Britain’s Great War episode 3 – The Darkest Hour: Jeremy Paxman tells the story of how Britain edged close to defeat in the worst conflict it had ever known. Unearthing the wreck of a German U-boat in the Medway, he describes Germany’s attempt to starve the country into submission – could the Win the War Cookbook save the day? […]
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Britain’s Great War episode 2 – The War Machine: In the second part of his landmark series on how the First World War affected the lives of the British people, Jeremy Paxman describes the crisis facing the country as it becomes clear it is fatally unprepared to fight a modern industrial war. Now the whole population is enlisted
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Britain’s Great War episode 1 – War Comes to Britain: Jeremy Paxman traces the story of the dramatic early stages of the war, from stunned disbelief to the mass recruitment of volunteer soldiers. Fear of invasion grips the country, Boy Scouts guard bridges, and spies are suspected everywhere. For the first time, British civilians are fired on by
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WWI – The Final Hours: On 8 November 1918, an Englishman, a Frenchman and a German gathered in secret, on a train carriage in a forest near Paris. Their meeting would last for three days. Its aim: bring peace to Europe, and an end to four long years of brutal and deadly war. One hundred years after the
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Deadly Battles of World War I: poison gas killed 80,000 soldiers in World War I. Nearly a million more were victims who suffered its lingering effects. Initially the wind distributed chlorine gas across the battlefields of the western front but an arms race quickly developed until one in three shells contained some form of toxic gas. Deadly Battles of
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A Scottish Soldier: A Lost Diary of WWI: thousands of black soldiers fought in the First World War. Poet Jackie Kay tells the story of one of them – Arthur Roberts. Arthur grew up in Glasgow and joined the King’s Own Scottish Borderers in 1917. He fought at Ypres and kept a detailed diary, which gives us a unique account
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Great War Horses: the horses that provided the backbone of the Australian Light Horse regiments in World War I were popularly known as Walers. Bred for Australia’s tough Outback conditions, Walers were well-equipped for the harsh climate and terrain of the Middle East, where the ANZAC forces faced the armies of the Ottoman Empire. Great War Horses is
They Shall Not Grow Old –Â Peter Jackson brings to life the people who can best tell the story of World War I: the men who were there, employing state-of-the-art technology to transform audio and moving image archive footage more than a century old. Alternative video stream For Fullscreen They Shall Not Grow Old Driven by a
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The Fight to the End tells the story of the terrible battles of 1917 and 1918, and how Britain and her allies turned a looming defeat into victory. As recruitment levels fell, conscription was introduced. One of the conscripts was Harry Patch – here interviewed for the first time – who went on to live to the age of 111,
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The Battle of the Somme is an immersive account of one of the most iconic and tragic battles in history, told through its last survivors and through families and communities at home who lost loved ones. When the troops went over the top in June 1916, they imagined this was the attack that would end the war. Instead, it turned
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Vivid and heartbreaking stories told by the last Tommies – filmed in their 90s and 100s – remembering life and death in World War I, illustrated with powerful archive. The three-part series is the result of a uniquely important oral history project to record the experiences of men and women who lived through Great War. This episode tells the story of
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The Allies win a great victory at Amiens. The tide is turning, but the victors are under no illusions. The German Army remains a daunting fighting force and it has an ace up the sleeve: the Hindenburg Line – the most formidable defensive system in military history. If the Allies are to have any hope for victory, they need to
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