World War One

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  • War's Secret Shame: Shell Shock

    Dan Snow describes how Shell Shock first began to emerge during the First World War and meets veterans of more recent wars who have struggled to overcome the symptoms of PTSD

  • WW1: The Tunnels of Death

    December 1914. After 5 months of war, both the Germans and the Allies have dug themselves in behind impenetrable lines. Faced with this siege, the soldiers will bring back into use an old weapon that they will modernize: mines, blowing up enemy fortifications from beneath...

    In February 1915, i...

  • The Room Where It Happened: Versailles 1919

    Join Dan Snow and a hand picked team of experts for a thought-provoking panel discussion that delves into one of the most consequential diplomatic agreements of the 20th century: the Treaty of Versailles.

    Representing Woodrow Wilson and America is Historian Alexandra Churchill, taking the perspe...

  • Germany's Wars: One Man's Life

    From the trenches of WW1 to rise of Hitler and the Nazis, never before seen diaries & photos reveal the life of German Soldier & Teacher Wilhelm Kurtz.

    Hidden away since his death in 1982, they are part of an extraordinary archive of documents and personal photographs from the frontline of histo...

  • The Forgotten Battle of World War I

    This documentary sees military historian Alex Churchill travelling through Germany and the Belgian battlefields, retracing the opening weeks of the First World War - a blood battle that took place before the trenches, barbed wire and gas we typically think of when we think "First World War" - ins...

  • More Than A Medal

    A century-old injustice needs to be corrected. “More Than a Medal,” follows the extraordinary story of researchers working against time, exploring previously untold heroic stories from the battlefields of France, and the experience of modern-day descendants as they maintain cautious hope of reco...

  • History Under the Hammer: Lost Mark I Blueprints

    Auctioneer Paul Laidlaw provides a tour of Laidlaw's Militaria collection in Carlisle, which is home to the only known surviving blueprint of the British Mark I Tank.

  • The Devil's Porridge

    Dr James Rogers visits the Devil's Porridge Museum to find out more about H.M. Factory, Gretna - the United Kingdom's largest cordite factory during World War One. He discovers the untold story of the young 'Gretna girls' that worked in the Factory and the dangerous task they faced creating the p...

  • War Art of the Western Front

    It was the war to end all wars. In 1914, catastrophe struck Europe as great power diplomacy failed and alliance systems mobilised vast armies against one another in a conflict that dragged on in bloody stalemate for four long years. Nations geared their entire economies towards victory and called...

  • Living History: The Somme Battlefields

    The Battle of the Somme, which began on 1 July 1916, is remembered as one of the bloodiest events of the First World War. On the first day of the offensive, one man was killed every 4.4 seconds, making it the bloodiest single day in the history of the British Army. There were over a million casua...

  • 100 Days to Victory

    1 season

    The extraordinary story of how the Allies turned the tide of World War One in the final months of 1918.

  • The Cutting Edge: Tanks in World War One

    On 15 September 1916 the battlefield changed forever. At Flers-Courcelette, during the brutal, bloody fighting on the Somme, the British army released a new weapon designed to combat the devastating power of the machine gun: the tank. Moving on caterpillar tracks and protected by plated armour, t...

  • Forgotten Faces of the Great War: The Chinese Labour Corps

    China started out as a neutral country during the First World War. But by early 1917, one thousand Chinese men were on their way to the Western Front. Tens of thousands more would follow, to provide logistical support to the Allies. They constituted one of the largest labour corps of the war. The...

  • Sam Mendes on 1917

    1917 is a new film directed by Golden Globe winning film maker Sir Sam Mendes. Set in early 1917, at the height of the First World War on the Western Front, Mendes uses the backdrop of the German retreat to the Hindenburg Line as the stage for telling a story inspired by the memories of Alfred Me...

  • Avi Shlaim on the Balfour Declaration

    Avi Shlaim is Emeritus Professor of International Relations at St Antony's College, Oxford. Here he discusses the background and implications of the historic Balfour Declaration of November 1917.

  • The Road to 1914: Myths of Nationalism

    Margaret MacMillan talks to her nephew Dan about her seminal book 'The War That Ended Peace: The Road To 1914'. They discuss the importance of Storytelling to the historian's process, the ways in which political actors at the time viewed the relation between fate and choice, the role that masculi...

  • The Blue Book: Armenian Genocide

    In the period 1915 to 1917, between 1 and 1.5 million Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire died in what is the regarded as one of the first cases of genocide in the 20th century.

  • Salisbury Plain: Training for War

    Salisbury Plain is the Ministry of Defence's largest training ground, covering an area the size of the Isle of Wight. Dan Snow is shown around the Plain by MOD archaeologist Richard Osgood, to explore how British, Commonwealth and Allied troops prepared for the two great wars.

  • WW1: The Final Hours

    On 8 November 1918, an Englishman, a Frenchman and a German gathered in secret, on a train carriage in a forest near Paris. Their meeting would last for three days. Its aim: bring peace to Europe, and an end to four long years of brutal and deadly war.

    One hundred years after the end of the Firs...

  • Untold Stories of World War One

    Dan Snow introduces four projects funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council over the last four years, highlighing underexplored aspects of First World War history, from German wartime photography to miltary training in Northern Ireland.

  • The Untold Story of the Unknown Warrior

    The First World War was a conflict like nothing the World had ever known. More than 700,000 men mobilised in the UK would die during the conflict. Roughly 250,000 of those would have no known grave. The Tomb of the Unknown Warrior became a place where all those people who were denied a grave to v...

  • Africa and War

    The first shot fired by British forces in the First World War was fired by an African soldier in Africa. Historian David Olusoga presents three 1418 Now art commissions that will highlight the often overlooked role played by African soldiers.

  • The Christmas Truce

    On Christmas Eve 1914 many sectors of the Western Front in France and Belgium fell silent. Troops from all sides put down their weapons and sang carols, exchanged gifts and buried their dead in No Man's Land. The following day the truce continued in many, but not all areas, and troops gathered in...

  • The Western Front

    The Western Front, a 400-plus-mile stretch of land weaving through France and Belgium from the Swiss border to the North Sea, was the decisive front during World War One. Despite the global nature of the conflict, much of the world remembers the scars of the Great War through the lens of these ba...