World War One
-
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...
-
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...
-
Bristol: Aerospace Museum
This was our first city road trip for Snow on the Road - 3 days in Bristol visiting its most interesting historical sites. What's so wonderful about Bristol is how its history is interwoven into the fabric of the city. World treasures like the SS Great Britain and Underfall Yard are visible all a...
-
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...
-
Ghosts of the Romanovs
At about 1am on 17 July 1918, in a fortified mansion in Ekaterinburg in the Ural Mountains, the Romanovs – ex-tsar Nicholas II, ex-tsarina Alexandra, their 5 children, and their 4 remaining servants – were awoken by Bolshevik captors and told they must dress and gather their belongings for a swif...
-
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.
-
The Lost Wrecks of Jutland
The Battle of Jutland was the decisive naval clash of the First World War, pitting the German High Seas Fleet against the Royal Navy's Grand Fleet in an all or nothing battle for supremacy and survival. At the end of the war, the defeated German fleet was scuttled at Scapa Flow. Or so we thought....
-
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...
-
What Would I Die For?
A short film created through the 1418-Now art commissions reflecting on the thoughts and emotions of the soldiers of the First World War.
-
Archaeologist Spies of World War One
Archaeologists excavated the ancient past during peacetime, but in war they had a different mission - to play a vital role in modern military intelligence. Historian of archaeology Dr Amara Thornton explores a network of archaeologist-spies, codebreaking, mapping and running agents, and with expe...
-
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.
-
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...
-
The Western Front Tunnels
The creation of man-made underground tunnels played a huge role in the outcome of the First World War. They were first dug to mine under enemy positions and detonate bombs or attack in desperate and fierce fights. As the war dragged on, nevertheless, they developed another purpose: providing sold...