Original subtitles

As the 20th century began, the movie camera brought history to life.

And World War I was the first in which the action could be seen as it happened.

Early cameras were too bulky to record many critical events.

But modern graphic techniques now allow these to be recreated.

Such as the world's first tank against tank engagement.

The exploits of the wars leading balloon buster.

A daring special forces operation.

Defending a fortified position against a revolutionary new weapon.

Or the brutal effectiveness of air power.

Modern techniques also allow World War I to be seen in colour as it really happened.

This was the war in which many of the weapons which

today dominate the battlefield were first developed.

The machine gun.

The tank.

Specialized combat aircraft like fighters and strategic pilots.

And the craft which revolutionized naval warfare.

The submarine.

And the aircraft carrier.

When the war began everyone expected it to be short and fast moving.

Instead the power of the machine gun.

Massive artillery bombardments.

And barbed wire led to the nightmare of trench warfare.

For the next three years on the western front.

Millions of men lived a nightmare existence on its

squatter and constant danger from enemy bombardment.

They went over the top in futile mass attacks.

Only to be mown down in the hundreds of thousands by enemy machine guns.

Attempts were made to break the stalemate.

One of the most macales.

Planned by the German general staff.

The historic fortress town of Verdon would be assaulted.

Not to achieve a breakthrough, but simply to bleed the French army to death.

The town of Verdon had been a crucial defensive

position on France's northeastern border for centuries.

Around it was an elaborate and mutually supporting

system of fortresses designed to halt any enemy advance.

The Germans calculated that the French could

not afford to allow the position to be lost.

They would pour the elite of their army into

what would become an horrific killing ground.

The fortresses like that at Duomont had first

been built in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Their walls and underground defenses had been constantly

updated to withstand assault or siege by modern weaponry.

They had massive and heavily armoured rotating turrets for heavy artillery.

And many machine gun nests.

But the reality was that since 1914, the defences had been allowed to crumble,

and the forts were severely undermanned.

On the 21st of February, 1960, after a nine-hour bombardment,

the German attack began.

After four days of savage fighting, the German assault

pioneer, Sergeant Eugen Kunse, managed to get into Duomont.

To his astonishment, he wandered entirely alone through a vast concrete labyrinth.

He could hear the muffled bangs of Fort Duomont's 155mm gun.

Guided by these, he made his way nervously to the main turret.

The French gun crew were so preoccupied that they

didn't notice it, until he made them prisoner.

Kunse then roamed on.

The realisation began to dawn on him that the fort was virtually unmarked.

In fact, its garrison had been reduced to a mere 56 elderly French gunners.

Scarcity able to believe his good fortune, Kunse eventually

found the remainder of these in the main dormitory.

Many still in their beds.

He simply locked them in their room and called his men into the fortress.

Sergeant Kunse had single-handedly captured Verdun's most powerful bastard.

Despite this disaster, the French held Verdun.

Astonishingly, three-quarters of the French army was

involved in the fighting during the next nine months.

More than 750,000 men, roughly half of them French

and half German, were sacrificed in a bloodbath.

By the fourth winter of the war, the Allies were hanging on grimly,

desperately waiting for the arrival of millions

of fresh American troops to turn the tide.

The Germans were equally aware of this danger.

Russia's collapse in December 1917 meant that

they could bring more than a million men west.

And General Eric Ludendorff, the commander on the western front, was determined to

use these to achieve a swift and final victory.

Knowing an attack was imminent, the British commander, Phil Marshall

Douglas Haig, adopted a new defensive system based on death.

There would be a forward zone, or blue line, lightly

manned, but with strong points to blunt the initial attack.

Then the battle zone, or red line, where the main fighting would take place.

And finally, the rear zone, or brown line, where the enemy assault would be held.

Ludendorff decided that a new attack method was needed to break these defenses,

storm troops.

Likely equipped and fast-moving units of the most battle-hardened men would slip

into the enemy's lines under cover of the bombardment.

These would use surprise and speed to bypass centers of

resistance and break through deep to the enemy's rear.

At four in the morning of the 21st of March, 1980, 6,000 German guns opened up

on the full depth of the British positions with gas and high explosives.

Just over four hours later, the first wave of storm

troops leapt out of the trenches and raced forward.

They slipped through the wire using stick grenades as one of their main weapons.

Another was the deadly belching fire of flamethrowers.

The German barrage moved forward a hundred meters every two to three minutes,

protecting this human tidal wave.

But in the end, it ran out of impetus, and

the last great German offensive fizzled out.

During 1916, the British had come up with a completely different but equally

innovative method of breaking the stalemate of the trenches.

Deep underground, special teams of miners recruited from the coalfields of Wales and

Northern England had begun to tunnel under the German lines.

It was backbreaking and claustrophobic work, with the

ever-present danger of being entombed alive by a collapse.

And made worse by the knowledge that the Germans were listening for the sound of

digging and sinking counter tunnels down which raiding parties would tiptoe.

Sometimes they would break in on the British miners

and desperate battles in the dark would ensue.

Some of the tunnel systems stretched for hundreds of yards underground,

with elaborate dead ends and false connections.

Once the main tunnels were under the selected sections of the enemy line,

they were packed with explosive.

An average of 21 tons of amatol per mine.

The greatest use of mines came on the 7th of June, 1970, at the beginning of the

British assault on the Messines White Sheet Ridge near Eep.

A total of 23 mines had been dug under the crucial

German position, at which 19 were to be used.

The Germans had pulled back from the others.

The firing wires were connected up.

And the assault troops moved into position in No Man's Land.

After six months of preparation, the firing

teams checked their watches and prayed a lot.

Then, at 3am, the plungers were driven home.

And more than 400 tons of explosive ripped two miles of the German front apart,

killing thousands of defenders.

Sadly, the initial breakthrough was not fully exploited.

A more long-lasting British attempt to break the trench stalemate was the tank.

By mid-1916, armour, caterpillar tracks and the internal combustion engine had

been brought together to form the first land ships

capable of crossing trenches and supporting infantry.

These were either the female, armed only with machine guns, or the male,

with two six-pounder guns in the side-sponsons.

These first tanks had a speed of about four miles an hour and a crew of eight.

The British tanks were first used piecemeal in

September 1916 during the Battle of the Somme.

They achieved some local successes.

But it was not until the Battle of Kombrai in November 1917,

when 376 tanks were used that their true potential was shown.

The holes were punched in the German life, and by

nightfall more than five miles had been gained.

But the unreliability of these early tanks meant

that the breakthrough could not be followed up.

Nevertheless, the Germans were so impressed by the British

successes that they urgently developed their own tank.

A 33-tonne monster with a crew of 18 named the A7V, armed with a 57mm cannon and six

machine guns, it was totally underpowered and

unwieldy, and could only manage three miles an hour.

But it was rushed into service to counter the British threat,

and the first tank against tank confrontation soon followed.

This came during the great German offensive in March 1980, when the storm

troops tore through the British lines and penetrated more than 40 miles.

The second assault in April kept up the momentum, and the

possibility of breaking through to Paris suddenly seemed feasible.

On the early morning of the 24th of April, Ludendorff's forward units were less than

ten miles from Amio, probing towards a village of V.

One and a half miles southwest of the village, a section of British tax,

one male and two females, was waiting in support of dug-in infantry.

As the crews peered through the mist, they saw an extraordinary sight.

One of the few operational German A7Vs lumbered into view.

The British started up and moved forward to engage it.

The world's first armored duel was underway.

The Ironclad monsters ponderously closed the range.

Inside the tax, the conditions were appalling.

There was no proper suspension, and the unsylenced engines roared and belched fumes.

Finally, the leading British tank, the male, opened fire with its six pounder gun.

But missed.

Unscathed, the A7V trundled on.

It's crew desperately trying to see where the fire was coming from.

Finally, they spotted the enemy, halted and opened fire.

No effect at first, but then it began to find

its range and struck both British females.

Neither was disabled, but unable to make any impression with their machine guns,

they halted and began to pull back.

While the German was concentrating on its mates, the

British male continued to advance and close the range.

Its crew, desperately trying to hold the A7V in their

sights as they were thrown around in the un-sprung attack.

At last, they got with an effective range and opened fire again.

After a ranging shot, the A7V was hit.

Its crew decided that the British fire was getting a bit too accurate and began to

withdraw, thus ending the world's first tank versus tank battle.

The tank had revolutionised the battlefield, and the French

were quick to see the need to add speed and mobility.

They developed the 7-ton Renault FT-17, with a two-man crew and a machine gun or

37mm cannon in the world's first traversing turret.

The American forces, which had begun arriving in France in summer 1917,

soon replaced their French helmets with the British

version, but enthusiastically adopted the small French tank.

They practiced with it before the cameras for publicity.

Several hundred were brought forward in support when the Americans began their

first major action as an independent force.

This was September 1980, in the Merse-Argon area of northeastern France.

There the Americans faced a daunting challenge.

Their trenches lay at the foot of the slopes, running up to the Argon forest.

They would have to attack uphill against an experienced enemy which had had plenty

of time to build elaborate defensive positions.

Behind the barbed wire and trenches of the German front line, there are series of

machine gun nests which had been carefully camouflaged in the wooded terrain.

German reinforcements could be rushed to these to blunt any breakthroughs.

From them, the German defenders could bring withering fire to bear on advancing troops.

The Americans had practiced hard using tanks to support their infantry.

But these frequently came to grief, since the Renault's were only lightly

armored and they could only get across a gap of six feet.

Despite these problems, the US troops were able to break through after three-week

savage fighting and force the Germans to abandon their defensive wire.

In the wide-open spaces of the Eastern Front, warfare had been much more fluid.

In August 1914, Tsar Nicholas II and his generals planned to send the Russian First

Army across the border of East Prussia in the north, advancing along the railway

line towards the capital Königsberg and drawing the German defenders towards it.

Four days later, the Second Army would move into the

heavily wooded area near Tannenberg in the south.

It would then strike north to Königsberg and cut off the main German army.

The Russians surprised the Germans by how quickly they were able to mobilize.

And the appearance of hard-riding Kosak cavalry

struck terror into the local Prussian population.

First army crossed the East Prussian border within two weeks of the outbreak of war.

It had 150,000 men and alone outnumbered all the German forces in East Prussia.

The opposing armies clashed indecisively near the town of Gumbinen.

Whereupon the German commander, Max von Plitwitz, fell back in panic,

begging for permission to evacuate East Prussia.

And the Russian general, Pavel Rennenkamp, advanced a few miles and then stopped.

Unfortunately, he hated Alexander Samsonov, the commander of Second Army,

and had no intention of doing anything to support his advance.

The German High Command had now called 67-year-old Paul von Hindenburg out of

retirement to replace von Plitwitz, with the

highly able Eric Ludendorff as his chief of staff.

They spotted the opportunity which the excellent German railway system now gave

them to use their much smaller army to beat each of the Russians in turn.

One army corps was urgently sent by rail round to the Russian's left back.

This went unnoticed by the enemy, which was

unaware that it faced any serious opposition.

Most of the remaining two corps were then ordered to march southwest as fast as they

could to take up a position on the right of the advancing Russian Second Army.

Once again, all evidence of a major enemy move was ignored by Second Army.

The remaining German divisions spread out as a covering force to harass the First

Army once Rennenkamp decided to get moving again.

The

Germans proved that a little very mobile artillery

and cavalry could imitate a much larger force.

In the south, the Germans watched as the Russian

Second Army lost cohesion amid the forests and lakes.

They then went in for the kill.

Thrusting forward, they then went in for the kill.

Thrusting forward through the town of Needenburg, the corps which had moved

secretly by train sliced through the Russian

line of advance, cutting off much of Second Army.

Then the other corps which had moved southwest, completed the encirclement.

Confused and terrified by this sudden and

unexpected assault, the Russians broke and fled.

General Samsonov went into the woods alone and shot himself.

While more than 300,000 of his men were

killed or wounded, then 90,000 taken prisoner.

It was one of the most complete defeats in military history.

When World War I began, manned flight was only 11 years old.

Aircraft were rickety and unreliable, used only for observation.

The crews used handheld pistols or machine guns to drive off the enemy.

The dinner Dutch engineer named Anthony Focker, working for the Germans,

found a way of interrupting the fire of a machine

gun so it could fire forward through the propeller.

His eindecker, or single winger, became the world's first specialized fighter.

And for six months ruled supreme over the Western Front.

The Allies rushed to develop their own fighters.

And for the next three years, a succession of ever

more powerful machines fought duels to the death.

The most successful pilots became superstars.

Aces, like Manfred von Richthofen, the Red Baron.

The Frenchman, Georges Guinimer.

Britain's Albert Ball.

And America's Eddie Rickenbach, one of the few to survive.

This revolutionary new former warfare saw the development of new tactics.

Top pilots worked out how to outwit and kill their opponents.

One of the earliest was the turn, invented by one of Germany's first aces,

Max Imumen.

In which a head-on diving approach could be

used to stall turn in behind an unwary opponent.

Barrage balloons were widely used all along the

Western Front for observation and artillery spotting.

Shooting them down was one of the most dangerous missions faced by early pilots.

As they were closely defended by anti-aircraft guns and enemy fighters.

One of the most successful, famous and short-lived balloon busters was a

21-year-old American lieutenant Frank Luke.

Luke only reached a frontline squadron in August 1918

and was determined to become famous as a fighter pilot.

He saw the dangerous job of balloon busting as his

quickest way to get to grips with the enemy and volunteer.

On the 12th of September, just two weeks before U.S.

troops began, the MERS are gone offensive, Luke went on his first balloon hunt.

He shot down one that day,

and eight more over the next four days.

Within a fortnight, he had 14 confirmed kills.

During this devastating aerial rampage, he had also shot down five enemy fighters,

making him America's leading ace.

But Luke was now becoming dangerously punched drunk

by his success and felt that nothing could stop him.

On the 29th of September, he took off and flew over his airfield, dropping a note,

saying, watch the three hand balloons on the MERS.

He wanted an audience for his next spectacular.

And U.S.

troops watched as the first balloon burst into

flames and the tiny plane moved on to the next.

Frank Luke was true to his word.

The third balloon also went down.

But he never got back to base to bask in his glory.

As night fell, there was no sign of him.

Only after the war was it established that his lone aircraft had been jumped by eight

fuckers and forced to lap after destroying two.

He died from the wounds he had received in the air.

The information sent back by the observation balloons was increasingly

used, not only to direct artillery bombardments, but to

plan bombing attacks on enemy lines and supply routes.

The first bombing attempts were extremely basic.

The observer simply dropped a missile over the edge.

But soon aircraft were being fitted with wing racks

on which increasingly powerful bombs were attached.

Aiming was still crude, with the crew relying on

eye and an estimate of how much offset to allow.

But this new form of warfare soon began to prove how effective it could be.

One of the most dramatic examples came during the

Battle of Megiddo in Palestine in September 1980.

RAF bombers dominated the battlefield, flying constant missions to harass the

Turkish troops who were allied to the Germans.

In one incident, an entire supply column was

caught in a narrow defile and utterly destroyed.

As one RAF officer described, pilot after pilot, flying in perfect order,

dropped his bombs and then raked the poor Turks with machine gun fire.

Everywhere they were mercilessly pursued and caught in the unfolding slaughter.

The carnage was an eerie prophecy of the effect of

air power almost a century later during the Gulf Wars.

By the time of the last great Allied offensives on the western front in

September and October 1918, the role of tactical air power and the effectiveness

of close cooperation with ground forces was fully understood.

So too was the potential of this new weapon for long-range strategic assault.

On the 13th of June 1970, 14 German Gauter bombers took after bomb London.

Each carried a ton of bombs and 162 civilians were killed.

This raid opened a new chapter in warfare.

For the first time, non-combatants, many miles

from the front, were directly in the firing line.

By the end of the war, the British had developed their own strategic bomber force

and were preparing to mount sustained campaigns against German cities.

This strategic bomber was now seen as one of the crucial factors in warfare.

As Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin said in the

1930s, the bomber will always get through.

Another crucial weapon, which had a revolutionary effect on warfare,

was the submarine.

Armed with the torpedo, an invention which had

already frightened naval commanders the world over.

The submarine soon proved that it could threaten any battlefield.

But it was not the threat to battle fleets, which was to prove critical.

The German U-boats soon showed that they had the potential

to win the war by cutting Britain's vital trade links.

Only the danger that indiscriminate sinking of neutral ships might bring the

United States into the war held the Kaiser back

from launching an all-out attack until 1970.

For much of the war, the Germans found it easy to prey on merchant shipping,

because most ships sailed alone and unescorted.

U-boats didn't even have to use valuable torpedoes to destroy their prey.

The British eventually introduced convoys.

And developed methods of locating submerged U-boats

using sound detectors towed behind warships.

This was backed up with depth charges launched from fast-moving escorts.

But the U-boat threat continued.

And the British Admiralty decided that the only way of

stopping the wasps must be to block up the wasps next.

By 1917, the main U-boat base was at Bruges in occupied Belgium.

Eight miles from the sea, but connected to the ports of Ostend and Zebruger by canals.

It was too far from the sea for there to be any chance of a landing to catch it.

The U-boats were housed in concrete shelters, which provided excellent

protection against naval or air bombardment.

So British Admiral Roger Keyes, commander of the Dover Patrol,

decided that the best way to stop them was to block

the points where the canals went out into the sea.

Both the ports were heavily protected with artillery and troops, and the entrance at

Zebruger was also guarded by a mile-long mole.

This was heavily fortified with a twenty-foot high wall on the seaward side

and would need to be seized before block ships could reach the harbour mouth.

Keyes decided that this could be achieved by birthing a shallow draft ship alongside

it, carrying a landing party of elite troops, 700 men of the Royal Marines.

He selected the cruiser HMS Vindictive for the task,

when she was fitted with extra armour and guns.

A new upper deck was built with eighteen landing

ramps, which would be lowered on top of the sea wall.

The volunteer naval crew practiced raising and lowering these.

The mole had arches halfway, and was planned to blow these using an obsolete

explosive-packed submarine so that reinforcements could not get along it.

What the attackers did not know was that a German destroyer had moored on the inside

of the mole the previous night, more or less exactly

alongside where the vindictive was aiming to land.

Admiral Keyes aboard the destroyer HMS Warwick led the task force out of Dover

Harbour on the evening of the 22nd of April.

The weather for the crossing was calm.

For the previous week, monitors with their massive fifteen-inch guns had been

bombarding the German coastal guns and strongholds.

Nightfall and German searchlights probed the darkness

as the town behind them was lit up by the British ship.

Then at 2330 hours, coastal patrol boats surged in and released their smoke floats.

The wind was blowing from the northwest, wafting

the smoke directly towards the mole and the port.

Realising that something was going on, the Germans opened a furious fire,

but their view was increasingly obscured by the

smoke screen from the criss-crossing small boats.

Behind the protective cover of smoke, HMS Mendictive with two escorts also

packed with troops should she be sunk, moved into position.

The cruisers captain ordered full speed ahead, and

the three assault ships raced into the smoke screen.

On the mole, German sailors strained to see their enemy.

Then with only 250 yards to go, the three British ships emerged,

and the Germans opened a withering fire.

In the few moments that it took to reach the mole, the two most senior Royal

Marines and two naval officers were killed.

The German destroyer had also joined in the fire, and a heavy swell was making it

hard for Mendictive to get close to the mole.

The German defenders were now firing at point-blank range, and the Royal Marines

crowded on the deck of Mendictive were being slaughtered.

But this critical moment, the commander of one of the cruisers' escorts, the

converted ferry daffodie, saw the difficulty she was in, and nudged his bows

against Mendictive's side and pushed her alongside the mole.

At last, the landing ramps went down, and the Royal

Marines could start to fight their way ashore.

One officer, seeing a platoon of men crouched close

to a ramp, ordered them ashore, but no one moved.

They were all dead, cut down by a single machine gun.

But despite the German fire, the boarding parties on Mendictive began to get ashore.

The men on her two escorts were unable to

disembark because of the height of the sea wall.

So those from Daffodil clambered aboard Mendictive, so as to use her landing ramps.

As the landing parties came over the top of the wall, they

were met by a storm of bullets which cut down many of them.

An attempt was made to rush the tip of the mole, but

every single man in the attack became a casualty.

The Germans were firing from well-fortified positions,

and it seemed almost impossible to winkle them out.

From the foretop of Mendictive, a section of Royal

Marines was manning Lewis guns to provide covering fire.

One by one the men were cut down until only Sergeant Norman Finch remained.

Despite his wounds, he continued to fire on the German positions, and was one of

the eleven Victoria Crosses awarded that day.

The most ever during a single action.

Gradually however, the desperate gallantry of

the Marines seemed to be having some effect.

The fire from some of the German positions was slowing, and they were so preoccupied

with fighting off the assault that they would be unable

to turn on the block ships which would go in behind them.

While this desperate struggle continued,

another threat to the Marines became apparent.

One which could have bought the whole mission.

A battalion of German infantry on bicycles was seen approaching the mole.

If they got on to it, the Marines would be overwhelmed.

The submarine C-3 appeared in the nick of time

and headed towards the arches of the mole.

Without a shot being fired directly at her, the

commander rammed the submarine into position.

Before the Germans on the mole had realized exactly what was going on,

the seven men of the crew leapt into a skiff.

But most were wounded by heavy fire before

they could escape to the waiting motor launch.

12 minutes later the submarine exploded, blowing a 30-yard hole in the mole.

Any German hope of reinforcing their troops was now at an end.

With the Germans on the mole fully tied down, it

was time for the crucial block ships to move in.

Three elderly cruisers, 30s, Intrepid and the Fijania, had each been packed with

1,500 tons of concrete and equipped with skuttling charges.

Manned by volunteer crews, they now slipped in

behind the mole and headed for the entrance.

Seeing this new threat, the Germans in the port

itself concentrated their fire on the three ships.

Thetis was hit particularly severely and began to fill with

water, so her commander had to scuttle her outside the entrance.

Despite point-blank German fire, the other two ships succeeded

in entering the canal and were successfully scuttled.

Launches were standing by to rescue the crews of the

block ships, and these now moved in under heavy fire.

As they moved off with the survivors, Claxon sounded to signal the end of the

operation, and the Royal Marines on the mole began to fall back to HMS Windington.

Amazingly, the cruiser was able to get away from the mole and linked back to England.

Her part of the raid had been a triumphant success, but

a success which had been bought at a very high price.

Of the 1,300 Royal Navy and Royal Marine volunteers who

took part in the action, over 600 were killed or wounded.

Sadly, the two block ships which had been intended to close the entrance at our

stand were unable to reach it, and had to be scuttled a mile outside it.

But a month later, the vindictive, this time loaded with

concrete as a block ship, managed to complete the job.

But the dawn at Zebruger showed that two of the three block

ships were well in the entrance, sunk across the main channel.

The sheer audacity of the raid was a welcome boost for the morale of the

British public, at a time when the successes of the German storm troops on

the western front looked to be close to breaking through the Allied line.

The Zebruger raid, with its intricate coordination of landing forces with the

block ships and the submarine used to isolate the

mole, was the biggest special operation of World War I.

Roger Keyes, the man who conceived it, was to go on to plan similar assaults when

he became Director of Combined Operations in 1940.

In this, as in so many other ways, World War I foreshadowed many of the

developments which were to be exploited in the Second World War.

And even more spectacularly, it pioneered many of the

weapons which have revolutionized today's battlefield.

Thanks for watching!