Great Battles of the Great War
The Somme, Gallipoli and Messines/Passchendaele. The great set-piece battles of World War I are explored in this landmark series combining unique archival footage with carefully researched location photography.Here Comes Kitchener's Army
On 1st July 1916, a hundred thousand British soldiers went over the top to begin the Battle of the Somme. They were the raw recruits of Lord Kitchener's New Army. As they walked across no-man land in perfect formation, they made a perfect target for the German gunners who mowed them down in their hundreds. Wave after wave were cut down and fell in perfectly formed lines, as if on parade. By the end of that first day 20,000 men lay dead, with another 40,000 wounded. It was the worst day in British Military History. By November 1916, the gains were minimal, the slaughter almost incomprehensible. In five months Britain, it has been said, lost her innocence in the face of the pointless loss of so many hundreds of thousands of lives.
The Last Crusade
What must it have felt like to be a soldier in an amphibious landing craft, heading for the beaches of Gallipoli on April 25th, 1915? The Allied Troops - which included the ANZACS - had to cross the exposed beaches under a hail of Turkish rifle and machine gun fire. It was a terrible baptism of fire for the soldiers of the Australian Imperial Force.
In the nine-month carnage of Gallipoli, the Allies lost 50,000 killed and gained a tiny foothold which they then abandoned when the 100,000 survivors were evacuated nine months later.
The Salient
Straddling the French-Belgian border, the flat, wet and muddy landscape surrounding the small Belgian city of Ypres was the scene of three great battles between 1914 and 1917. It culminated - in the final battle known as 'Passchendaele' - in a blood-letting that matched The Somme in desperation and losses. But while the rolling, intimate landscape of The Somme makes it easy to recognise features that would have been familiar to the troops, it's not too hard to see why the men who fought over the featureless landscape of Flanders often drowned in a sea of mud.
Of the million British soldiers who died in the Great War, most of them died here. Ypres became synonymous with killing on a grand scale and became a place of special dread for all who were sent there.
Bonus 50 minute documentary:
An Ordinary Hero - The Story of John Simpson Kirkpatrick
One of the unlikeliest heroes to emerge from the carnage and chaos of the First World War was John Simpson Kirkpatrick. Born in South Shields, County Durham, he eventually became one of Australia's most treasured heroes, famous for his work as a stretcher bearer and as the "man with the donkey" at Gallipoli. Using one of the donkeys landed for water carrying, he transported wounded men day and night from the fighting in Monash Valley to the beach on Anzac Cove. By the time of his death from machine gun fire he had saved many lives. Simpson Kirkpatrick was buried on the beach at Hell Spit.
