge at the front and stuck treads on it - very strange and surreal looking, like a steampunk invention based on the civil war Ironclads, really fits the "landship" monker.
But later towards the end of the war, you do get tanks that look like the typical WWII style, square chassis with a cupola on top, only very small - you have to look for people around them to check the scale in a photo, to be sure at a quick glance if you're not an accomplished "tankspotter".
For getting a sense of how the Great War fits into the wheel of world history, what got *me* started was Tuchman's The Guns of August, which won a Pulitzer back when it was written. It's a bit dated, and there are a lot of good
( ... )
The poison gas becomes important in the next few pages of the story, leading up to battling Azrael, which you can see at the preview link and the review, but I didn't bother to duplicate them on my scrapbook. (According to wikipedia the British Commonwealth troops didn't start wearing steel helmets until late '15/early '16, although the poilus were wearing them earlier - but theirs were of a very different style, though, more like firemans' helmets/morions with a higher crown and a reinforcing comb down the center.)
(Which means I find all the history posts both bewildering and enlightening. It's like watching someone geek out over a fandom I don't know--except I know it's real history this time.)
(I'm more of a book/fandom dork, but with definite science tendencies. We are madly in love with MakingLight, even though it, also, is way over our heads here...)
Comments 43
It's the tanks. The British didn't field them until 1916, at the Somme, and didn't field them in numbers until 1917, at the Battle of Cambrai.
This is rather important: if the British had launched the Royal Tank Corps a year early, the history of World War One and probably of the 20th century would have been rather different. For one thing, the German Western Front would have been under very heavy pressure 1916-17, which might have eased up enough pressure on the East that the Bolshevik Revolution would have been a non-starter.
No Bolshevik Revolution, Russia gets to be a victorious Ally, and neither the Fascist nor the Nazi Party get to use Lenin's Bolshevik Party as a model, which means the interwar rise of fascism is much-muted. For a weapons error, the artist sure picked one which does maximum damage to history!
Reply
And this is not difficult research - I don't know if you bothered to click any of the links I supplied, but in the menu bar of the first non-wikipedia website that comes up if you google "WWI" there is an entry for "tanks" which covers it all in detailed chronology. So they didn't even do the bare minimum. (Frankly, given how familiar it looks, I strongly suspect they traced some stills picked for their visual interest rather than their timeframe and composited them, possibly of Chateau-Thierry fighting, given the trees; if I had time and transport to the area libraries, I know I could locate the identical shots in a day or two ( ... )
Reply
You forget that the Tsarist regime fell over half a year BEFORE the Bolshevik Revolution. The Bolsheviks did not overthrow the Tsar, the Bosheviks overthrew Kerensky's Provisional Government, which was semi-democratic (very much a liberal democracy compared to all previous Russian regimes ( ... )
Reply
Reply
Glork!
Reply
Reply
Reply
(Where I live, the Scots-Canadian connection is strong, and this is a popular song at traditional heritage events, these days. But it's a more personal lament, like the old mining/train/shipping disaster songs, rather than a lament for the world burning.)
Reply
This is a more subjective matter, but I also suspect whoever wrote this crap had never actually heard a German person talk in real life. I worked with several German volunteers during my time at Librivox (here are their German-language recordings if you want to see for yourself), and found their accent graceful and soft-spoken. The "nasty-sounding language" is just a stereotype from too many Hollywood Nazis and Hitler newsreels, as far as I can see.
Reply
Reply
Reply
But later towards the end of the war, you do get tanks that look like the typical WWII style, square chassis with a cupola on top, only very small - you have to look for people around them to check the scale in a photo, to be sure at a quick glance if you're not an accomplished "tankspotter".
For getting a sense of how the Great War fits into the wheel of world history, what got *me* started was Tuchman's The Guns of August, which won a Pulitzer back when it was written. It's a bit dated, and there are a lot of good ( ... )
Reply
(The comment has been removed)
Reply
Reply
(Which means I find all the history posts both bewildering and enlightening. It's like watching someone geek out over a fandom I don't know--except I know it's real history this time.)
Reply
(I know! It's fun and yet somehow strangely terrifying. I think I'll always be a science-y dork.)
Reply
(I'm more of a book/fandom dork, but with definite science tendencies. We are madly in love with MakingLight, even though it, also, is way over our heads here...)
Reply
Leave a comment