The War Machine Britain's Great War

MILITARY DRUMBEAT

OMINOUS MUSIC

At three in the afternoon of May 7th, 1915,

a rocket was fired high into the sky off the southwest coast of Ireland.

It summoned the crew of the local lifeboat.

A passenger ship had been spotted in distress on the horizon.

The lifeboat of 1915 had no engine.

It was powered by 12 strong volunteers,

who, as they rowed, prayed,

because they reckoned it would take at least three hours

to reach the scene of the disaster.

They were met with a horrifying sight.

In the water, were hundreds of bodies

and the wreckage of a vast ocean liner.

The Lusitania had left New York six days earlier

loaded with British and American passengers.

She was the fastest ocean-going liner in the world...

..a floating five-star hotel.

The Lusitania was expected in Liverpool later that afternoon.

But she would never reach her destination.

The ship was the victim not of natural disaster,

but of an unprecedented act of war...

..by a German submarine.

When Kapitan Walther Schwieger fired his torpedo from his U-boat,

the U20, he scored a direct hit

on the most famous ocean-going liner in the world.

And, in so doing, he signalled the start of a new kind of warfare -

a warfare which made no distinction between those who wore a uniform

and those who didn't,

between men and women,

or between adults and children.

Almost 1,200 people were murdered.

It was the biggest single maritime disaster of the First World War.

The bodies of the dead were brought ashore

and laid on the quayside among the tins of paint

and the coils of rope, while survivors searched

desperately among them to try to identify missing relatives.

One mother posted a notice in a shop window over there.

It read, "Lusitania - missing baby, 15 months,

"very fair, curly hair, rosy complexion...

"tries to talk and walk."

For the first time in the nation's history,

ordinary people were being dragged into total war.

This is the story of how that conflict transformed the lives

of everyone in Britain.

Each man and woman would have to play their part,

and the nation would have to change utterly, and change quickly,

to have any hope of victory.

THEME MUSIC PLAYS

BIRDSONG

CROW CAWS

Bodies of the dead from the Lusitania

were washing up on the Irish coast for weeks afterwards.

144 of the victims are buried in mass graves

in this single cemetery.

It was the fact that so many of the victims were women,

so many of them were children, so many of them were babies,

that really angered people.

The sinking of the Lusitania seemed to bring war

to a new level of barbarism, and ever closer to home.

The reaction in Britain to the sinking of the Lusitania

was instant and violent.

Mobs surged through the streets

smashing any remotely German-sounding property.

In London, there were anti-German riots in the East End...

..but public outrage provided the Government with an unexpected boost.

It acted as a recruiting sergeant for Britain's volunteer army.

The Secretary for War and hero of Empire Lord Kitchener

pleaded for thousands more volunteers to go to fight

in France and Belgium.

But, at the front,

nine months of heavy fighting had failed to drive out the Germans.

The two sides faced each other along a line of trenches

stretching almost 500 miles.

In this new kind of industrial warfare,

there was one thing the army needed even more than it needed soldiers.

It needed munitions -

guns...

bullets...

and shells.

But despairing front line commanders

claimed they were being supplied

with the wrong kind of shells - simply not powerful enough

to destroy well-built enemy defences.

The shocking truth was exposed not in Parliament,

but in the popular press.

The patriotic Daily Mail decided it was time to break ranks,

launching a sensational attack on the War Secretary,

Lord Kitchener, himself.

On May 21st, 1915, a fortnight after the Lusitania,

the Daily Mail published an editorial.

"The Tragedy of the Shells - Lord Kitchener's grave error."

It alleged that the British government had sent the wrong kind

of shells to the Western Front and thereby caused the deaths

of British servicemen.

Now, it doesn't look very much on the page,

but, in the context of the time, this was a sensational accusation,

because it maintained that the British government

had been directly responsible for the deaths of its own citizens.

The shells scandal raised an alarming question -

were Britain's ruling class up to the job of winning the war?

The reputation of Kitchener would never really recover.

He was forced to make way for the man who, more than any other,

saw that, to achieve victory,

Britain itself would have to be transformed.

David Lloyd George, the newly created Minister of Munitions,

was a different sort of politician.

A Welshman with the common touch...

a passionate speaker...

a wily deal maker...

and the country's future Prime Minister.

From now on, in many ways, it would be Lloyd George's war.

Well, he was

an exceptional man in his own time.

And I think his great thing was that he had the foresight

to think strategically ahead and to get things moving,

and to mobilise the whole workforce in the country.

He had a different imagination

of how the war could be fought, didn't he?

Yes. He did actually have two sons

fighting in the front line in the war.

My Uncle Dick was a sapper and my father Gwilym was a gunner.

They were actually at the front throughout the war.

They would come back on leave to Downing Street

and he'd get first-hand information

about what things were like in the war.

And I think he saw very quickly that the way to increase

supplies of shells, and things like that,

was to harness businesspeople who were used to doing things,

and were used to doing them to a timetable.

-He really was the man for the job, wasn't he?

-Yes.

He had the vision, and he had the strategy,

and he had the determination.

Lloyd George needed every worker in Britain on side.

But there could never be enough of them to produce

the amount of munitions the country needed to fight a modern war.

He'd have to mobilise a new workforce -

a new industrial army -

the women of Britain.

The trouble was, some of the women in Britain

saw the Government as their sworn enemy.

The suffragettes wanted the vote for women

and had made serious trouble before the war to get it.

The Government had so far refused.

But Lloyd George saw that women's rights

and winning the war could be one and the same cause.

He set up a meeting with the notorious leader

of the suffragettes, Emmeline Pankhurst.

She had just finished a jail sentence for a bomb attack -

a bomb attack on his own house.

Pinfold Manor was the country home

Lloyd George had just built

for himself in the Surrey stockbroker belt.

Shortly before the outbreak of war,

a bomb tore through the house, wrecking five rooms.

The job of the police was made easy

when hat pins were found at the scene.

Emmeline Pankhurst and her suffragettes owned up to the attack.

They got in through this very tiny window.

-It is tiny, isn't it?

-Absolutely minute.

There were two bombs, I believe -

one which went off, and one which didn't.

-I think there were three...

-Three?!

-..and one went off and two didn't.

-Wow.

-Had they gone off, probably more would have been damaged.

-Lucky, otherwise you'd have nowhere to live, would you?

-True.

When asked why she had done it, Pankhurst replied, "To wake him up!"

that is, to frighten the Government into giving women the vote.

Fortunately for Lloyd George, he'd yet to move in.

But now there was a war on. It was time for the suffragette bomber

and the government minister to cut a deal.

These were strange days and no time to be bearing a grudge

over a little matter like someone trying to blow your house up.

Lloyd George wanted women for the war effort,

and Emmeline Pankhurst wanted women to have the vote.

MUSIC: "The March Of The Women"

# Life! Strife... #

They would eventually get it,

though they'd have to wait till the war was almost over.

A mere few weeks after the meeting,

Emmeline Pankhurst fulfilled her side of the bargain.

On July 17th, 1915, she led 30,000 women down London's Embankment

to demand a place in the struggle for victory.

It was called the Women's Right to Serve March.

What few people knew was that the Government was paying for it.

# ..Shoulder to shoulder and friend to hand... #

Many of those watching did so in horror.

These marching women,

with their strident demands and their noisy voices,

did not conform to the traditional idea of femininity.

But those watching would be astonished,

because this was the start of the biggest social revolution

of modern times.

Women in the workforce were nothing new.

But now women began to do jobs which only men had done.

Suddenly, Britain began to look very different...

..on the streets...

in the fields...

and in the factories.

The biggest change in the fortunes of women

would take place in a strange, sometimes frightening, new world.

In 1915, this was one of the most dangerous places in Britain.

It's pretty hard to believe now, but this peaceful place was once alive

with 6,000 people making explosives for the armies on the front.

These strange structures were designed

to withstand accidental blasts.

To mix the high explosive nitroglycerin.

To make cordite, providing the bang that powered shells and bullets.

For some, it wasn't the work that came as a shock,

it was the accents.

"Frankly, I didn't care for my companions,"

said one middle class woman.

"They struck me as rough, ill-natured, loud-voiced,

"vulgar little hussies."

But she added,

"Within a week, I had come to like them and, finally, to love them."

They were known as munitionettes.

The ones who worked at the Royal Gunpowder Mills

formed just a part of the million strong female workforce

employed by Lloyd George's new Ministry of Munitions.

The experience was exciting, new and dangerous.

Inevitably, there were casualties.

This is a photo of a woman called Charlotte Mead,

mother of five children, with a husband fighting in France.

It's taken in a photographer's studio,

where she's posing in munitions factory overalls.

It's probably just as well it's in black and white,

because working in close contact with high explosives

could do terrible things to you.

It could, for example, turn your skin yellow.

Within a year of this photograph being taken,

she was dead of toxic jaundice.

Not that you could have read about it in the newspapers,

because the press was banned from reporting such things.

By the time her husband returned from the front, it was too late.

The need for bullets, guns and shells was almost insatiable

in this relentless, total war.

Meeting that need involved the most dramatic

transformation of production the country had ever seen.

Lloyd George's impact on the munitions industry was spectacular.

Within six months, the number of shells being manufactured

had increased 20-fold.

Weapons, which had previously taken a year to manufacture,

were now being turned out in three weeks.

There would be no more shell scandals.

But, for Lloyd George, this was just the beginning.

"An undisciplined nation," he said,

"was fighting the best disciplined country in the world."

Every person in Britain had to dedicate themselves

to winning the war.

Starting in the pub.

# Another little drink Another little drink

# Another little drink wouldn't do us any harm... #

Hangovers were harming the war effort.

"Workers who drank," said Lloyd George,

"were murdering men in the trenches."

So brewers were ordered to water the beer,

pubs to limit opening hours,

and public figures - including the King -

pledged to give up drink till the war was over.

# ..Another little drink wouldn't do us any harm. #

Under the No Treating rule,

it became an offence to buy a drink for someone else.

A man in Southampton was fined for buying his wife a glass of wine.

So was his wife.

So was the barmaid.

Britain was learning to do as it was told.

Or much of it was.

For not everyone was so ready to knuckle down to government demands.

On the banks of the Clyde, a crisis was brewing

that threatened the very conduct of the war itself.

The Clyde shipyards were at the heart of the war effort.

From here came battle cruisers, destroyers,

minesweepers and merchant ships.

The shipbuilders of the Clyde were skilled,

comparatively well paid and militant.

And they weren't impressed by the Government telling them

the nation had to pull together in a spirit of sacrifice.

They saw the bosses doing very well out of the war.

Because, to some people, the war was less about sacrifice

and suffering than it was about an opportunity

to make money, a lot of money.

There were uniforms to be made, guns to be assembled,

ships to be built.

Some engineering firms saw their profits really soar,

and some workers weren't prepared to put up with that.

They called it profiteering.

But when workers on the Clyde threatened to strike,

there was outrage.

Lloyd George went to meet them.

Talk of patriotic duty fell on deaf ears.

Strikers sang the Red Flag and told him to get his hair cut.

The Government's patience snapped.

The ringleaders were arrested under the Defence of The Realm Act -

an emergency law designed to muzzle anyone undermining the war effort.

The strike collapsed.

A century later, the episode still evokes

powerful feelings from local trade unionists,

like Davie Torrance and Davie Cooper.

There would be many people, and it was said, that it was an act of

disloyalty for the trade unionists to start being difficult,

disrupting things, making demands that were not very readily met,

certainly by the employers,

and there was a lot of public resistance too, wasn't there?

Indeed. There was a feeling there that it wasn't our war,

it was the bosses trying to carve out more capital for themselves.

-That was the feeling.

-But vast numbers of people did volunteer.

Well, people got conned.

They're still conning people to go to Afghanistan and Iraq.

The point, of course,

the people who wished to continue with the war,

to a great extent, were profiteers

and racketeers, in many cases.

So, therefore, to say that we were less than patriotic

I don't think is quite correct.

You really think that the ruling classes unnecessarily

prolonged the war so that some people could make money out of it?

Yeah. Yep. It's a fair assumption.

I get the strong impression talking to you two that you actually

think that these guys who caused this industrial disruption,

about which the Government was extremely

exercised during the First World War,

because of the dangers they saw to the war effort,

that these guys are actually heroes of yours?

-Definitely. Obviously. Definitely.

-No?!

Political and industrial heroes. Yeah.

-You were difficult buggers, weren't you?

-Aye, absolutely.

Very well-organised, difficult buggers.

THEY LAUGH

The Government had acted tough with the striking shipbuilders...

and won.

But the pressure of war allowed - indeed, compelled -

politicians to intervene even further in the lives

of British citizens,

including where they were to live.

Men and women flooding into the shipyards

and factories of Glasgow needed homes.

In these rented tenements, families lived crammed together,

eight families to a block.

The fathers, husbands and sons worked in the shipyards,

or were now away fighting at the front.

With demand high, and the menfolk away,

the landlords saw their chance.

What better opportunity to raise the rents?

The results were devastating.

Families who had lived for years in this tightly-knit community

now faced being uprooted.

One woman decided she wasn't going to have it.

Mary Barbour was a 40-year-old mother of two

and a pillar of the local Socialist Sunday School.

She decided to organise a campaign of resistance - a rent strike.

Soon, over 20,000 Glasgow tenants

were refusing to pay the rent increases.

They quickly became known as Mrs Barbour's Army.

It wasn't long before some of them

ended up in court.

On the morning of the 17th November, 1915,

an enormous crowd of women and children from the tenements

had gathered here outside the Sheriff's Court in Glasgow.

Inside, 18 defendants were on trial for refusing to pay

the increase in their rents.

Mrs Barbour's Army had been joined by a new influx of recruits -

men from the factories and shipyards -

determined to force a confrontation.

The crowd carried placards which caught the eyes of the press.

The last thing the Government wanted were pictures

of the families of soldiers being thrown out on the street.

The crowd was getting restless, and the Sheriff was worried.

He telephoned London and got through

to the Minister of Munitions, Lloyd George.

"The workers have left the factories", he said,

"they are threatening to pull down Glasgow. What am I to do?"

Lloyd George's response was instant -

"Stop the case.

"A Rent Restriction Act will be introduced."

There was wild cheering in the streets.

Tenants would now be protected from exploitation by landlords,

and rents fixed at pre-war levels.

It was one of the most important laws of modern times.

Once again, the war had forced government

to intervene in the lives of British citizens.

It had put women into the workplace,

it had made laws about strikes,

it had even determined what and when people could drink,

and now it was making a law about what they paid

to keep a roof over their heads.

A social revolution was under way.

But whatever the Government might do for families at home,

for men at the front, it could do almost nothing.

The war had ground to a deadly stalemate.

Life in the trenches was muddy and miserable.

Rats and lice were everywhere,

food was usually cold,

and feet were rarely dry.

The air was heavy with the smell of explosives, death and decay.

The trenches were intended to protect you from bullets.

Artillery shells were another matter altogether.

A direct hit on a trench meant scorchingly hot metal,

shards of wood, earth and body parts flying everywhere.

One soldier recalled making his way along a trench

when a shell landed behind him.

He looked back and he saw just a black hole

where, moments earlier,

a lance corporal had been boiling water in his mess tin.

In the muck and fear of the trenches,

a new sort of family was formed.

A corporal and a few men in a trench were like survivors

from a shipwreck on a raft,

was the way one veteran remembered it.

# Oh, how I want you

# Dear old pal of mine... #

The extended family was the few dozen men in your platoon.

And the father figure - the lieutenant.

This was usually a boy of no more than 19 or so.

As in the factories back home,

the war was creating - if briefly -

a new kind of society,

bringing together people who'd scarcely been aware

of each other's existence.

It was the responsibility of young officers in their dugouts to read

and, if necessary, to censor their men's letters home.

As a lieutenant in the trenches, the future Prime Minister

Harold Macmillan described the effect of reading their mail.

"Dear Mother, are you on the drink again?

"Uncle George says the children are in a shocking state."

Macmillan found the task brought him much closer to his men.

"They have very big hearts, these soldiers," he said.

"It is very moving to read all their letters home."

Before battles, soldiers wrote home

for what they knew might be the last time.

One was John Scollen,

a miner from Durham who had volunteered with his friends

early in the war.

"We are about to attack those awful Germans.

"If it's God's Holy will that I should fall,

"I shall have done my duty to King and country."

"Dear Tina, you have been a good wife and mother,

"and brought up our canny bairns,

"whom I'm sure will be a credit to both of us.

"My Joe, Jack, Tina and Aggie,

"not forgetting my bonny twins Nora and Hugh,

"and my flower baby, whom I have only had the great pleasure

"of seeing once.

"I know these are hard words to receive,

"but God's will be done.

"From your faithful husband, soldier and father, John Scollen.

"Goodbye, my loved ones. Don't cry."

DISTANT EXPLOSIONS

Five days later, John Scollen was killed in battle.

His body was never found.

By the end of 1915,

British forces had suffered almost half a million dead

and wounded for no significant military advantage.

How, then, was the war to be won?

The answer to some seemed obvious.

There were still nearly two million men of fighting age

who HADN'T volunteered.

Why should some risk their lives at the front,

while others stayed at home?

Any man who wouldn't volunteer to fight should be made to fight.

In other words, conscription.

But compulsory military service went against the grain of the British

way of doing things, of respect for individual freedoms.

Never before in the nation's history

had the law compelled men to fight in war.

But never had the nation been in such desperate straits.

In January 1916, men aged between 19 and 40

were ordered to turn up at their local recruiting office.

Failure to attend would be seen as desertion.

The authorities began to round up

men of military age in public places.

At one London station, passengers found the exits blocked

and taxis nowhere to be seen.

Those without the right papers were taken away and questioned.

But getting the dreaded call-up papers

wasn't always the end of the story.

All over Britain, tribunals of local worthies

heard appeals from anyone who felt they had a right to stay at home.

Over a million men - more than half the number called up -

took the opportunity to plead their case.

Presiding over the tribunal in Preston

was the Mayor, Harry Cartmell.

According to the law, anyone doing essential work was excused.

But what exactly was essential?

The Preston tribunal heard an application from a man

who gave his occupation as tripe dresser.

The man told Mayor Cartmell that he supposed the tribunal would accept

that tripe, and pig's trotters and cow's heels,

were items of food.

The Mayor nodded. "We go for that, certainly," he said.

The man went on - "In fact, they're essential foods."

The Mayor wouldn't have any of that, though.

The man protested.

"But tripe and onions is a most useful dish," he said.

"Delicious, I am told," said the Mayor,

"but hardly essential."

The tripe dresser was sent off to war.

But tribunal verdicts varied widely.

The men who looked after the horses of the Atherstone Hunt

were exempted because the country needed a good supply of horses.

Men who staffed bathing huts in one seaside town were exempted

because they were said to promote public health.

Corset makers claimed that "Ladies must have corsets."

"The Army must have men," came the reply.

There were some heart-breaking cases too.

A widow appeared before one committee to argue that her

11th son should be exempted.

Of the ten elder brothers,

five had already been wounded,

two were prisoners in Germany,

and one a prisoner in Turkey.

The request was granted.

About a third of the men who asked not to serve

were granted exemption, if only for a few months.

But there were some - around 16,000 in all -

who claimed that any kind of killing was wrong,

and they simply refused to serve.

Conscientious objectors - or 'conchies',

as they were mockingly called - weren't exactly popular.

Angry mobs raided their meetings.

They were accused of being soft on the Hun.

They were routinely ridiculed in the press.

Some of the conscientious objectors got pretty short shrift.

"You are a coward and a cad," one was told,

"nothing but a shivering mass of unwholesome fat!"

But it seems to me remarkable that a country which considered

itself in the grips of a struggle for national survival

nonetheless allowed individual citizens to decide

whether they could reconcile that struggle

with their personal conscience.

It didn't happen elsewhere in Europe.

The authorities were faced with a new question -

what should be done with men who refused point-blank

to have anything to do with the war effort?

The answers were often confused, even chaotic.

In the spring of 1916,

a group of objectors was brought here,

to the medieval castle in Richmond.

Among them, was Norman Gaudie -

a young railway worker

and a forward with Sunderland Football Club reserves.

The group, who became known as the Richmond Sixteen,

included a member of the Church of England, Quakers,

Jehovah's Witnesses, a Methodist and a Baptist.

For several months, Gaudie and the rest of the Sixteen

were imprisoned in the castle.

Some objectors were prepared to go to the front

as ambulance drivers or labourers.

Gaudie and his companions were absolutists -

they refused absolutely

to have anything to do with war.

The cells still bear the evidence of their time here.

The story of Gaudie's arrival at the castle is remembered

by his daughter-in-law.

When he first came here,

it took eight soldiers

to try and get his uniform on

because he was a great sportsman. It was...

-They were trying to get the uniform on him?

-Yes.

It was only his friend who said to him,

"Well, that wasn't a very pacifist thing for you to do."

Do you know why he was such a vehement pacifist?

Because of his connection with the Church,

and he believed that the message of Jesus was not to kill

and to be friendly, to love one another.

But if I said to you he was just being awkward?

No, he really, genuinely believed

that it was absolutely wrong to kill another fellow human being.

-And...

-What, even if it came at the price of your country being invaded?

At any price. He... That's how he felt.

And this seems to be a picture on the wall of his mother.

-"N Gaudie's mother," it says here.

-Yes, yes, yes.

It's quite a good likeness, really.

-Is it?

-Yes.

His mother had sewn a little pocket

on his vest and put the photograph in it,

and that's how he came to have the photograph

of his mother with him.

-And it's amazing how clear it still is, really.

-It is, isn't it?

100 years on, nearly.

But the Richmond Sixteen were yet to face their ultimate test.

They were ordered to France.

Here, once again, they refused absolutely to serve in any way.

But now they were under military discipline,

and the punishment for refusing to fight was death.

On a June morning, the men were marched onto a parade ground

in front of hundreds of troops.

They were led to a raised platform

and there, their sentences were read out to the assembled soldiers.

"The sentence of the court is to suffer death by being shot."

There was a pause.

"Confirmed by the Commander in Chief."

There was another pause.

"Commuted to penal servitude for ten years."

It was a reprieve, but it was a reprieve most cruelly delivered.

When it came to it, shooting men for sticking to their principles

was a step too far for the Government.

Instead, absolutist objectors served out much of the rest of the war

in British jails.

To be honest, the extreme conscientious objectors

have always struck me as cranks.

The war was dreadful and it was bloody,

but unless Britain was prepared to see the rest of Europe

turned into some enormous German colony, it had to be fought.

And most British people saw that.

One by one, the great majority of those who needed persuading

had fallen into line to give their support for the war.

With few exceptions, the people of Britain saw the war as a just cause

and necessary for national survival.

But the most bitter resistance to the conflict was still to come.

There was one part of the realm

where the war would unleash opposition, bloodshed and death,

and change the course of a nation's history.

In April 1916, much of the city of Dublin was reduced to ruins.

Not by German bombs, but as the result of fighting

between two forces supposedly on the same side -

the soldiers of Britain and Irish citizens.

Ireland in 1916 was part of the United Kingdom.

But many Irish people believed they had been living for generations

under foreign occupation.

Their watchword was that England's difficulty

was Ireland's opportunity.

Rebel leaders such as James Connolly

were prepared to turn to Germany for weapons.

The revolution started here.

On Easter Monday 1916, Connolly led a group of armed rebels

as they seized the General Post Office, symbol of colonial power.

Within hours, they had proclaimed the birth of the Irish Republic.

British troops surrounded the building and prepared for a siege.

On Wednesday, there was the sound of shelling,

because the British had brought a gunboat up the Liffey.

On Thursday, machine guns opened up

and James Connolly was hit in the ankle.

And then, on Friday, incendiary shells struck the building.

With the Post Office in ruins,

the rebels surrendered.

What became known as the Easter Rising had been crushed.

Connolly and the other leaders were brought

to Kilmainham Gaol, in Dublin.

For the British authorities,

the rebels were simply traitors in time of war.

15 of them were executed by firing squad.

GUNFIRE

Mass arrests followed of anyone

suspected of being a rebel sympathiser.

2,500 Irish people were sent to internment camps.

Reaction in Ireland was outraged,

and the executed nationalists became martyrs in the cause of freedom.

The Easter Rising had been a hopeless, scatterbrained failure.

But the British response - the executions, the mass arrests,

the internment without trial - had turned failure into triumph.

James Connolly and his comrades had been amateurish

and passionate and doomed,

but they had made the cause

of Irish freedom from British rule unstoppable.

The executed rebels were buried in a British military prison cemetery,

now venerated as a national monument in independent Ireland.

-So Connolly's buried here?

-Connolly's here.

'The grandson of one of the leaders

'testifies to their enduring influence.'

The first week of the Rising was a failure,

but it was a significant political success,

so there's no harm in losing the battle if you win the war.

And if I were to say that your ancestors,

including your grandfather,

were effectively on the side of the Germans, what would you say?

I'd say that nothing could be further from the truth.

The Irish people were on the side of the independence of this country.

They had to, obviously, get arms from somewhere

and the only people willing to give them arms were the Germans.

Do you think it's an exaggeration then to say

that the First World War MADE Ireland independent?

I think it's fair to say that the circumstances warranted a response

of the British to the Rising.

It did precipitate the independent Ireland we have today.

At the start of the war, Lloyd George had almost despaired

of what he had called his "undisciplined nation".

But by the summer of 1916, all that had changed.

Britain had become a machine for waging war.

Every factory and farm, every able-bodied man,

and millions of women too,

had been drawn into a titanic struggle to win the conflict.

But would it be enough?

The nation was about to find out.

July 1916.

The rolling landscape around the River Somme in northern France.

Here, Allied generals planned an attack

they hoped would decide the outcome of the war.

MILITARY DRUMS

Through May and June,

some three-quarters of a million Allied soldiers

gathered in preparation for an offensive,

massive in scale and ruthless in execution,

to end the stagnation of trench warfare.

Key to the plan was the destruction of German defences

before Allied troops even left their trenches.

On June 24th 1916,

the order was given to unleash the greatest artillery bombardment

the world had ever seen.

This was war on an industrial scale.

Seven days and seven nights of bombardment

in which a million-and-a-half shells poured down on the Germans,

an apocalypse so violent it could be heard miles away,

across the Channel, in the English Home Counties.

But it wasn't over yet.

The climax of the bombardment was still to come.

Two minutes before the attack was set to begin,

there was one of the biggest man-made explosions

in the history of the world.

This is the result.

The British had spent six months tunnelling

beneath the German fortifications

and now, at 7.28 on 1st July,

they detonated 30 tons of explosives.

The debris flew 4,000 feet into the air.

The generals were confident little could have survived the assault.

So confident, in fact, that there had been jokes

that all the troops would need to carry across no-man's-land

were their umbrellas.

At dawn, on July 1st, the men were assembled

ready to clamber out of the trenches and go over the top.

Most of them were volunteers from Kitchener's Army,

including many from the so-called Pals battalions.

It was a glorious summer's day.

BIRDSONG

At 7.30, whistles blew along the whole of the front.

WHISTLES BLOW

A football was kicked in the direction of the German trenches.

The Battle of the Somme was about to begin.

GUNFIRE

Wave after wave of soldiers marched towards the German trenches.

Among them were the 16th Battalion of the Royal Scots,

known as the McCraes -

a Pals battalion formed round the players and fans

of Heart of Midlothian Football Club.

But what met them was not what they had been told to expect.

As the football fans marched on,

German guns took a terrible toll.

Thousands of British shells had failed to explode.

The enemy wire had barely been cut.

The Germans had had months to build their defences.

Their dugouts were deep,

many reinforced with concrete,

and a week of shelling had caused only partial damage.

As the day wore on,

the hope for decisive victory turned into decided disaster.

McCrae's Battalion came on steadily and bravely up the hill

and then, to their horror,

a German machine gun opened up on them from the side.

They fell in great numbers.

One survivor recalled the shock of seeing men he had looked up to

cut down in front of him.

His company sergeant major took a bullet,

fell to his knees and his last words were,

"Be brave, my boys."

Then he fell forward, dead.

Andy Ramage, who was a printer,

had this photo taken of himself with his pal Frank Weston, a student.

Ramage was hit in the throat by flying shrapnel.

Weston was shot as he pulled him into a shell hole to protect him.

810 members of McCrae's Battalion went over the top that day.

576 were either killed or wounded.

By the end of that first day,

the British Army had suffered a total 57,470 casualties.

A little ground had been taken,

but there had been no breakthrough.

It was the bloodiest day in the history of British warfare.

The Somme offensive dragged on for months.

It did eventually yield some gains,

but they were bought at tremendous cost,

and the whole thing raised really troubling questions.

Were Britain's generals up to it?

Were Britain's soldiers?

Could the country cope with losses on this sort of scale?

And bleakest of all -

how much longer was it going to go on?

Next time -

German U-boats try to starve Britain into submission...

..an alleged pacifist plot to murder Lloyd George

lands this Derby family in prison,

and the state intervenes to police the sex lives of British citizens.