During World War I, on and around Christmas Day 1914, the sounds of rifles firing and shells exploding faded in a number of places along the Western Front in favour of holiday celebrations in the trenches and gestures of goodwill between enemies. The soldiers on the Western Front did not expect to celebrate on the battlefield, but even a world war could not destroy the Christmas spirit.
This is the secret story of how The War To End All Wars was fought - and what happened when the first Weapons of Mass Destruction reached the battlefield. This is the forgotten story of the secret deals, government mistakes, and political intolerance of America’s role in World War I.
What really happened when catastrophe befell the mightiest fleet in the world? Featuring remarkable new analysis of the epic battle that sent Britain’s unconquerable “super-dreadnoughts” to the seafloor, this documentary settles longstanding controversies and definitively solves historical puzzles through the utilisation of cutting-edge technology from diverse fields of research to provide definitive analysis of the Battle of Jutland, May 1916.
In just one day almost 60,000 British soldiers were killed or wounded. Why was this first day on the Somme such a disaster for the British? Filmed on the battlefield itself, in laboratories and on firing ranges - archaeologists, military historians, and other experts from disciplines as diverse as metallurgy and geology investigate the factors and conduct tests to replicate and understand the factors that turned one terrible day into the bloodiest in the history of the British Army.
During WWI, stalemate on the Western Front produced a new kind of warfare--a network of trenches dug on both sides of the line – and a new breed of soldier fought deep underground using shovels, picks, and explosives. By 1917, the British were staring defeat in the face and focused on a ridge in the Ypres sector of Belgium to breach enemy lines. A network of 19 mines were laid under a ridge by tunnel units – a total of almost one million pounds of explosives. The resulting blast was heard in London.
The American teenagers who marched into Europe's Great War could not have anticipated the horrors of modern warefare: machine guns, mustard gas, and artillery shells. Gerald Mcraney explains how outdated tactics would turn an infantry charge into an act of mass suicide.