- 12 years ago
The First World War - Part 3/10 - Global War
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Short filmTranscript
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00:23From the start of the First World War,
00:25Germany seized on Britain's greatest weakness,
00:27a vast empire hard to defend,
00:29fatal to lose.
00:32The gamble was that Britain might risk everything to protect it,
00:35even victory on the Western Front.
00:44War for Europe meant war for the world.
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03:04The days when the Germans left the earth to one neighbor,
03:07the sea to another, and kept only the heavens for themselves,
03:12are over.
03:13We don't want to put anyone in the shade,
03:16but we too demand our place in the sun.
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03:24of empires, but by 1900 she had Togoland, Cameroon, German Southwest Africa, now Namibia,
03:30and German East Africa, now Tanzania. Her flag flew over patches in the Pacific,
03:38New Guinea, Samoa, and Micronesia. She had a vital toehold in China at Tsingtao,
03:47where she recalled her ships and brewed beer.
03:49Grand Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz saw this as just the start.
03:57We are now standing only at the beginning of a new division of the globe.
04:07Germany alarmed the world with her imperial tub thumping.
04:10She eyed up Puerto Rico and considered pouncing on the Panama Canal the minute it was completed.
04:19But the boldest of all the Kaiser schemes was Operational Plan 3.
04:25The East Coast is the heart of the United States, and this is where she is most vulnerable.
04:31New York will panic at the prospect of bombardment. By hitting her here, we can force America to negotiate.
04:37Germany's secret plans from 1903 to attack the eastern seaboard with 60 ships and 100,000 men to shell Manhattan and capture Boston.
04:55The outlandish scheme was driven by the Kaiser's resentment of America's growing power in the Pacific.
05:11He believed in a militarist state and increasingly hated what the West stood for.
05:15Service to mammon, greed, self-indulgence, land grabbing, lying, treachery and not least murder.
05:29The Kaiser thought capitalism was vulnerable.
05:31That a strong enough attack on its international systems of trade, credit and insurance could bring the edifice tumbling down.
05:38Operational Plan 3 was dropped, but not the hostility towards capitalist empires.
05:56By 1912, Germany had traded in Weltpolitik for a more realistic policy.
06:01Now, her military machine prepared for a European, not a global war, and the army got the budget increase, not the navy.
06:12The first day of war found Germany's high seas fleet trapped by the mighty British navy in the North Sea.
06:21And all the German navy had to threaten the entire British empire was a scattered force of 17 cruisers linked by a wireless network to Berlin.
06:31There was the Königsberg of East Africa, the Gerben and the Breslau in the Mediterranean,
06:43the Dresden and the Karlsruhe in the West Indies,
06:48the Leipzig off the west coast of America.
06:52But the greatest concentration of cruisers was Admiral Graf von Spee's powerful East Asiatic
06:57squadron based at Tsingtao in China.
07:08Tsingtao gave Germany a huge area of operations across the South China Sea and into the Pacific.
07:16Seizing it would cut the squadron's lifeline.
07:18Britain saw the urgency, but lacked the resources.
07:23So, two days into the war, she turned to her ally, Japan.
07:33Japan was a growing power.
07:35Britain's call for naval help suited her ambitions perfectly.
07:39Together, Britain and Japan would capture Tsingtao, vital German base and the Kaiser's pride and joy.
07:51It would shame me more to surrender Tsingtao to the Japanese than Berlin to the Russians.
07:56On the 2nd of September 1914, 60,000 Japanese troops landed up the coast, violating China's neutrality.
08:09They met up with 2,000 British and closed in on the German garrison of four and a half thousand.
08:14It's unbearable.
08:19All we can do is sit and wait for this bunch of monkeys to arrive.
08:24Every day they get a bit closer.
08:26No one expects to get home in one piece.
08:29No hope of reinforcements.
08:32The noose around our necks is getting tighter and tighter.
08:35For a solid week, the Japanese battered Tsingtao.
08:51On the 7th of November, they entered the town in triumph.
08:59Some Germans sneered at the token British force, forgetting the Japanese to do their dirty work.
09:05The brave British.
09:08They played no part in the capture of Tsingtao, but they joined in the victory parade.
09:14As they went by, we Germans were ordered to turn our backs on them.
09:18The English complained to the Japanese commander, but he simply said,
09:22well, we can't repeat the whole procession just because of that.
09:26The capture of Tsingtao gave Japan a launch pad to pursue her empire building.
09:37Within weeks, she demanded territory and trading rights from China.
09:42Japan also seized all German possessions north of the equator.
09:48Australia and New Zealand were quick to steal those to the south.
09:51Much to America's frustration, Britain had empowered Japan in the Pacific.
10:02Key stage in a process that would lead, a quarter of a century later, to Pearl Harbor.
10:07Germany's loss of Tsingtao, far from neutralizing Spee's squadron, ensured its destructive power would be felt around the globe.
10:22The best German cruiser commanders, like Spee, were fearless mavericks, whom the war turned into heroes.
10:32Superb sailors with the instincts of pirates.
10:35The Kaiser had given them full authority to make their own decisions in wartime.
10:42The heavy responsibility of the officer in command will be increased by the isolated position of his ship.
10:49But he must never show one moment of weakness.
10:52Above all, the officer must bear in mind that his chief duty is to damage the enemy as severely as possible.
11:00Spee now split his squadron.
11:07The light cruiser Emden, under Captain Carl von Müller, made for the Bay of Bengal.
11:12Spee in the Scharnhorst led his other ships across the Pacific.
11:21I'm quite homeless. I cannot reach Germany.
11:24I must plow the seas of the world, doing as much mischief as I can.
11:32At the Admiralty in London, Winston Churchill fretted about where Spee would show up next.
11:36The vastness of the Pacific and its multitude of islands offered him their shelter.
11:44And once he had vanished, who should say where he would reappear?
11:49He was a cut flower in a vase, fair to see, yet bound to die.
11:55But so long as he lived, all our enterprises lay under the shadow of a serious potential danger.
12:01Spee had a constant worry.
12:10Cruisers needed coal every eight or nine days or they'd be dead in the water.
12:16He made for neutral Chile, where he had coal waiting for him.
12:26On the 1st of November 1914, he ran into a British fleet off Coronel.
12:31The battle which followed inspired a post-war feature film.
12:44The British commander was Admiral Sir Christopher Craddock, under orders from London.
12:51It appears that Gneisenau and Scharnhorst are working across to South America.
12:55Be prepared to meet them in company.
12:57Craddock had one ship that could outgun Spee's fleet, but she was slow and had been left behind.
13:07Now Craddock raced towards enemy ships better armed than his.
13:11He had ignored his own rule of thumb.
13:18A naval officer should never let his boat go faster than his brain.
13:22I immediately ordered Scharnhorst and Gneisenau to go full steam ahead and within 15 minutes,
13:30I was racing against heavy seas at 20 knots and came to lie parallel with him.
13:34Craddock's ships were no match for Spee's.
13:45Good Hope and Monmouth were obviously in distress.
13:48Monmouth yawed off to starboard, burning furiously.
13:50There was a terrible explosion on Good Hope between her main mast and her after funnel.
13:57The gust of flames reached a height of over 200 feet,
14:00lighting up a cloud of debris that was flung still higher in the air.
14:031,600 British sailors were lost.
14:15It was Britain's worst naval defeat for 250 years.
14:20The global war was going Germany's way.
14:23It is only when you get to see and realize what India is, that she is the strength and the
14:36greatness of England, it is only then that you feel that every nerve a man may strain,
14:43every energy he may put forward, cannot be devoted to a nobler purpose than keeping tight
14:50the cords that hold India to ourselves.
14:56Britain's empire and trading network was the single biggest resource she brought to the war.
15:03And India was at the heart of it.
15:08The cords were never tighter, all the more reason for Germany to want them cut.
15:13These slender lines on the map were now the focus of intense study in the British and German admiralty's
15:24in the chart rooms of warships.
15:26Fingers traced the vital shipping lanes through the Suez Canal, around South Africa's Cape.
15:33Mines pondered how to protect them, how to sever them.
15:37And one of the sharpest mines was on the bridge of the German cruiser Emden.
15:44A month after she left Admiral Spee's squadron, Captain Carl von Müller steered her into the Bay of Bengal.
15:53In 1932, the Germans made a feature film about his odyssey.
15:57He had an indescribable power over the entire crew.
16:07He never gave orders, he just expressed a wish.
16:11From the moment he took command of the ship, he never left the bridge again.
16:16This is where he stood, slept, sat, studied the maps.
16:20This is where he wanted to be, stand or fall.
16:27The Emden sometimes rigged a dummy funnel to look like a British cruiser.
16:38A large steamer appeared dead ahead, and thinking we were an English man of war,
16:42was so overjoyed at our presence that she hoisted a huge British flag.
16:47I'd like to have seen the look on her captain's face when we hoisted our flag,
16:51and invited him most graciously to tarry with us a while.
16:57Captain Müller became famous for taking all crew and passengers safely onto the Emden,
17:01before sinking their ship.
17:06We always allowed them time to collect and take with them their personal possessions.
17:11They usually devoted most of this time to making certain
17:15that their precious supply of whisky was not wasted on the fishes.
17:18As a ship was in the ship's place, Müller regularly released his grateful captives.
17:28Such was the Emden's impact that the British Admiralty later
17:31drew up this chart to track her movements.
17:38Müller even had the audacity to steam into the Indian port of Madras,
17:41as a crew member recorded in his diary.
17:4722nd of September, 1914.
17:509.30pm.
17:52The Emden sneaks closer and fires 125 shots.
17:56Some hit boats in the harbour.
17:58Huge columns of fire rise above the oil tanks.
18:02The coastal defences open fire, but they all fall short.
18:0823rd of September.
18:10We are now 100 miles away.
18:12We can still see the fires at Madras.
18:14In the city of London, freight rates and shipping insurance rocketed.
18:27At one point, the entire British trade fleet in the Bay of Bengal
18:31was kept in harbour, rather than fall prey to dashing Captain Müller.
18:39Germany's rogue cruisers were starting to harm Britain's war effort.
18:44Three transports are delayed in Calcutta through fear of Emden.
18:49This involves delaying transport of artillery and cavalry.
18:53The cabinet took a strong view.
18:55The extirpation of these pests is a most important subject.
19:02While the Emden ran the British ragged at one end of the Indian Ocean,
19:0525 Royal Navy warships hunted the cruiser Königsberg at the other,
19:09off the coast of Germany's East African colony.
19:11She had raided Zanzibar and sunk a British-like cruiser
19:16from her secret hideout in the refugee delta.
19:20The frustrated British decided to strangle all her possible bases,
19:24starting with the port of Tanga.
19:25On the 2nd of November 1914, the British steamed into this bay.
19:40In the global war, Imperial powers got others to do their fighting.
19:44Most of the British troops were Indian.
19:46Their arrival was closely watched by Thomas Plantin,
19:55a 16-year-old African fighting for the Germans.
19:57The approaching British ships had all their lights blazing
20:03and seemed to be making no attempt to conceal their presence.
20:07We were in position with machine guns, waiting in ambush for them,
20:11and many of them were killed when they started to come ashore.
20:13A lot of them were killed before they even got out of the water.
20:23Thomas Plantin was one of 2,500 men under German commander,
20:26Paul von Letov Vorbeck.
20:28The British thought taking Tanga would be a pushover,
20:33but they reckoned without Letov.
20:37He was a professional Prussian soldier, hard as nails, charismatic.
20:43Von Letov was a remarkable soldier,
20:45but stubborn and single-minded to a degree I have fortunately never experienced before.
20:50His most remarkable quality was the reckless energy with which he pursued his goals.
20:54This was often covered up by his persuasive charm,
20:58which he could switch on if he wanted to.
21:03On the ship to Africa, von Letov had met Karen Blixen,
21:06who would later write out of Africa.
21:09He clearly turned on the charm for her.
21:12A German officer, von Letov, who belongs to a very old Mecklenberger family,
21:18has been such a friend to me.
21:20You should hear how they talk about him out here.
21:23As the greatest genius of the age.
21:29Despite losing men during the landing, the British now threatened Tanga.
21:34Governor Schnee ordered Letov to evacuate the town, rather than see it destroyed.
21:40But Letov had come to Africa to fight.
21:44It was crucial to prevent the enemy from gaining a foothold in Tanga,
21:48thus giving him a base from which to advance north.
21:50I couldn't let the governor's order to spare Tanga take precedence over this priority.
22:01Letov wrecked the British positions himself on his bicycle.
22:04He also called in reinforcements.
22:14Three companies of German troops came by rail to Tanga.
22:17Here, on the 4th of November 1914, they met the British Indian soldiers, raw and poorly trained.
22:24British intelligence officer Richard Minotshagen watched the ensuing route.
22:34Half the 13th Rajputs turned at once, broke into a rabble and bolted.
22:39I could not believe my eyes.
22:41They were all jabbering like terrified monkeys and were clearly not for it at any price.
22:46I could not believe my eyes.
22:47I could not believe my eyes.
22:48I could not believe my eyes.
22:49Everyone in the dense forest, friend and foe, was mixed up together, shouting in all sorts of languages.
22:55The enemy ran off in wild disorder, and our machine guns mowed down whole companies to the last man.
23:02Von Letov was based here, at the German hospital.
23:14After two days of heavy fighting, the British sent Richard Minotshagen to negotiate a surrender.
23:22The Germans were kindness itself and gave me a most excellent breakfast, which I sorely needed.
23:28We discussed the fight freely, as though it had been a football match.
23:34It seemed so odd that I should be having a meal today with people whom I was trying to kill yesterday.
23:41It seemed so wrong, and made me wonder whether this really was war, or whether we'd all made a ghastly mistake.
23:51The German officers were all hard-looking, keen and fit.
23:54They treated this war as some new form of sport.
24:02The British failed to take tanga, and suffered 700 casualties.
24:07Letov lost just 65.
24:10Germany hailed him as a hero.
24:14A German David is fighting alone against the British Goliath in Africa.
24:18If we cannot fight by his side, at least we must make sure that he is well supplied with shot for his sling.
24:29But the British blockade of Germany prevented reinforcements reaching Letov.
24:38Further east, across the Indian Ocean, Muller was still causing havoc.
24:42He'd sunk two warships and captured 23 merchant ships.
24:50On the 9th of November, 1914, the Emden anchored at the Cocos Islands to destroy the British wireless station.
24:57But the radio operator spotted the Emden's bogus fourth funnel, and put out a call for help.
25:06The Australian cruiser Sydney picked up the message, and ended the Emden's maverick career.
25:11Captain Muller was taken prisoner.
25:23He and the other survivors were well looked after.
25:28Dear loved ones, I'm well and healthy.
25:31The British were very friendly.
25:34They took loads of photos of us, and asked for our addresses to send us the snaps.
25:39Yours, Walter.
25:46Now, Admiral Graf von Spee's luck also ran out.
25:51Britain took the risk of detaching two of her latest battlecruisers from the crucial North Sea blockade of Germany to deal with him.
25:57On the 8th of December, 1914, German commander, Hans Poghammer,
26:05sighted their huge masts, as they recoiled in Port Stanley on the Falkland Islands.
26:11He realised the Germans were outgunned and outpaced.
26:16We choked a little at the neck.
26:18Our throats contracted and stiffened.
26:20For that meant a life and death grapple, or rather a fight ending in honourable death.
26:28The German fleet tried to get away, but the British battlecruisers were too fast.
26:34At 1.25pm, Spee turned to face them.
26:39But the British were careful to stay out of range of his guns, firing their own from 16,000 yards.
26:49The German fleet tried to stay out of range of his guns.
26:52The German fleet tried to stay out of range of his guns.
26:54Lieutenant Harry Bennett on HMS Canopus watched what happened and painted these watercolours.
26:59At 4.17pm, the Scharnhorst went down with Admiral von Spee and all hands.
27:12At 6.02pm, the Gneisenau sank with most of its crew, including Spee's younger son, Heinrich.
27:18His other son, Otto, was on the doomed Nuremberg.
27:27The sight was one of fearful awe.
27:30She turned over and sank with a graceful gliding motion, as would a tumbler pressed over in a bowl of water.
27:37Those who went down in her were game to the end, for we saw a party of her men standing on the quarterdeck,
27:43waving the German ensign as she sank, and so they went down into their watery grave.
27:53The Battle of the Falklands heralded the end of Germany's cruiser campaign.
27:58Her global war would increasingly have to be fought on land.
28:02Again, her commanders would stretch slim resources to lead the British Empire a dance.
28:13The Suez Canal presented a rare opportunity for Germany to harass the British Empire.
28:30A crucial British sea lane, vulnerable to attack by land forces.
28:37But Germany couldn't spare any men from the Western Front,
28:40so Berlin turned to Ottoman Turkey, her ally since November 1914.
28:56The Turkish Fourth Army was stationed in Palestine, just 150 miles from the Suez Canal.
29:02The Turks agreed to help capture Suez, assigning these 19,000 troops.
29:15They saw it as the first stage in their own reconquest of Egypt and Libya.
29:24We marched at night and only by moonlight.
29:28My heart was filled with a deep melancholy, mingled with great hope of success.
29:33At the sound of the song, the red flag flies over Cairo, to the accompaniment of which the advancing battalions
29:40forged ahead over the endless waste of desert, feebly illuminated by the pale gleam of the waxing moon.
29:47The Turks had to transport howitzers, floating pontoons, food and water across the Sinai desert, and didn't lose a single man.
30:02In the early hours of the 3rd of February 1915, they reached the Suez Canal.
30:07The German colonel, who had planned the operation, now watched it go horribly wrong.
30:16A sentry noticed our attack and fired.
30:19The shots created panel.
30:21The English then blasted the banks with machine gun fire.
30:24The Turks found the canal defended by nine British warships and 30,000 Indian troops, dug into defensive positions.
30:41The Ottoman troops suffered 1,200 casualties.
30:46The survivors retreated across the desert.
30:48The attack had failed, but Africa was now a battleground in Germany's global war.
31:01She had three bases of operations.
31:03The Cameroons, Germany East Africa, where Letov was still at large,
31:08and German Southwest Africa, with its ports and wireless stations.
31:13Luckily for Britain, she had a colony right next door.
31:16Unluckily, it was the one whose loyalty she could least rely on.
31:25The Union of South Africa was racially diverse.
31:29Blacks, Boers, and British settlers.
31:34Just 15 years before, Britain had fought a long bloody war against the Boers.
31:40Many still had little love for Britain.
31:42Their loyalty could not be counted on.
31:45As one commander told South Africa's Prime Minister, Louis Botha.
31:49My men are ready.
31:50Whom do we fight?
31:51The English?
31:52Or the Germans?
31:56But South Africa was ideally situated to launch an attack on German Southwest Africa.
32:03British Colonial Secretary, Louis Harcourt, took the gamble.
32:06If your ministers desire and feel themselves able to seize such part of German Southwest Africa,
32:15as will give them the command of the wireless stations there,
32:18we should feel this was a great and urgent imperial service.
32:24South Africa's government readily agreed, because it had many imperial ambitions of its own.
32:29It wanted to seize German Southwest for itself.
32:38On the 14th of September 1914, South African forces crossed the Orange River into German Southwest.
32:44But the Germans were one jump ahead, as the South Africans found out when they paused at the watering hole of Sandfontein.
32:56The South Africans were beaters, but there was worse to come.
33:24Part of South Africa now rose up in armed rebellion.
33:41Commanding the forces in the Northern Cape was Marni Moritz.
33:44Fearless and uncompromising, Moritz had fought a vicious guerrilla campaign against Britain in the Boer War.
33:55His sympathies lay entirely with Germany.
33:59I received a telegram ordering me to take a large commando into German Southwest Africa.
34:05I was determined not to fight on behalf of the British Empire, and my officers and troops were in full accord with me.
34:13In October 1914, Marni Moritz crossed the Orange River into German territory at Squeet Drift to enlist German support.
34:21Two days later, Moritz addressed his troops under this tree.
34:42Now, men, we don't want to be ruled by the Jews and the financiers of England.
34:51General Bayers, General DeWitt and myself have decided to form an independent South African Republic
34:58and have entered into an agreement with the Governor of German Southwest Africa.
35:02They will provide us with arms and ammunition, guns.
35:09On this step depends the freedom of the masses of the country.
35:19Britain's request for help had brought her dominion to the brink of civil war.
35:23In London, the colonial secretary, Lewis Harcourt, feared the breakup of the Union of South Africa.
35:32He secretly ordered 30,000 Australian soldiers diverted to the Cape to smother the rebellion.
35:39Safety of the Union is first and paramount consideration.
35:44We attach no importance to German Southwest Africa in comparison.
35:48The Australians weren't needed.
35:54In the winter of 1914, the loyal South Africans defeated the Boer rebels.
36:00This is rare film of 50 of them being led to trial in Cape Town.
36:04But they never caught Marni Moritz.
36:10By July 1915, South Africa cornered the Germans, forced their surrender and annexed their colony.
36:18And Britain had more work for South Africa, north this time, to deal once and for all with von Letov.
36:29London turned to South Africa's defence minister to lead the campaign, Yanni Smuts.
36:37Smuts, too, had fought in the Boer War, but was now passionately pro-British.
36:42More a statesman than a soldier, Smuts made an indifferent general of conventional forces.
36:47And he was up against Letov.
36:53British officer Richard Minotshagen was now Smuts' intelligence officer.
36:59Smuts is quite determined to avoid a stand-up fight.
37:03He told me he could not afford to go back to South Africa with the nickname Butcher Smuts.
37:07If von Letov is clever and Smuts not clever enough, there's going to be trouble.
37:16Letov was clever.
37:19Here, at his headquarters at Moshi railway station, he thought through the idea of depriving Britain
37:24of manpower in Europe by opening up the war in Africa.
37:29The question was, could we, with our small forces, prevent considerable numbers of the enemy from
37:35intervening in Europe, or inflict substantial damage on their armaments and troops?
37:41I strongly believed that we could.
37:55By August 1916, Letov had become expert at his cat-and-mouse game.
37:59I think we're in for an expensive hide-and-seek, and von Letov will still be cuckooing somewhere
38:12in tropical Africa when the ceasefire goes. Smuts has cost Britain many hundreds of lives,
38:19and many millions of pounds.
38:21Letov ran his force of up to 15,000 soldiers, mostly black, on scrounging and improvisation.
38:35No supplies from Germany reached him after March 1916, but he made a little go a long way,
38:40as Ludwig Deppert, one of his medical officers, noted.
38:46When there was no ammunition, Letov would try to produce his own cartridges.
38:51If the men asked the commander for weapons or clothes, they were told,
38:55take it from the enemy. Letov made war at cost price.
39:01You'd have been justified in displaying this war at a country fair with a for sale sign.
39:06Cheapest war in the world.
39:15Yanni Smuts had five times Letov's force and resources to match.
39:22But the further he went into German East Africa, the more stretched his supply lines.
39:28And he reckoned without the killer tsetse fly. The life expectancy for his 50,000 horses was just four weeks.
39:35It was just four weeks.
39:41Torrential rain, mud, dust, and boiling heat further slowed his progress.
39:48Intelligence was sketchy, maps inadequate.
39:51Telephone cable often had to be raised to eight meters to avoid damage by giraffes.
40:00This is like warfare of bygone days.
40:03We come along where no road had ever been, where probably white man had never trod before.
40:11The river is in flood and we can't get across.
40:14On the other side, the German patrols are watching us.
40:20But the crocodile hold the peace between us very successfully.
40:23Letov played with Smuts, refusing to fight, slipping away, luring him deeper into Africa.
40:39As they went, they spread the war's grief and destruction, dragging in more and more of the
40:44people of Africa. This war was being carried on the backs of black Africans.
41:02For the let-off campaign alone, the British recruited over a million black porters.
41:07One in five died from malnutrition and disease, death rates comparable with those on the Western Front.
41:21They endured their ordeal quietly. They only had duties and hardly any rights.
41:27They tumbled into the splashing mud with their heavy loads and were then ruthlessly forced to move on and catch up.
41:37Oh, the lindy road was dusty and the lindy road was long, but the chap what did the hardest graft,
41:45who could not do but wrong, was the Cavarondo Porter, with his Cavarondo song.
41:51It was, come here, Porter. It was Amera, here, Gip. And Amera didn't grumble. He simply did his bit.
42:07What smut saves on the battlefield, he loses in hospital. But it is Africa and the climate we're
42:15really fighting, not the Germans.
42:22Out of 20,000 South Africans, over half were invalided home by the beginning of 1917.
42:28They were replaced by black troops from Nigeria and Ghana. Recruitment of blacks soared in East Africa as well.
42:39Over the course of the war, the king's African rifles rose from 3,000 men to 35,000.
42:45Fululiani Longwe spoke for many black soldiers.
42:53Think of yourself buried in a hole with only your head and hands outside, holding a gun, death smelling all over the place.
43:03Listen to the sound of exploding bombs and machine guns. Smoke all over and the vegetation burned,
43:10and, of course, deforested. Watch your relatives getting killed, crying, finally dead.
43:18These things we did, experienced and saw.
43:24Letov survived undefeated to the very end, marching triumphantly through Berlin in 1919.
43:32The British never caught him, even though they turned it into an African war and set an army on his tail.
43:40But Britain and France had such reserves of manpower in their colonies, that from 1914 they shipped them to Europe.
43:54Remarkable French colour photographs of the world that came to serve on the Western Front.
43:58French general Charles Mangin had calculated that France could raise up to 300,000 from her empire for Europe.
44:14No one believed him.
44:18But, in fact, they mobilised double that number.
44:21Black troops have precisely those qualities which are demanded in the long struggles of modern war.
44:32Endurance, tenacity, the instinct for combat, the absence of nervousness, and an incomparable power of shock.
44:40Not only do they enjoy danger, a life of adventure, but they are also essentially disciplinable.
44:48People started hiding and running away from the camp.
44:57There were all kinds of illnesses, even psychological illness.
45:01People didn't know where they were going or even why they were fighting.
45:05There were rumours that we would never come back, that we are going to be sold as slaves.
45:10India provided Britain with one and three-quarter million men in the war.
45:21They'd been thrown into some of the toughest fighting from the start.
45:32One Indian wrote to a friend.
45:33The war is a calamity on three worlds and has caused me to cross the seas and live here.
45:42The cold is so great that it cannot be described.
45:46We have not seen the sun for four months, thus we are sacrificed.
45:51I have neither sleep by night nor ease by day.
45:55There can never have been such a war before, nor will there ever be again.
46:03There can never have been such a war before, nor will there ever be again.
46:07Some men, like Jason Jingo, used to the habitual racism of colonial rule,
46:12returned home with greater self-esteem.
46:22We had liked our time in France.
46:25It was our first experience of living in a society without a colour bar.
46:30We were different from the other people at home.
46:32Our behaviour, as we showed the South Africans, was something more than they expected from a native.
46:39We had copied the manners and customs of the Europeans, and not only copied, we lived them.
46:52But it wasn't the same Africa Jason Jingo and the other survivors came back to after the war.
47:02The empires, which once carved it up, had now turned parts of it into a wasteland,
47:07as German medic Ludwig Depper realised.
47:14Behind us, we leave destroyed fields and, for the immediate future, starvation.
47:18We are no longer the agents of civilisation.
47:23Our path is marked by death, plundering, and deserted villages.
47:27It would be years before African nationalism took off, but a few had begun the journey.
47:44In 1914, John Chilembwe challenged the basis of the war and Africa's place in it.
47:49And his words would haunt colonial officials for years to come.
47:54Let the rich men, bankers, titled men, storekeepers, farmers, and landlords go to war and get short.
48:07Instead, the poor Africans, who have nothing to own in this present world,
48:12who in death leave only a long line of widows and orphans in utter want and dire distress,
48:18are invited to die for a cause which is not theirs.
48:32Germany had fought a remarkable global war.
48:37But it cost her her cruisers, her wireless network, and all her colonies.
48:41Yet Germany had forced Britain and France to call on their empires and lean on their allies.
48:52In the process, these flexed their muscles and formed empires of their own.
49:01The First World War saw the last scramble for Africa.
49:04And the ideas the Kaiser had so hated, land grabbing, avarice, and capitalism, had in fact been spread wider.
49:17For the moment, imperialism looked more successful than it had ever been.
49:21In the next episode of the First World War, the call goes out for jihad, holy war in the Middle East,
49:39the nightmare of Gallipoli, and the agony of the Armenian people.
49:43The First World War, thecano – The first world is shaped by the UNI.
49:48It was a 재미난ary, a rolling basis of the UNI.
49:53For the first world, the best world is made up.
49:55The first world is made up.
49:56The last world is made up.
49:59The first world is founded in the past.
50:05The first world is made up.
50:07The first world is made up.
50:09The second world is made up.
50:09The first world is made up.
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