The First World War from Above

A fitting film for Memorial Day is “The First World War from Above,” a short but engrossing BBC documentary hosted by the Irish journalist Fergal Keane. 

What makes the documentary so unique is it examines World War I—the first major conflict fought after the invention of the airplane—from an aerial perspective. Although it uses a vantage point high above the trench lines to look at the war in a new way, the best part of the film is its deeply personal nature. It never loses sight of the fact that the aerial photography recorded bloody battlefields upon which millions of young men fought, suffered, and died. 

As the documentary explains, the new age of aerial reconnaissance made artillery fire—the leading killer in World War I—far more accurate than ever before. For example, Keane shows how the decision of a German unit to cultivate a garden near their camouflaged barracks inadvertently gave away their position to British aviators, which enabled a devastatingly accurate series of Allied artillery strikes on the German troops. In the documentary Keane also walks the surviving stretches of trench lines with historians, who describe the grim reality of combat on the Western Front. One of the battlefields Keane explores is the Somme, where on a single day—July 1, 1916—over 19,000 British soldiers were killed and nearly 40,000 wounded. By the time the Battle of the Somme ended in November 1916, over one million British, French, and German soldiers had been killed or wounded, and yet the battle lines between the Allied and German armies had barely moved.  

Most memorable of all, Keane’s documentary includes archival footage of a remarkable 1919 flight by the French pilot and war veteran Jacques Trolley de Prévaux. Armed with a motion picture camera that he attached to his aircraft, Trolley de Prévaux flew from the Belgian coastline to the French citadel city of Verdun, recording for posterity an unforgettable record of the war’s unprecedented devastation. Trolley de Prévaux’s 1919 footage, which was taken just months after the war ended in November 1918 but was only discovered a few years ago in the French military archives in Paris, is quite remarkable. In the spirit of Trolley de Prévaux, Keane takes to the air with modern pilots to fly over the same ground that Trolley de Prévaux flew over. As Keane shows, if you look hard enough, the beautiful countryside of modern France and Belgium still bears hidden scars of the conflict that cost some 16 million lives.   

In a really nice touch, Keane concludes his documentary with a visit to Trolley de Prévaux’s now elderly daughter, who tragically never knew her parents. The reason was because they did not survive World War II. When Nazi Germany conquered and occupied France in 1940, Trolley de Prévaux and his wife served in the French Resistance. In 1944 the Gestapo captured, tortured, and executed them, just before the Allies liberated France from the Germans. It’s thus quite moving to see the daughter’s reaction when Keane shows her the footage of her father’s airship flight in 1919.    

“The First World War from Above,” which is only about 50 minutes long, is available on YouTube here. 

Comments

[Bill Turnier]

An interesting aside on the topic of military aerial photography. In an anthropology class over 55 years ago I learned the story of an aspect of the use of photography for archaeological purposes. The French did not exempt clergy from military duty. A French Jesuit archaeologist was assigned to aerial photography duty. Photos taken of what appeared to be pasture revealed lines and shapes that were thought to be of military significance. Yet when troops occupied the fields no structures were found. Excavation revealed that below where lines were present in photos there were buried roads, walls or structures. Because of variations in the nutritional and drainage nature the fields above produced variations in the quality of grasses that were only apparent on close examination of photos. The use of aerial photography for discovery of archaeological sites persists to this day.

[Anthony Gaughan]

Thank you for your comment, Bill. On that very point, there is an interesting New Yorker article about an ancient city in Honduras that sat undisturbed in dense jungle for centuries until modern technology just recently made it visible from above: https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/an-ancient-city-emerges-in-a-remote-rain-forest.