World Wars

World Wars

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World Wars
  • The Savage Storm: The Allied Invasion of Italy - Part Two

    The Italian campaign in September 1943, spearheaded by the US 5th and British 8th Armies, is one of the most dramatic campaigns of the entire Second World War - it was here that Hitler’s ‘Fortress Europe’ would finally be pierced. By the beginning of October, after a tough fight to gain a foothol...

  • The Savage Storm: The Allied Invasion of Italy - Part One

    The Italian campaign in September 1943, spearheaded by the US 5th and British 8th Armies, is one of the most dramatic campaigns of the entire Second World War - it was here that Hitler’s ‘Fortress Europe’ would finally be pierced. The first, tentative steps to total Allied victory. But lacking th...

  • 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...

  • The Lost Sailors - Solving a World War II Mystery

    During WWII, the sailors of the British merchant navy played a vital role keeping the UK fed and armed. They carried essential supplies across the treacherous Atlantic - and many paid with their lives. What's less well known is that many of those sailors were Chinese - volunteers who came to Brit...

  • D-Day - 24 Hours in Normandy

    At 07.37 on 6th June 1944, the ramps of the landing craft carrying the men of A and D companies 6th battalion Green Howards went down, and the men stormed up the beaches.

    It was D-Day.

    Now Dr James Rogers is going to put D-Day under the microscope, following in the footsteps of the men of the ...

  • 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...

  • Alan Turing: The Pride of Manchester

    A special film exploring the life and legacy of Alan Turing - genius pioneer of modern computing. With Alan's nephew Sir Dermot Turing and exclusive access to unseen family records, we investigate lesser known aspects of his incredible work. This story is rooted in the City of Manchester, home t...

  • Hitler vs Stalin: Not One Step Back

    80 Years ago the armies of Hitler and Stalin went head to head in the bloodiest battle of the Second World War.

    Fought over five months through the bitter Russian Winter, the Battle for Stalingrad would serve as a turning point in the course of the Second World War and would mark a drastic chang...

  • Hitler vs Stalin: Last Man Standing

    After four months of heavy fighting, German commander Paulus and his troops had succeeded in pushing the Soviet's from out of the centre of the city and to within 800 metres of the Volga.

    Victory seemed within their grasp, but what Paulus and Hitler didn't know was that Zhukov and Stalin were pl...

  • Hitler's Secret Weapons Manager: The Two Lives of Hans Kammler

  • Etoa: A Kokoda Track Story

    Seventy-five years after the horrors of the Pacific War, the forgotten perspectives of the local people emerge as a crew of archaeologists arrive in remote Papua New Guinea in search of the remains of lost soldiers.

    The legacy of the Kokoda campaign contributes an enormous amount to the DNA of c...

  • The Lancaster Bomber

    The Lancaster Bomber tells how, as Bomber Command’s most destructive weapon, it went on to become instrumental in the defeat of Nazi Germany during the second world war.

    With contributions from military historians Alexandra Churchill, Dr Peter Johnston and James Holland, authors Leo McKinstry (L...

  • My Father's War: How Pearl Harbor Transformed America

    Join Don Wildman, as he discovers how Pearl Harbor transformed America and changed the lives of a whole generation of Americans, including his father's.

  • Heroes of the Somme

    Heroes of the Somme uses original archive from the Western Front to uncover the stories of seven of the men whose remarkable bravery in 1916 won them the Victoria Cross, Britain’s most prized military medal. Interviews with modern day family members reveal the personal stories of each character, ...

  • 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...

  • 1916

    Last year audiences around the world were astounded by Sam Mendes' incredible World War One epic, 1917. This autumn, Dan Snow was invited to take a look at a recreated World War One trench network in the UK, built by military historian Taff Gillingham. In homage to 1917, we decided to film this w...

  • 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 Battle of Jutland: Who Really Won?

    In May 1916, the long anticipated great naval clash occurred in the North Sea between the Royal Navy's Grand Fleet and the German High Seas Fleet. Both sides claimed victory in the battle but who really came out on top? Find out in our audio guide.

  • 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....

  • The Western Front

    Our image of the First World War has been largely shaped by the events of the Western Front. Find out more about the key battles of this theatre with our audio guide.

  • Remembering Remembrance: The Origins of our Commemorative Day

    On the 11th of November at 11am in 1918, the guns fell silent on the western front. Exactly a year later, commemorative events took place across what was then the British Empire to remember those who had fallen during the First World War – however, not all events were looked upon favourably by co...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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...