Voices of the First World War18 Nov 2016

Omnibus 1916 Series 2

Dan Snow tracks the development of the First World War through the recollections of those who were there.

Drawing on the sound archives of the IWM and the BBC, in this omnibus edition of five programmes looking at the course of the war in 1916, interviewees recall the impact of the Battle of the Somme on Sheffield, through the recollections of a soldier who fought with the Sheffield City Battalion and two people who were schoolchildren at the time. They recall the lists of dead in the newspapers, the frequent announcements in school assemblies of older brothers who had been killed, and the sight of the many returning wounded on the streets. Gertrude Farr's husband Harry, injured at the Battle of the Somme, refused to carry on fighting. In the second programme Gertrude and her daughter reveal the effect the execution of her husband for cowardice in 1916 had on her life. In the third programme, men recall the first appearance of tanks during the war, at Flers as the Battle of the Somme carried on. Dan also looks at what troops got up to off the battlefield, when they were out of the front line in France. British soldiers spent the majority of the war behind the lines with brief, often appalling, spells in the trenches. Football matches, construction projects, training, drinking, theatres, religious observation and sex took up more time than the fighting. Finally, in 'Prisoners of War of Kut-al-Amara', men recall the 'death march' from Kut to Baghdad and northwards, and their experience of years of captivity after the end of the siege of Kut in April 1916, and we hear how differently officers were treated in contrast to lower ranks.

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Episoder(56)

25/12/2018

In an omnibus edition of selected programmes from the final series, Dan Snow looks at some of the key events of 1918, from the German Spring Offensive in March, to the impact that the arrival of masse...

25 Des 201856min

11 o'clock

Dan Snow presents the final episode of Voices of the First World War, veterans recall what they were doing when the armistice took effect at 11 o'clock on 11th November 1918, and how they felt now the...

9 Nov 201813min

Mutiny in the High Seas Fleet

Dan Snow hears accounts of those who witnessed the restlessness, disorder and eventual mutiny of the sailors of the German High Seas Fleet in early November 1918, and recollections of one of the most ...

8 Nov 201813min

Open Country

'Green fields, no barbed wire, nothing…'. Those who were there recall what it felt like to be advancing at last in the autumn of 1918, after years of stalemate. After a series of assaults on the Hin...

7 Nov 201813min

Amiens

In August 1918 after years of disappointment, bloodshed and stalemate, Allied troops launched a surprise overwhelming attack on the German Army - a short, four day battle in which the Allied forces ad...

6 Nov 201813min

Torpedo

Across 50 programmes, in a major series throughout the commemorative period, Voices of the First World War has been tracking the story of the war through archive interviews with those who experienced ...

5 Nov 201813min

Enter America

Dan Snow hears the recollections of US soldiers who were sent to fight in France in 1918, and looks at the reactions of British and German soldiers to their arrival. They had received formidable physi...

6 Apr 201813min

Spanish Flu

It was a tragedy beyond comprehension. Soldiers who had survived the trenches, civilians who had weathered shortages and bombardment, now faced a new enemy: influenza. The virus tore through societies...

5 Apr 201813min