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The Great War covers the era of the First World War from its causes and origins to its violent aftermath. Jesse Alexander covers the important events
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00:00Of all the disasters of the 20th century, the conflagration once called the Great War looms as the one that damaged mankind irreparably.
00:14It wasn't just the 22 million who died between 1914 and 1918 in populations dramatically smaller than now.
00:23It was a much greater death.
00:25Centuries old empires met their end.
00:29The world lost generations of philosophers, writers, builders, musicians, poets, scientists, healers, artists.
00:38The flower and seed of a magnificent continent, dead in mud and misery.
00:45The trench soldier felt by 1916-17 that the war would be endless indeed and that there would be no survivors standing there, if you will, with a victor's flag at the end.
01:01His death was inevitable.
01:03Glory, chivalry and idealism did not survive.
01:08From the horrors were born all the tools, all the monsters for later horror.
01:13From beginning to end it was epic.
01:16Its peoples, its battles, its slaughter, its errors.
01:21People were full of the notion of sacrifice, and God did they sacrifice.
01:34The millennium that had dawned in 1900 shone upon a European civilization so dazzling.
01:53that it seemed within reach of every opulent promise of mankind.
02:08There had been many sharp, ugly wars over the last century, but now Europe's cunning diplomatic ballet had at last seemed to balance power for a long, prosperous peace.
02:20Beyond that, the blood of England's King George V mingled with that of Russia's Tsar Nicholas II, Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm II, and Austria's Emperor Franz Joseph in intricate marriage alliances.
02:36It was Cousin Willie, Nicky, and Georgie.
02:41What was to fear?
02:43In a Victorian afterglow, England's prosperous island was fed by a treasure fleet of merchant ships connected to its colonies.
02:51Its lifelines and shores were protected by the impregnable steel walls of the Royal Navy.
02:58One quarter of the map was England's red.
03:01Germany was an industrial miracle, becoming Europe's wealthiest center of industrial might.
03:09The formidable Prussian army was brilliantly professional.
03:13Its navy was growing fast.
03:16Former Chancellor Bismarck had said,
03:19I am bored.
03:20The great things are done.
03:22France, with its rich overseas empire, had reached an intellectual and economic prominence that made Paris the golden hub of world culture and business.
03:33France's spirited army stood behind an iron line of forts that denied the eastern frontier to the Germans.
03:40A saying was, as happy as God in France.
03:49Russia was a feudal monarchy that gleamed at the crown.
03:53Its sumptuous corp hid inner decay, but its titans of literature, music, and dance gave it world stature.
04:01Though Russia's armies were ill-equipped by a poor industrial base, they were valiant and huge.
04:08But a smoldering revolutionary named Trotsky would observe that history had already poised its gigantic soldier's boot over the ant heap.
04:19In Austria, the sixty-six year reign of the ancient Franz Josef was beset by arrogance,
04:25and the tensions of a polyglot empire always on the verge of breaking into ethnic fragments.
04:31But that was nothing new, and the court of Vienna seemed timeless in its waltzing magnificence.
04:41Far off in Washington's White House, Woodrow Wilson guided a youthful, happy giant,
04:46and enjoyed the high, peaceful thoughts of the college professor he had been.
04:50It is correct to say that Americans, by and large, both inside and outside the government,
05:00were of the opinion that wars in Europe were really none of our business.
05:05In Sarajevo, Bosnia, on the morning of June 28, 1914, a hot sunny day of peace everywhere.
05:14Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria, and his beloved wife Sophie, set forth in an open automobile for a day of military review on the royal couple's 14th wedding anniversary.
05:28But 19-year-old Gavrilo Princip, an Austrian who belonged to the Serbian radical group called Black Hand,
05:39was waiting in the Sarajevo mobs along the parade route.
05:43In two shots, he fulfilled his mission, killing both Franz Ferdinand and Sophie.
05:49The Archduke's last words were,
05:53it is nothing, but Princip's small revolver had begun the annihilation of tens of millions.
06:15The assassination, ultimately, of the Archduke worked against the interest of the Serbian national independence.
06:20Why? Because it gave Austria-Hungary, the government,
06:25the pretext to militarily occupy Serbia for good, period.
06:32Soon an ambassador stood before Kaiser Wilhelm,
06:35asking if Austria-Hungary could count on Germany's support if she mobilized against Serbia,
06:41even if Russia came in.
06:43Germany said she could, without thinking she might have to.
06:47The alliances were essentially protective.
06:53This was an armed peace.
06:56Germany felt that it was hemmed in by France and Russia, who, of course, were allied.
07:04So there had been a German-Austrian alliance since 1879,
07:09which had been followed by a French-Russian alliance.
07:12At this critical moment, Kaiser Wilhelm went to sea on his yacht for 20 days,
07:18described as the greatest maritime disaster ever.
07:21Behind his back, Austria scuttled the Serbs' conciliation efforts,
07:26sent them a harsh ultimatum, and planned Serbia's subjugation and partition.
07:31Now Russia, responding to Serbian appeals against the Austrian threat, mobilized.
07:38Austria-Hungary ordered full mobilization without the emperor knowing that Russia had mobilized on Serbia's side.
07:46So began the cascade of mobilizations that was soon to immolate Europe.
07:51This was a time that called for giants, and there were none.
07:59You had a lot of men who were in control, who were afraid.
08:04They were afraid of what would happen to them,
08:08not if they went to war, but what would happen if they didn't go to war.
08:13Entering the fatal August of 1914, the dominoes of dusty alliances kept toppling.
08:28Remembering nervously that Russia extended to her East Prussian borders,
08:33Germany gave Russia 12 hours to call off mobilization.
08:37Next was the preposterous German ultimatum to France,
08:42giving her 18 hours to pledge her neutrality if Germany fought Russia,
08:47with the French fortresses of Verdun and Toul to go to Germany as hostages.
08:52France mobilized.
09:00The rest was formality.
09:02By August 3, Germany would be at war with France and Russia
09:06on the side of Austria-Hungary,
09:09and it turned out to be rather exhilarating.
09:14War was your chance to distinguish yourself,
09:17to put some color on yourself, to put a decoration on your chest,
09:20and to know in the face of a large public
09:23that you were being valued for being different.
09:26War was this opportunity.
09:29Between August 2nd and 18th, France would ship 3,781,000 soldiers
09:39in 7,000 trains, a train running every eight minutes.
09:46Germany would speed 1,500,000 men to the west,
09:51and another 500,000 to the east against Russia.
09:56It's a war about power, about prestige, about colonies, about competing markets.
10:06It's not a war about ideology.
10:10It's a war about people wanting respect.
10:14It's a war about Germany feeling it's being squeezed in,
10:19and needing to expand.
10:22It's a war about settling old scores,
10:25the way France was determined to get back Alsace and Lorraine.
10:30It's a war about stabilizing empires,
10:35as Austria wanted to neutralize Serbia.
10:40Russia was a very impatient nation in 1914,
10:45wanting above all, it seems, access to the Mediterranean
10:50and to the sea trade routes that lay beyond.
10:53And hence, it wanted above all control of the straits into the Black Sea.
10:59The supremacy of heavy artillery arrayed in hundreds and thousands,
11:05and limitless machine guns set behind miles of barbed wire had yet to be shown.
11:14Indeed, one attack-minded French general would boast that his best weapon was
11:18the living breast of the French soldier.
11:22Germany's secret weapon was its war plan,
11:25worked out years earlier by one of its vaunted tacticians,
11:28General Alfred von Schlieffen.
11:31The French von Schlieffen calculated would fixate upon regaining the lost provinces of Alsace and Lorraine,
11:38and direct their attacks straight eastward towards them and Germany.
11:42Von Schlieffen intended no more than a holding action here,
11:46with the vast preponderance of his German armies concentrated to the north in a steamroller right wing.
11:53That powerful wing would break in a huge wheeling attack through neutral Luxembourg and Belgium.
12:00Then the attack could sweep down into France by the back door.
12:04The French fortresses facing Germany would be outflanked,
12:08and the French armies crushed between German regions from east and west.
12:13Neither Britain's Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, nor his foreign secretary Edward Grey,
12:18were much interested in Serbia or an ambiguous defence pact with France.
12:25To stand aside would not hurt British honour,
12:28unless Germany violated Belgium,
12:31whose neutrality Britain had guaranteed at the formation of that state in 1831.
12:39And there was also the thought of having the rapidly strengthening German fleet
12:43right across the channel in the Belgian port of Antwerp to challenge Britain's sea supremacy.
12:54The process was in command.
12:56On August 1st, Germany crossed the Luxembourg border,
12:59seized the country within 24 hours, and demanded free passage through Belgium.
13:06Germany gave Belgium's King Albert 12 hours to agree.
13:10He refused and appealed to King George for support.
13:13Germany's Bettmann Holweg voiced astonishment that London would go to war over what he called a scrap of paper.
13:23World opinion abandoned Germany, and on August 4th, Britain declared war.
13:29The army Britain mobilized was blooded in colonial wars and deeply professional.
13:36But it was tiny in this maelstrom, just 125,000 men.
13:46The British Expeditionary Force rushed to the continent for what all presumed would be a short war.
13:55They recognized that a modern war with modern weapons,
13:58the capabilities of armies and navies at the time,
14:01would lead to great slaughter.
14:04But for this very reason, the cost both in blood and treasure would be so great
14:10that the war would have to be over very quickly.
14:12This became known as the short war illusion.
14:18The von Schlieffen plan was no longer in the hands of its late originator.
14:21The general staff was now headed by General Helmut von Moltke,
14:26a gloomy shadow of the titan father who had engineered Prussian victory in 1870.
14:32Von Moltke had been forced to tinker fatally with the von Schlieffen plan,
14:37when a massive French offensive on his left wing in Lorraine threatened to cut off the German armies advancing through Belgium.
14:44So where Schlieffen had demanded a left wing with only 9% of the forces on the right,
14:51von Moltke had to divert 42% of his armies there.
14:57The British army had deleted the entrenching spade from its equipment.
15:02Audacity, audacity, always audacity was the French creed.
15:06Their horses were ready.
15:08All the powers, England, France, Germany, Russia, Austria-Hungary,
15:13held these great reserves of cavalry equipped with swords and lances,
15:18ready for the ride through to victory.
15:23On August 4th, 1914, the cavalry spearhead of 60,000 Germans
15:28hurtled at the mouth of the Liège gateway to Belgium.
15:33The batteries of great forts dominated the attack corridors.
15:36Some 25,000 Belgians manned the defensive works,
15:40and the bridges over the Meuse River had been demolished.
15:45The Germans found the going heavy,
15:47their attacks sinking bloodily in the Meuse.
15:52But a German legend was being born.
15:55An obscure colonel of fusiliers, Erich Ludendorff,
15:58became separated from his own unit in the confusion of battle.
16:01In the chaos, Ludendorff shone.
16:04He got the milling German cavalry onto the right road
16:06to swing behind the Liège defenses.
16:10When the commanding general fell, Ludendorff leaped into his place,
16:13entered Liège, and became Germany's Wagnerian hero.
16:17Lost in the battle smoke was the real hero of the siege,
16:22the war's first secret weapon.
16:24Enormous 420-millimeter siege guns
16:26that wrecked the thick-walled forts one by one
16:28with man-sized shells.
16:30We might say now that the Germans had no sense of public relations.
16:49And they proved that again and again in their invasion of Belgium
17:00and of northern France.
17:03There would be suspected guerrilla action,
17:06and they would simply line hundreds of men
17:10from eight-year-olds to 84-year-olds
17:14up against a wall and kill them.
17:21They burned the great library of Louvain,
17:25one of the great centers of culture in the Middle Ages.
17:29And the legend of the raping, burning, murdering Hun
17:36would be a formidable weapon in the hands of Allied propagandists.
17:41The ghosts of the murdered Belgians
17:44would form themselves in armies,
17:47haunting Germany to its death.
17:59With the war only days old,
18:14the German momentum was building
18:16as they plunged deeper into Belgium,
18:20heading for Namur and the Meuse.
18:25The French chief of staff,
18:27General Joseph Jacques César Joffre,
18:30massive, pugnacious,
18:31remote from the welfare of his troops
18:33and the true situation,
18:35followed von Schlieffen's script
18:37like one of his soldiers.
18:40The French attacks in Lorraine,
18:43it had to be Lorraine and Alsace
18:45because part of the rhetoric
18:47was getting the lost provinces back.
18:57They were destroyed by the Germans.
19:01Do you realize that the French lost 300,000 men
19:07in the first three months of 1914?
19:11In England, its hero war minister,
19:22Field Marshal Lord Horatio Kitchener,
19:24the legendary Kitchener of Khartoum,
19:27saw things with brutal clarity.
19:30Kitchener argued that the Germans
19:32were readying their knockout punch through Belgium.
19:35He saw the British officer corps
19:38as the preserve of gentlemen
19:40who disliked having to take their profession seriously
19:43and stated that the war would be won
19:46by the nation with the last million men.
19:49Squarely in the path of the huge
19:51and unrushing German right wing,
19:53the scant 100,000 men of the British expeditionary force
19:56deployed where the Belgian front hinged
19:59on the mining center of Mons.
20:02The British commander,
20:04amiable skittish Sir John French,
20:06was nowhere up to the job,
20:08but was blessed with a brilliant subordinate,
20:11Tigerish General Horace Smith Dorian.
20:14French's position lay squarely in the path
20:18of the belligerent gambler,
20:19General Alexander von Kluck,
20:21leading the powerful First Army,
20:23northernmost force of the German wheel.
20:29Von Kluck rushed directly
20:31at the best trained riflemen in the world.
20:34So deadly was the fire of the British professionals
20:37that the Germans could not believe
20:38they were not up against machine guns.
20:41Their dead piled up.
20:44Although German artillery finally drove the British back,
20:48Mons was taken as a British victory,
20:51and the survivors were thereafter called Mons men
20:54and wore a special medal called the Mons Star.
20:58The French, in particular,
21:00were so inexperienced with war come 1914
21:04and so untrained in the future conduct of war
21:09that they sent soldiers to the front,
21:11this in the fall of 1914, in red pants.
21:14Lo and behold, because, of course,
21:16the German machine gunner could spot them in a second.
21:19This practice was immediately changed.
21:23lienn day after shooting.
21:25Geoffra Figueroa remained blind
21:27to the mortal danger to his army.
21:29His Futile Plan 17,
21:32the frontal assault of the German center in Lorraine
21:34was stopped cold.
21:37the french made no use of stealth ground or short rushes they chanced all on audacity and died for
21:46it to the north the gallant british expeditionary force was being expended in a series of tragic
21:54battles sometimes to slow the germans and sometimes because the exhausted men had strength to shoot
22:01but not to walk when moltke's grip was closing upon paris but where were the reports of huge
22:11prisoner bags and captured guns the only sure sign of a foe defeated
22:18the one bright spot in the allied picture was general joseph simon galliani
22:24galliani was old he was retired but he was the best of the french generals
22:31and he was pulled out of retirement to set up defenses around paris
22:41the french government was prepared to evacuate paris
22:47women were weeping in the streets
22:52so unstoppable seemed the german wheel on paris the general french proposed a retirement of the
22:57british expeditionary force to england only a furious rebuttal by kitchener held in england
23:05sir arthur conan doyle spoke of the most terrible august in the history of the world one thought that
23:11god's curse hung heavy on cluck meeting galling resistance and beginning to feel his overextension
23:19began the undoing of his rampaging right wing by invoking a crucial change in the
23:24plan that had served him so well instead of swinging southwestward around paris he began
23:31turning inward to the south to pin the french armies between two german forces
23:36this presented the flank of his army already weakened by two corps sent to east prussia on the
23:42russian front to a flanking counter-attack from forces in paris this seemed not to concern his impetuous
23:49nature the new aerial reconnaissance capability proved its mettle by spotting the god sent inward
23:57wheel along the marne
24:01von kluck with the bit in his teeth drove his stretched exhausted forces forward
24:08when men march day in day out day in day out there comes a point where they get a little tired
24:14and furthermore they did not anticipate what hauling guns over these distances was going to do to their horses
24:27paris began to panic crowds demanded that it be declared an open city
24:33dropped german leaflets declared there is nothing you can do but surrender
24:37refugies rushed toward the railway stations ministers wept
24:46galliani responded i have received a mandate to defend paris against the invader this mandate i shall
24:52carry out to the end joffre finally began to see the possibilities of the german's flank being in the air
25:02he sent galliani to see if sir john french's british expeditionary force was ready to join an attack
25:08sir john became lost in the gallic language and finally blurted tell him that all that men can do
25:15our fellows will do the battle of the marne was a series of confused deadly clashes that began on september
25:23fifth and bled on through seven dreadful days the germans had not looked to their flags and gaps in their
25:36line appeared everywhere they botched their communications they attacked without reconnaissance
25:41or artillery preparation and advanced in the open against mass fire
25:46all the mistakes their despised foes had made in the early going the big wheel was bound to run out
25:55of gas they had gone too far too quickly some days they would average 26 miles marching and they didn't
26:07have the logistical ability to keep up with this march
26:16at one critical juncture as the french line began to bend general galliani collected 1200 french taxicabs
26:24to rush decisive reinforcements to the front
26:28it was history's first important use of gasoline-powered mobility in war
26:33bit by bit the german wedge fell back to the river end paris was saved nobody could know it but the wild
26:45mobility that had characterized the war's first weeks in the west was over for good obviously we will
26:53never know what would have happened if the germans had taken paris in 1914 but the evidence that we do have
27:03on this general issue is that there is nothing to suggest that the french were going to throw in the towel
27:16meanwhile in the east the death machine had not been idle
27:20the german rebuff on the marne was more than recouped at the gates of prussia
27:32while the battle of the marne had raged on the western front throughout august the huge russian army
27:40had tried for decisive victory in the east the germans had relatively few troops in the east because
27:50their intention was to deal with france as quickly as they could and they were convinced they could
27:59take france out of the war in a matter of a month or six weeks
28:05the russians then started their offensive in what was then called east prussia
28:16the defenders of the wide german front covering over 200 miles of east prussian border numbered
28:21barely 135 000 men under general max von pritwitz the russian armies bearing down on them numbered
28:31650 000 men an advantage of four to one
28:34they moved in two armies commanded by generals alexander samsonov and pavel reninkov
28:46the russians were good soldiers the trouble was they just didn't have the right arms sometimes they
28:53didn't even have rifles they didn't have enough artillery between the opposing armies lay a hump-filled
29:03countryside broken miserably with forests lakes and marshes the russians could deploy only slowly
29:10over narrow fronts enabling the germans to shift forces over their efficient railway systems
29:17seeing that the russian armies would be split upon entering east prussia and arrive on the battlefield
29:22at different times the german high command made plans to defeat each in separate turn
29:31von moltke misinterpreted an adjustment in the line by von prittwitz as defeat and retreat and made
29:38a far-reaching decision he changed commanders on august 28th he cabled general erich ludendorff
29:48the hero of liege you may yet be able to save the situation in the east
29:56on ludendorff's train to prussia there was a fortuitous meeting
30:01aboard was general paul von hindenburg called out of retirement the commanders connected instantly in
30:08spirit hindenburg and ludendorff would become virtually one as military dictators of germany
30:15hindenburg and ludendorff proceeded with the plan for which von prittwitz had been fired it worked
30:21perfectly helped by the russian propensity to send radio messages in the clear so that the germans knew
30:28their plans
30:32on august 26th the huge pivotal battle of tannenberg began to unfold
30:36samson of drove his split-off army into a trap baited by a purposely thin german center
30:46as samson of wired vainly for reninkamp's army to be rushed to his rescue the germans methodically
30:53crushed his flanks and pinched off his center when they closed behind him by capturing the rail and road
31:00center at nidenberg the disaster was complete
31:08there were 92 000 russian prisoners
31:16samson of bad farewell to his staff and walked into the woods a single pistol shot was heard
31:22nobody bothered to go into the woods to search for his body
31:30the german public got the sense that this team of hindenburg and ludendorff was a pair of military
31:40geniuses who seemed able to do almost anything these two individuals look to people in germany
31:50in the terrible crisis of the war as the most likely people to bring germany victory
32:02austria had pounced upon the serbs to take the long desired territory
32:08on august 16th a ferociously fighting serbian army under a defensive genius named radomir putnik
32:15smash the austrian attack at the battle of the jadar river then they were beaten by the russians in 1914
32:26they continually had to call on the germans to save them and this happened again and again it's one of
32:36the motifs of that war and when the germans saved them where did the germans have to get the troops from
32:44the western front a german officer sighed gloomily we are fettered to a corpse and there was no comfort in the west either
32:56no one realized the great implications of this many soldiers on a battlefield
33:03now in 1914 the machine gun and rapid fire artillery gave an individual the capability to
33:13cover about three times the ground that he had before in the war of 1870 and yet
33:19there were ten times the troops
33:22as the fronts hardened each side saw its only hope for advantage at the flags
33:27and there began a leap frogging series of movements the so-called race to the sea
33:33to either get around the enemy or to defend against his end runs
33:37there was no place where you could maneuver and that became the great dilemma of
33:48the war in france and belgium how do you get through
33:59by the end of september 1914 two months after the great war began the western front became a brutal
34:07honeycomb of astonishing complexity
34:13the man height trenches grew underground dugouts for men and horses galleries to accommodate stores
34:19and headquarters pillboxes ammunition dumps traverses and communication tunnels
34:26and the trenches appeared in successive lines shrouding themselves in thousands of miles of barbed wire
34:32trench warfare trench warfare was hell on earth
34:39mud disease typhus
34:42our rats inside the trenches gas shells day after day of cold and filth
34:50with the front stabilized it was possible to begin the massing of artillery wheel to wheel in great packs for uses in defense and attack
35:08artillery men soon became artists masters of the creeping barrage and the pre-registered firestorm
35:14the great killer of the first world war was artillery artillery accounted for 70 percent of the casualties in the first world war
35:31the western front by the beginning of 1915 had become a line of entrenchments reaching from switzerland to the channel over 400 miles
35:46we said that a man could walk from switzerland to channel and never emerge above ground
35:51it was more than most men could bear
36:12with firepower and sheer numbers ending all western front mobility in the early war antwerp was evacuated
36:21the remains of the belgian british forces fell back to dig in on a fragment of belgian soil in flanders
36:38that would become infamous for four years as the war's most lethal ground
36:45when molke's failures had brought command of the german army to general erich von falkenhayn
36:51he was enigmatic dashing and stopped cold by an old reliable weapon mud
37:00if they had overpowered the belgians they could have gained the last real prizes of 1914 which were the
37:10channel ports and the belgians under king albert opted to flood that flat landscape
37:20and that flooded landscape absolutely stopped the germans
37:26defending the ports with the french the british expeditionary force made a magnificent stand at
37:32ypres called wipers forever by the british the british defensive salient was shaped chillingly like a skull
37:40within it one million would die or be maimed slaughtered at triple the rate of any other sector
37:46kitchener cried out this isn't war the battle died down and the armies dug deeper
37:58we know that soldiers began to recognize that the conditions of war
38:03this war of attrition this bleeding of the enemy to death was forever changing their lives
38:09when they recognized themselves that probably their most important weapon for protection was the spade
38:15not the gun not the bayonet the germans did something very smart early on in the war
38:23and that was that they gained practically all the high ground on the western front
38:31the nation suddenly understood that this was another sort of war
38:45a munitions machine of unheard of size had sprung up everywhere
38:51the french 75 millimeter guns alone were spewing 30 000 rounds a day
38:56england was soon turning out a million two hundred thousand shells a month
39:03the army's butchery would need every one of them
39:11as 1915 began the german planners broke into rival camps called easterners and westerners
39:18each seeing his own front as the decisive one to break the stalemate
39:22the hindenburg ludendorff team managed to take warsaw from the russians
39:28although the enemy retreat into the russian fastnesses made it meaningless
39:38the austrians again knocked heads against the serbs and came out with 100 000 dead
39:44and nothing gained the germans hoped for more from turkey the germans were successful
39:51in drawing the ottoman empire into the war on their side that meant that they had to fight russia
40:00in the caucasus it meant that when british forces landed in what is today iraq they had to fight them there
40:09turkey although it had lost the ottoman empire had lost most of its european territories still had the area
40:23around what was then constantinople is now istanbul and the dardanelles in other words the straits connecting
40:30the aegean sea with the black sea and this was an area of enormous importance because it was the most
40:40plausible route by which the western powers could supply russia with military supplies
40:50although turkish attempts to break into russia through the caucasus in december were
40:54bloodily repulsed the nervous russians appealed to britain for a british diversion to ease the threat
41:00from the south the british and the french were determined to force the dardanelles
41:07they planned they planned a combined land and naval campaign the largest amphibious operation probably
41:15ever tried up to that point winston churchill as lord of the admiralty was one of the principal architects
41:22an attempt by british and french fleets to force the dardanelles by naval gunpower alone foundered in
41:34a series of spectacular sinkings of three attacking battleships by turkish mines and shore battles
41:43the seizure of the dardanelles would have to be given over to an army landed by sea
41:47the attack point chosen was the gallipoli peninsula guarding the european side of the straits
41:58imposing cliffs looked down on the sea with points rising to 1200 feet access from narrow rocky beaches
42:06was limited to a series of gullies running up through low dense scrub the capable general sir
42:13ian hamilton was sent by kitchener to command two divisions of australians and new zealanders
42:19under general sir william birdwood the anzacs and a french brigade numbered 70 000
42:26and were destined for valorous calamity trying for the impossible goals
42:33they would go over the mountains toward constantinople as it was called then and others would go up into the
42:41balkans the idea would be to hit germany from another side of course it didn't work because thanks to the
42:50turkish machine guns gallipoli simply turned into the western front gone vertical
43:01the defenders fought superbly under the capable german general limon von sanders who soon commanded 84 000 turks
43:11the gallipoli landings were made from small boats and awkward landing ships bunching the troops for
43:17the murderous fire that met them the forces were scattered around four small and unconnected
43:23beaches around the toe of the peninsula confused and floundering everywhere the attackers missed key
43:31tactical and strategic opportunities to go forward where the turks were weak and walked instead
43:38into a series of hornets nests quickly the attacking forces found themselves pinned by turkish forces on
43:48cramped strips of unsheltered beach beneath virtually unassailable heights from which defenders poured down
43:55non-stop death as turkish reinforcements arrived to freeze the lines all birdwood could think to tell
44:03these dying soldiers was to dig dig dig the anzacs did picking up the permanent name of diggers
44:14nowhere was courage expended more recklessly or hopelessly than at gallipoli in attacks on the
44:21heights in three days a third of the assault force had fallen
44:25the royal navy came in close to help with big gunfire but the german submarines were waiting
44:36three british battleships went to the bottom careers began to dissolve
44:43british prime minister asquith removed winston churchill as first lord of the admiralty
44:49by july gallipoli battle casualties had passed the 50 000 mark names like suvla bay and anzac
45:00cove became symbols of useless courage and prodigious waste another 40 000 diggers fell
45:07in august for what a soldier called five acres of bad grazing ground what you had as a result
45:15was a terrible bloody fight that runs through most of 1915 in which approximately a million men
45:25from both sides fight over this small peninsula and a quarter of them are buried there still today
45:34shortly after a december blizzard froze and drowned 280 men in trenches
45:39the gallant diggers of gallipoli were pulled out and hell thereafter would hold no new terrors for them
45:48such as the one they were due to endure on other miserable fronts of this great war now consuming
45:54mankind without end
46:00you
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