ITV – Great Battles of the Great War (1999) Part 2: Somme Here Comes The Kitcheners Army
English | Documentary | Size: 920 MB
For four years, from 1914 to 1918, World War I raged across Europe’s western and eastern fronts after assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria ignited the war. Along the 1915 Gallipoli campaign, the savage combat on the Western Front in France and Belgium came to define modern warfare.
The Western Front evokes images of mud-spattered men in waterlogged trenches, shielded from artillery blasts and machine-gun fire by a few feet of dirt. This iconic setting was the most critical arena of the Great War, a 400-mile combat zone stretching from Belgium to Switzerland where more than three million Allied and German soldiers struggled during four years of almost continuous combat. It has persisted in our collective memory as a tragic waste of human life and a symbol of the horrors of industrialized warfare.
The great set-piece battles of the World War One – Gallipoli, the Somme and Messines/Passchendaele – are explored in this landmark series which combines unique archive footage with carefully researched location photography, transporting the viewer back to the exact spot where so many momentous events occurred.
Producer & Director: Ed Skelding ; Produced by ESP for Tyne Tees Television
Part 2: Somme: Here Comes the Kitchener’s Army
In 1916 Kitchener’s New Army was thrown into the chaos of the Western Front in an attempt to break through the German trenches and win the war. It took four and a half months and a million lives to gain only seven miles of blood soaked ground. Here, the machine gun and the tank inflicted killing on an industrial scale. War would never be the same again.
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-mans 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.
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