Heroes of the Somme

The Somme. Where one million casualties

was the price paid for six miles of empty farmland.

The 1916 battle has become a byword for futile military sacrifice.

They were effectively the small change of that sort of war.

It's very clear from this excerpt

that Haig is prepared to take high numbers of casualties.

But who were the men who fought here,

and what drove them on?

It was a thing about being with your mates,

as opposed to dying for Ulster.

That's their duty and their job,

go and physically bomb the Germans out of those trenches.

This is the story of the battle over four key days,

told through the actions of seven of the men

whose bravery won them the highest military honour,

the Victoria Cross.

They were the Heroes Of The Somme.

A 141-day offensive.

14 bloody battles.

13 Allied nations.

It was here, in Northern France,

on the 1st of July 1916, that the massacre began.

And where just 51 men won the Victoria Cross...

..Britain's rarest military medal,

awarded for conspicuous bravery.

The Somme VC winners came from every rank, background and nationality.

This is the story of seven of them,

illustrated with original footage from the Western Front

and historic reconstructions.

Their experiences explain the entire offensive...

..where the first Victoria Cross went to an Ulsterman.

This name on the Thiepval memorial is that of my great uncle,

William McFadzean, the famous VC from Ulster.

He's in amongst 73,000 others of no known grave,

so he's just one of many.

The battle in which Billy fell was critical.

After a year and a half of war,

Germany still occupied Western France.

The French were fighting back, but it was bloody.

They had lost one million men and were demanding help.

It was quite clear that the French expected the British

to pick up their share of the burden,

and so Britain had to fight somewhere in the course of 1916.

There should be an inter-Allied offensive,

where Britain, France, Russia and Italy will all hit Germany

and hit the centre of Paris at the same time.

So the Russians were going to attack in the East,

the Italians were going to attack in the Southern Front

and, of course, the British and the French

were going to attack on the Western Front.

Britain decided to stand tall, whatever the cost,

and recruited a new army.

Within two months, half a million men answered Kitchener's call.

Volunteers from every corner of the Empire.

They were sent to the Somme,

where the first to fall were the sons of Ulster.

In Belfast, Billy McFadzean is remembered as a Loyalist folk hero.

He was born in Lurgan, County Armagh.

He was a bit of a Jack-the-lad, as far as we know.

If his school report is anything to go by.

He liked to get into a bit of trouble and a bit of mischief.

I think if you were in his company here in France,

in the war, you would have had a good time.

After school, Billy became a clerk in a Belfast linen company.

But, by the time he was 19, he was on the Somme.

So just a young man, here with all his mates -

it was an adventure for them.

I think they all wanted to come out here before the war was over,

and they had to go back to their boring jobs in Belfast.

Billy was part of the 36th Ulster Division.

16,000 men recruited mainly from the Ulster Volunteer Force.

An amateur militia set up, as they saw it,

to defend Protestant Ulster from the threat of Home Rule.

If Home Rule was actually enacted by the government in Westminster,

then the Unionist party would set up a provisional government

and it would take charge of the running of the nine counties

of the historic province of Ulster,

and then the UVF was there, essentially,

to provide the military muscle to back that government.

UVF organisers hoped offering men to fight for the King

would be seen as an act of supreme loyalty.

In return for which, plans for a Home Rule might be scrapped.

But Billy was not a hardline UVF loyalist.

He was originally a member of a very different organisation -

the Young Citizen Volunteers.

The YCV was formed as a non-sectarian,

non-political organisation.

There's records of Protestants, Catholics,

Jews, Quakers in the organisation.

But the YCVs were small in number.

And as recruitment in Ulster gathered pace,

the organisation was rolled into the UVF.

They were drawn into the UVF

just before they were coming into the British Army.

But they maintained that individuality

within the Royal Irish Rifles,

because they were known as the 14th Battalion YCVs.

In July 1916,

all the men of the 36th Ulster Division

were asked to make the same sacrifice,

as they lined up in the trenches of the Somme.

Throughout that spring, Britain prepared for the big push.

They sent men, artillery, ammunition,

dug trenches, built defences

and established supply lines.

The plan - hammer the German front line.

Within a week, break through and begin the march to Berlin.

By the 30th of June,

120,000 British troops occupied an offensive line

13 miles long.

Gavin Hughes is a military historian.

He's come to the Somme to piece together the actions

of these seven Victoria Cross winners.

He's starting by pinpointing the Ulster Division

in the final hours before the battle.

This is a copy of the battlefield map

belonging to Major General Sir Oliver Nugent,

commander of the 36th Ulster Division.

As a historical document, this map is indispensable.

We know exactly where our battalions are,

we know where the enemy is and, when we correlate this

with the landscape features that we've got,

we can pretty much negotiate our way around the battlefields.

The map shows Billy McFadzean's 14th Battalion was here,

in Thiepval Wood.

Just part of the 36th Ulster Division's

three-mile sector of the front.

At some points, less than 300 yards from the German trenches.

Billy McFadzean could have looked out from Thiepval Wood

and seen his enemy on this very ridge.

He was trained as a bomber...

..and, in the small hours of the 1st of July,

was preparing the vast supplies of hand grenades

when, before the battle even began,

an act of extraordinary bravery won Billy a Victoria Cross.

Just before zero hour,

the bombardiers of the 14th Royal Irish Rifles

are priming the grenades for the assault.

These trenches are crowded with advancing troops

getting ready to make their assault on the German lines over there.

We don't know how it happened, but one of the boxes of grenades

falls from the trench into the bottom,

and two grenade pins fall out.

Billy McFadzean, being a bomber,

would know exactly what had happened.

He would have either heard the striker going down

or heard the lever coming off

and knew immediately what has happened.

If they explode,

they are going to send burning hot fragments of shrapnel

throughout this trench.

There will be body parts everywhere.

Men will die.

If you're in a packed trench, do you turn and run?

Yeah, of course you do.

And the decision he makes, seeing his friends around him,

is that he collapses upon the box,

smothering the blast and actually killing himself instantly.

EXPLOSION

Billy's actions saved the lives of all of the men in his trench...

..and won him the very first Victoria Cross

of the Somme offensive.

Today, Billy McFadzean is part of Loyalist folk history,

remembered as a hero who made a blood sacrifice

in the name of the King to save Ulster from Home Rule.

His name comes up on so many issues.

The majority would be to do with the Loyalist faction in Ulster.

There was a ballad of Billy McFadzean,

which is a local Belfast-based folk song, I suppose,

but again, it's been adopted by people of the Loyalist tradition.

But Billy's great-nephew doesn't believe politics belongs

at the heart of the McFadzean story.

Sometimes you think, has his...?

Say his face on the mural -

has it ever encouraged a young lad to pick up a brick

and throw it at somebody?

If it has, then I'm ashamed.

Um...

And my gut feeling is it probably has over the years.

As far as I can see, Billy McFadzean was a young lad going off to war

for a great time and a bit of a laugh, and he was an eejit.

And that's probably why he died for his fellow soldiers,

because the bond he would have had with them would have been intense.

So it was...a thing about being with your mates,

as opposed to dying for Ulster.

That's probably the last thing on anybody's mind, you know,

on the morning of the 1st of July.

Billy McFadzean died before the battle even began.

Within hours, thousands more Ulstermen would join him.

The commander-in-chief of the British Army

was General Sir Douglas Haig.

His job, to turn political necessity into a military master plan.

Haig ordered an artillery barrage,

the like of which had never been seen.

For seven days, Britain's guns rained 1.5 million shells

on the German front lines.

The aim - destroy their dugouts,

disable their guns,

and cut the thickets of barbed wire blocking no-man's land,

so British foot soldiers could simply walk straight at the enemy.

Haig was confident this plan would work.

The night before the battle, he wrote,

"The wire has never been so well cut,

"nor the artillery preparation been so thorough."

He talks about the splendid spirits of the men.

We know from other sources that there is a sense of optimism

about what this offensive will achieve.

But had Haig's barrage worked?

The 36th Ulster division was about to find out.

And this man was about to become a hero.

Robert Quigg was born about three miles away from here, Bushmills.

Like most of the other residents there,

the young fellows there,

he left school, probably around the age of 12 or 13,

and he became a farm labourer.

Robert Quigg worked at the big house for the Macnaghten family.

In September 1915,

young Sir Harry Macnaghten and Robert Quigg

volunteered to serve in the 12th Battalion Royal Irish Rifles.

But Robert agreed to an extra responsibility.

Lady Edith, who was Sir Harry's mother,

called Quigg into the big house, or certainly to the kitchen steps,

and said, "Look, I want you to look after young Harry

"because he is very young and you're sensible.

"Make sure he's OK."

He was an older man, he was 31,

and Sir Harry was just 20.

So I suppose there was a sort of fatherly feeling as well,

you know, and he had a sense of responsibility for him.

Robert Quigg stood less than a mile from Thiepval Wood.

Now, only hours after Billy McFadzean's death,

he and thousands of fellow Ulstermen

prepared to be the first to face the enemy.

All along this line, you have the Ulster Division,

you have the 9th Irish Fusiliers,

and then you have Robert Quigg's battalion,

the 12th Irish Rifles, actually here.

And this is where they are going to go against.

They have to go down this valley,

cross no-man's land and then back up

against the German front-line trenches there.

Robert's mission - cross no-man's land

and seize the first three lines of German trenches.

Just 400 yards away, where, for a week,

the Allies had been raining shellfire

to destroy the enemy defences.

General Haig was confident there would be little resistance,

and the 36th Ulster Division believed him.

All the official reports say

that not a German will survive those trenches

after the artillery barrage.

That was the official story,

and that's why they thought there'd be no opposition.

At 5am, the barrage intensified.

At 7:20,

giant underground mines were detonated along the front.

Robert Quigg was about to find out if General Haig was right.

And at 7:28, the Ulster Division was ordered over the top.

Quigg had his answer.

EXPLOSION ECHOES

GUNFIRE

The German defences were not destroyed.

Britain's great barrage had failed,

leaving Quigg and the Ulster Division stranded in no-man's land.

From all quarters, they are getting German machine guns from there,

German machine guns from here and German machine guns from there,

long-range machine gun fire which effectively is sweeping them away.

Companies are being decimated.

All along Britain's battlefront,

tens of thousands of men walked straight at the German guns.

By lunchtime, 20,000 were dead.

40,000 more wounded or missing.

This was the worst day in British military history.

But, in his diary, General Haig seems to have been unconcerned.

Haig writes, "This cannot be considered severe

"in view of the numbers engaged and the length of the front attacked."

That's quite an interesting reflection.

It's very clear from this excerpt that Haig is prepared to take

high numbers of casualties.

As Robert Quigg crawled back to his trench,

thousands lay bleeding to death on the battlefield.

Somewhere among them, Sir Harry Macnaghten.

Robert didn't forget his promise.

That's when Robert Quigg, who must have already been exhausted,

he decides he's going to go out there

and bring Harry Macnaghten back again.

And so, I suppose, in trying to fulfil

his duty to Lady Edith,

he crawled out into no-man's land to search for him.

Robert searched the battlefield for Sir Harry for seven hours.

But, while he did so, he could not ignore the cries of the wounded.

He goes out seven times, and on each occasion,

he brings back a wounded man.

Under shellfire and machine gun fire.

The last man...

Quigg is so tired, he actually drags him back on a groundsheet,

from within yards of the German wire.

I suppose it reveals his sense of duty

and his sense of duty to those of his comrades who had been injured.

Being back in the trench at the end of the battle

and hearing the cries of the wounded from no-man's land,

his heart just went out to those poor souls

who are lying out there, suffering.

Robert Quigg was awarded the Victoria Cross

for saving the lives of his comrades.

But Sir Harry Macnaghten was never found.

There were nine VCs won that day.

Four went to Ulstermen.

Quigg, McFadzean and Eric Bell...

and George Cather.

Their bravery helped the 36th Ulsters to achieve its objectives,

the only British division to do so.

Their commander, Oliver Nugent, was filled with pride.

He writes, "My dearest,

"the Ulster Division has been too superb for words.

"The whole army is talking

"of the incomparable gallantry shown by officers and men."

But Nugent lost nearly 6,000 soldiers.

And the 36th Ulster Division was almost wiped out.

Nugent talks about how,

"I'm very proud but very sad when I think of our terrible losses."

For him, the 6,000 men he mentions, and the 150 officers,

are real people.

They were the victims of German machine guns

and Britain's own failed artillery barrage.

Their hundreds of thousands of shrapnel shells

were, quite simply, the wrong tool for the job.

And throughout the campaign, their artillery teams

remained dogged by failure of a different kind.

What we have here is an unexploded shell.

It's thought that there could have been half

of all the millions of shells that were fired

up and down this entire front actually were duds.

That explains very, very easily why the British barrage didn't work.

Another reason was the German dugouts.

They were up to 30 feet underground

and cast in thick, reinforced concrete -

impervious even to the Allies' heaviest artillery.

The 36th Ulster Division went to the Somme to serve the King

and was nearly obliterated.

The shattered division of Ulster Unionists was withdrawn.

And, in September, a new division lined up on the Western Front -

the 16th Irish Division, made up of nationalists.

One of its officers was John Holland,

the son of a vet from Athy in County Kildare.

John went to Clongowes Wood College,

a prestigious Catholic boarding school...

founded by Jesuits to educate a middle-class

ready to lead a new, independent Ireland.

One past pupil was John Redmond, leader of the Irish National Party.

He secured the promise of Home Rule for Ireland.

To ensure that promise was kept,

Redmond offered to recruit a division of Irish nationalists

to serve in the British Army on the Western Front.

When Redmond swung the Irish Party behind the recruitment campaign,

that was certainly a major factor in getting Clongownians to enlist.

There were over 600 Clongownians enlisted, and as far as I'm aware,

that's the second largest number of any school in Ireland.

John Holland was adventuring in South America

when war broke out in Europe.

Straight away, he returned

and enlisted in John Redmond's newly-formed 16th Irish Division.

In late 1915, they headed for the Somme,

ready to make their sacrifice in the name of Irish nationalism.

He was serving with the 16th Irish Division,

but they didn't actually go on to the offensive

until September 1916.

So this was their first big test.

September 3rd, day 65.

By now, 285,000 Allied casualties,

and the line had advanced by,

at most, just three miles.

The Somme was in stalemate, the idea of a sweeping offensive abandoned,

as Allied command made do with small-scale gains.

The Somme is clearly deadlocked in this period.

The defensive has the upper hand

over the offensive on the battlefield of the First World War.

Um, think of it this way -

if you put a man in a trench, he's quite a difficult target to hit.

If you have a man advancing across a field towards a trench,

he's exposing his whole body to being hit.

This simple fact was not lost on German command.

One of their generals, Crown Prince Rupprecht, wrote...

.."Their losses in human life are prodigious.

"Amply and in full coin,

"the Allies have paid for every foot of ground we sold them.

"They can have all they want...

"at the same price."

The territory that's been lost to particularly the British

is not very much, and Germany can afford to sacrifice this.

This is French soil.

It can afford to allow Britain to really hammer the German lines

and lose such huge casualties in the process.

It was a price General Haig was prepared to pay.

He was determined to break the stalemate

with a second major offensive.

But to do that, he first had to push the Germans back beyond Ginchy

and Guillemont.

If you go to the village of Guillemont today,

it's immediately obvious it's a really tough nut to crack

if you're an attacking army.

It's a ghastly killing match.

Of all the battles on the Somme, the Guillemont, Ginchy,

they're right up there for sheer horror.

Haig knew this only too well.

The British Army had failed to take Guillemont eight times already,

but now they planned very different tactics.

By this stage, the British have got beyond the clumsy tactics

of the 1st of July.

They are no longer simply forming up in waves, in long lines,

advancing slowly towards the enemy.

On the morning of the 3rd of September,

John Holland and the 16th Irish Division

planned to attack Guillemont.

Not in a single wave, but in small, deadly teams.

John Holland was a bombing officer with the 7th Leinsters,

about to lead just 26 men out of the woods towards the village.

And you can see the objective of Guillemont right ahead.

They would have seen the shattered remnants of the tower

and they would have known that dead ahead,

that's where they had to get to.

John Holland's bombing company were armed with grenades and bayonets

and prepared for bloody hand-to-hand combat.

He has to get them and their grenades across there.

That's their duty and their job,

to actually go and physically bomb the Germans

out of those trenches.

And he and his men run for their lives

across the pockmarked, shell-strewn, exploding hell

between here and Guillemont.

His job was to lob grenades right into those German trenches

and clear those trenches with bomb, revolver and bayonet.

In fact, the official historian

actually tells us what the 7th Leinsters did

when they got to the front line.

He says that they bombed, captured and brained with their rifle butts

all of the Germans in the first trench.

And that is men like John Holland, over there.

John Holland captured the first trench at the edge of the village.

But he didn't stop there,

and drove his men onwards into the centre of Guillemont.

This shattered town was a fortress of German concrete dugouts.

They survived nine weeks of intensive British bombing

and still survive to this very day.

Well, this is a perfect example of why the Germans were so safe.

The ceiling, solid concrete.

Brick, leading to other chambers with blast walls.

We've got two dugout entrances on top,

but it leads to a third chamber.

This is exactly the kind of dugout, if not actually one of the dugouts,

that Lieutenant John Holland would have actually attacked

on the 3rd of September, 1916.

You can tell how difficult it would have been

to take this kind of dugout.

He would have been using Mills bombs - grenades.

That's the first and foremost method of attacking a dugout like this,

rolling the grenades down into the dugout.

One goes off, two goes off, hopefully the men come out.

If not, you have to go in and more grenades,

more grenades, bayonet men, fight.

It ends up becoming a brutal carnage.

Every dugout was a miniature battle, and John Holland knew that.

As dusk fell on the 3rd of September,

Lieutenant Holland had bombed and brained his way

into the very heart of Guillemont.

By doing so, he'd allowed the 16th Irish Division

to sweep into the village and capture it.

The only problem was, of his 26-strong bombing section,

only five had survived.

But John Holland lived

and became the 32nd man in the Somme to win the Victoria Cross.

He received a huge welcome in Ireland.

In Athy and in Kildare,

the councils had special meetings and passed resolutions,

saying what a fine fellow he was. And...

the Athy town council presented him with a silver tea service

to commemorate the event.

Certainly, public opinion was prepared to acknowledge his,

his courage and his bravery and that he was, you know, an Irish hero.

John Holland's actions came after Ireland's Easter Rising,

yet he was still hailed a hero by Irish nationalists,

just as McFadzean, Quigg,

Cather and Bell were hailed as heroes by Ulster Unionists.

But, in Ireland, not every VC winner was remembered in the same way.

Thomas Hughes also attacked Guillemont on the 3rd of September.

He, too, won the VC.

But, over the years, his story was forgotten.

Thomas was from farmland near Castleblayney in County Monaghan,

a town that would soon end up on the south side of Ireland's new border.

No British soldier was mentioned around this area anyway, like.

You know, we are three or four miles here from Crossmaglen, you know,

and South Armagh. You didn't dare mention any member of your family

being near the British Army, like.

Politics meant Thomas Hughes' story was forgotten

and it's only now that his family is piecing his life together.

The 1901 census, he was 16, working in Cowley's as a farm hand.

So that made up for what he was.

So he obviously, you know, he worked from a young age, like,

and it was a hard life.

In 1915, Thomas was 29 and out of work,

so he seized the chance of a decent wage by signing up as a Private

with the 6th Connaught Rangers.

He more than earned his pay when, on the 3rd of September,

he attacked Guillemont with the rest of the 16th Irish.

When the Connaughts actually get into Guillemont,

they realise that their commanding officer, whom they love,

Lieutenant Colonel Jack Lennox Cunningham, has been killed.

It enrages them and they push on,

even though they were not supposed to,

and Hughes is one of the men who does that as well.

In the charge, Thomas was hit.

Somehow, he made it to a field dressing station

but refused to stay there.

Instead, he insisted on returning to the fight.

He's obviously walking wounded but he decides,

"No, that's where I should be, I should be there at Guillemont.

"I'm not that badly wounded that I can't take part in this."

And, luckily for the 6th Connaughts, he does go back.

Thomas knew his comrades were at the mercy of a deadly weapon.

The threat that Thomas manages to spy is the MG08 machine gun,

which is a devastating weapon which is cutting down the Connaughts,

cutting down the Leinsters,

cutting down the first waves of the 16th Irish.

Like tens of thousands of other men in the Somme,

Thomas's comrades were being annihilated

by the German machine gun.

He knew he needed to disable it.

It meant risking his life and he was already injured,

but Thomas didn't hesitate.

He dashed out in front of his company...

..shot the gunner...

GUNSHOT

..and captured the gun.

And as he says, he shoots the four chaps and that's how he manages

to spring the surprise on them, kills them,

captures the gun and takes prisoners at the same time.

The 16th Irish poured into Guillemont and seized the town.

Thomas Hughes won the Somme's 33rd Victoria Cross...

..but at huge personal sacrifice.

He had been shot in the legs and never walked properly again.

In 1917,

he was welcomed back to his hometown of Castleblayney as a hero.

It seems like the whole town wanted to turn out to celebrate

their local hero, the return of the native son.

Judges, doctors,

everybody with any sort of letters after their name

seems to have come out.

You know, I don't think the fanfare lasted very long afterwards,

once the initial euphoria had died down.

By 1921, Ireland was partitioned...

..and the Monaghan hero of the British Army

now found himself living in the new Irish Free State,

where attitudes to war veterans changed dramatically.

Because he had taken the King's shilling, as everyone called it,

he would have been seen as one of the enemy.

It just showed how the community feeling had turned

from 1917, the hero, 1940 whatever, the enemy.

Thomas spent the rest of his life in and out of the workhouse.

After he died, his sister was forced by her own poverty

to sell his war medals.

And the only memory of Thomas left in Monaghan

was a gravestone erected by the Royal British Legion.

Today, attitudes to Ireland's Great War heritage have softened,

and Thomas Hughes's family are now learning about his Somme story

for the very first time.

I went to France on the bike last September

and into Belgium, you know?

Just went to Guillemont, where his act was.

It was nice to go there, just nice to be where he fought, you know,

and something I always wanted to do. I got to do it last year.

Just look, just look at him, here, he's smiling, he's happy,

even though he's wounded. I think he just wanted to get on with life.

It is sad, the way that life hit back at him afterwards.

It's not fair.

It's not just Thomas Hughes, there's a lot of Castleblayney men,

a lot of local men went and you'd like to see them all remembered.

How many of these medals have been won?

Not too many. They are few and far between.

And you know,

all I can say is, I'm proud to be related.

Well done, Thomas.

Thomas Hughes, John Holland and the 16th Irish Division

left Guillemont in Allied hands.

And the British front advanced by 4,500 yards, at a massive cost -

4,000 lives.

But it broke the stalemate.

15th of September,

Day 77.

Haig could now begin his second great offensive,

a large-scale advance on the villages of Flers and Courcelette,

and then onwards to the German stronghold of Bapaume.

The British launch the second great offensive after the 1st of July,

a major operation intending to break the German positions.

The battle of Flers-Courcelette, which is the name

that was subsequently given to the great attack,

this is most famous, of course, for the first use of tanks.

With tanks added to the quite seriously improving British infantry

and artillery, there is a real chance of actually,

finally breaking into and through the German positions.

Haig placed his faith in new technology

at the Battle of Flers-Courcelette.

As important would be the fighting spirit

of men like Lieutenant Colonel John Campbell.

His military heritage is preserved at London's Wellington Barracks...

..headquarters of the Guards Division,

and home to the hunting horn that made Campbell a legend.

Well, the Campbells are a very strong military family.

No less than 15 Campbells served as Coldstream officers

between 1741 and 1970.

And it's a bad average - seven of them died in active service.

John Campbell, who in fact was my mother's godfather,

joined the Army in 1896.

By September 15th, 1916,

John Campbell was a 39-year-old Lieutenant Colonel.

Tucked into his belt was a hunting horn,

a reminder of his favourite pastime back home in Shropshire.

He commanded the 3rd Battalion Coldstream Guards

as they launched an attack from Ginchy,

when his men quickly found themselves under heavy fire.

There was a problem.

They knew on the flank that there was a nest of machine guns,

but there was a plan to deal with this,

using new technology - the tank.

This was the first time a tank had ever been used in battle.

They would become one of the key weapons of 20th-century warfare

but this, their first outing, did not go smoothly.

Unfortunately, the tanks all broke down and weren't there,

so there was the worst possible position.

The tanks that arrived on the Somme were untested prototypes,

rushed into service by Haig

against the advice of the machines' designers.

They sent 50, with no guarantees they would work.

Of those, only 25 or so actually made it into the front line.

And then a lot of the tanks, when they went down into trenches,

couldn't get out again. The trenches were too deep,

too wide, too much mud in them.

Also, they were simply bogged down because they didn't work.

They were experimental.

The failure of the tanks left John Campbell's Coldstream Guards

dangerously exposed to German machine gun fire.

Campbell and his Coldstreams are crossing this ridge and you can see,

it's a perfect, beautiful view from here.

The only problem is

this is where the German machine gunners are sited,

along this sunken road, and they have a perfect field of fire

for the Coldstreams as they come across.

They cut down rank upon rank of the Coldstreams.

It was devastation.

The first two lines were massively hit, and the 3rd Battalion,

on the left, had to deflect to try and deal with the problem.

This was the moment that John Campbell realised

that something had to be done and had to be done now.

He has to rally those men who are basically keeping their heads down

because to raise them is almost certain death.

But he does a really strange thing,

and actually, as one account puts it,

"They heard what must surely have been the strangest sound

"that ever rose above the war of a battlefield."

They looked and saw their colonel standing in their midst,

a hunting horn to his lips.

With this action,

what Lieutenant Colonel Campbell has done is taken personal control

of his men by blowing that hunting horn,

and it says he only plays one sharp note.

When he tells them, "We're going to take that sunken road,"

the men instantly rally.

The magic of it fired their blood as no words could have done.

The Coldstream rose, what was left of them, and swept on.

It was unique to him.

With the sound of the horn, they knew to move now, together,

as a team, and that's why it worked.

John Campbell was awarded the Victoria Cross

for his bravery and leadership.

His was the 37th,

and, thanks to his hunting horn, he became known as the "Tally-Ho VC".

Another Guardsman won a Victoria Cross for his actions

north of Ginchy that day.

Fred McNess came from a very different world

and won his VC at horrendous personal cost.

Fred lived in Yorkshire before the war and he was a carrier,

a delivery man, if you like,

working for a small firm in and around Bramley and Leeds.

The pictures we have here show Fred on his wedding day,

with his wife, my grandmother.

And he's surrounded by members of his and her families.

In his life before the war,

his primary interest was to earn a living and look after his family

and ensure that he and his family had as good a life as possible.

But in 1915, Fred did exactly what was asked of him.

He enlisted.

I guess he had a sense of duty and commitment

to family, King and country, as it were.

On September 15th, 1916,

Fred demonstrated that commitment to duty beyond question.

He was a bomber with the Scots Guards.

That morning, Fred's platoon was leading the charge

on a line of German trenches.

Lance Sergeant Fred McNess was the first of his Scots Guard platoon

to enter the first line German trench.

When he got here, it was a fierce hand-to-hand battle.

He bombed them back along the trench, but the Germans fought on.

He kept on fighting, bomb after bomb,

traverse by traverse,

until his bomb supply was almost exhausted.

When that nearly happens, he builds a barricade.

Fred McNess was determined to keep hold of the trench

his men had seized, but with no grenades, what was he to do?

The interesting thing is Fred McNess

is falling back on his training, here.

He's a bomber, so he actually realises

that there must be something in this trench

that he can use against the Germans, and he finds it.

German grenades.

He works out how to actually use them

and they start flinging these back at the enemy.

Armed with the enemy's own ammunition,

McNess and his men fought the length of the trench,

taking section after section,

until he and his men were right on top of the Germans.

It is at this point that, in that McNess's own words,

he sees a German throw a grenade.

It explodes near his dial, as he calls it.

It actually removes part of his jaw, his teeth, into his neck.

It is a fierce wound, a terrible, terrible wound.

But despite this severe injury, he refuses to leave his post.

In fact, what he does is actually encourage his men

to continue the fight against the Germans,

and with his last bit of strength,

he continues to throw bombs at the Germans,

until, through loss of blood,

he's eventually persuaded to leave his post

and go to a dressing station.

Fred's savage injuries sent him back to London,

one of thousands who returned from the Somme

with devastating facial disfigurements.

Their treatment led to a new medical discipline, reconstructive surgery.

Specialised hospitals were set up to deal with this flood of patients.

After the first day of the Somme, the 1st of July, 1916,

200 casualties were expected but 2,000 arrived.

The Somme battlefield, of course,

produced every injury you could think of in every part of the body.

From the face point of view, if one looks at the records,

there are injuries to the jaw, injuries to the lip,

injuries to the cheek, injuries to the eye socket

and there are injuries to the forehead

and particularly, of course, major injuries to the nose.

Some people lost their nose completely.

So it was a very protean collection of every type of facial injury

you could possibly think of.

Fred McNess was missing part of his lower jaw,

but surgeons used the latest technique to rebuild it

using a piece of his rib.

The treatment took a year and a half,

but it restored his speech and the use of his mouth.

Fred was awarded the Somme's 38th Victoria Cross in 1917,

for showing dash under fire.

For 40 years after the war, he worked as a shoemaker,

but his face always showed the scars of the Somme.

I can show you this rather poor photograph of him,

after he'd come out of hospital.

Yes, he's lost the contour of the jaw, just here,

and there's this great hollow underneath it.

He's lost some of the overlying soft tissue.

That's not uncommon, to get that sort of hollowing out.

You never recreate the sort of thickness of the tissue.

Fred's family believes he also carried psychological scars

from his experiences on the Somme...

..and that these never healed.

Tragically, Fred took his own life in 1956,

almost 40 years after the event

for which he was awarded the Victoria Cross.

There is probably a question over whether he was suffering

from what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder.

The official version was that he found it difficult

to continue to live with the discomfort and pain

of the injuries that he received.

November 13th, 1916.

Day 136.

560,000 Allied casualties.

In the north, the front line had still barely shifted since day one,

and winter was coming.

It is clearly getting to the point of the year in which the Allies

are going to have a great deal of difficulty carrying on operations

because the weather has broken.

The mud is terribly deep, terribly sticky.

And I think they are aware that this is probably

the Allies' last throw in the fighting on the Somme.

Haig was under political pressure to secure victory

before winter made fighting impossible.

His plan, a new assault on the same high ground the 36th Ulster Division

had fought for on the 1st of July,

which the Allies had been fighting for ever since,

and which was still littered with horrific reminders of their failure.

Some British troops have a really horrible experience

of attacking across a battlefield

and the dead of the battle of five months before are laying around.

Central to Haig's plan was to take Beaucourt,

a heavily-defended hilltop village.

Where we are now, on the approaches to Beaucourt itself,

pretty much the same place that Robert Quigg was fighting

on the 1st of July.

This, of course, is the key to the whole Somme battle

on this side of the front.

The man trying to win Beaucourt this time was an adventurer,

who left home looking for a fight...

..and found it on the battlefields of World War I.

His name was Bernard Freyberg.

My grandfather was born in 1889

in Richmond in Surrey.

And the family emigrated to New Zealand when he was two and a half.

Although born in England, he was brought up as a New Zealander.

He lived in some awful shack and there was almost no money,

and so he had to catch rabbits in order to have food to eat.

Bernard was a natural adventurer and news of a civil war

on the other side of the world was too tempting to resist.

At the first opportunity, he left New Zealand for America.

-There was a war going on. He liked the idea of it.

-Mm.

So he went out, down to Mexico,

and allegedly fought with Villa Pancho

before coming back at the onset of the First World War

to England to enlist.

Bernard Freyberg signed up with the Royal Naval Volunteer-Reserve.

He served in Belgium, then the Mediterranean,

where he won a Distinguished Service Order for his heroism at Gallipoli.

By that time he arrived on the Somme, he was a Lieutenant Colonel,

still only 27 years old, still full of fighting spirit.

The small hours of the 13th of November,

Freyberg prepared his Royal Naval battalion to attack Beaucourt.

At 5:45am,

he burst from the Allied trenches and charged through the darkness,

fog and shellfire, at the Germans.

He drove so far, so fast,

that he was in danger of running into the Allies' own barrage

that fell in front of him.

Through sheer grit and determination and his own character,

he ends up being hit by shell splinters

on the way up to this position,

largely because he's so keen to get ahead

that there are actually British shells

that are actually exploding above them.

Freyberg was hit twice, but each time,

he got back on his feet and led his men onwards.

And they take three trench lines, all the way up to this point.

And that's an amazing feat of arms and courage,

because they do it in the early hours of the morning, in a mist.

The fight is brutal.

And, by the end of it, the men are shattered

and they can probably see Beaucourt just down there.

They can certainly hear the Germans. The Germans are sniping at them.

By nightfall, Freyberg was on the very edge of Beaucourt...

..but with just 300 men and so far forward,

in danger of being surrounded.

However, Colonel Freyberg had no intention of surrendering.

He gives this rallying cry to his men,

who are dispirited when they get to this point.

And he says, "Not only are we going to hold our position here tonight,

"but tomorrow morning, we are going to take Beaucourt."

With so few men, Freyberg had only one option -

gather reinforcements and attack before sunrise.

There's a report about how they actually, um...

go and put the bayonets onto their rifles

by muffling them with their greatcoats,

cos they don't want the noise of their attack

to even be heard by the Germans.

The first man out of the trench was Freyberg.

Straight away, a bullet hit his helmet...

BULLET WHIZZES AND CLANGS ..and threw him to the ground.

GUNFIRE

But he got up and, to cheers from his men, charged on.

He and a small force captured some 500 German prisoners

and, by noon, Beaucourt had fallen to Freyberg and his men.

But his luck ran out.

On this very spot, Freyberg is actually telling his officers

how to prepare for the inevitable, as he sees it, German counterattack,

when a shell explodes pretty much directly above him,

sending a fragment burning into his neck.

And it's a really bad, bad wound this time,

but he will not leave his men

because he's actually trying to tell them

how to prepare the defences for the German attack that's going to come.

And that again speaks volumes about the man.

Freyberg staggered to a dressing station, nearly died,

but pulled through,

to win the 51st and final Victoria Cross of the Somme campaign.

Freyberg fought throughout the rest of the First World War

and the Second, in which he was commander of the New Zealand Army.

And I think he just enjoyed an army life.

It was something that suited him. He liked the challenge of it.

He was very, very fit and he wanted to win,

and he wanted to achieve something, and that's what he did.

Bernard Freyberg and his men left Beaucourt in British hands at last.

Within a week, the Somme offensive was over,

but not because Britain made a decisive breakthrough.

The Somme offensive fizzles out in the end,

I think largely through mutual exhaustion.

Both sides were reeling from their losses.

The British had suffered 400,000 casualties.

The French, 200,000.

Germany, around 500,000.

Today, we still debate who actually won the Battle of the Somme.

It makes you feel physically sick,

thinking about those sorts of losses.

And yet, they were effectively the small change of that sort of war.

One of the reasons why this scale is possible

is a different attitude to human life

and a different attitude to ideas about citizenship and human rights.

Ghastly as those losses are,

we mustn't try to superimpose our views, our morality, even,

on what happened 100 years ago.

One man made war an adventure.

For another, adventure turned into sacrifice.

One's bravery was remembered for a century.

Another's forgotten within a decade.

One soldier fought because it was his heritage.

Others because it was their duty.

They all risked everything.

They all won the Victoria Cross.

They are all Heroes Of The Somme.