Raising Arms Bullets, Boots and Bandages: How to Really Win at War

Our history has been shaped by centuries of war.

From the armies of the Romans...

..to the modern, global conflicts of today.

I'm Saul David and I'm a military historian

and what history tells us again and again is that

beyond the derring-do of military commanders,

it's the nuts and bolts of how you house and feed your army,

how you move it and how you kit it ready for battle

that's the real key to winning wars.

Today, military logistics dominates modern warfare

with entire branches of specialists dedicated to feeding,

moving and kitting out frontline soldiers ready for battle.

This is the story

of how this elaborate, high-tech world came to be.

Because throughout history, the greatest challenges

faced by any military commander have remained the same.

If you don't keep your soldiers fed,

they'll never even make it to the battlefield.

Think about it this way,

that you're slaughtering for 80,000 men a minimum of 300 animals a day.

If you can't move your men and fast,

you'll never steal a march on the enemy.

US General George C Marshall once described the Jeep

as America's greatest contribution to modern warfare.

And, don't forget, America invented the atomic bomb.

And any army that isn't equipped with the latest technology

has, literally, been cut to shreds.

Some of the greatest failures and victories in history

have come down to the detail of military logistics.

The real story of how wars are won and lost.

Weapons...

The cutting edge of battle.

From longbows to cruise missiles, the supply of arms,

the very tools soldiers need to fight,

has always been an ultimate factor in deciding wars.

History tells us that a general can move and feed an army

as efficiently as he likes but the real litmus test is the battlefield.

All that energy that he expends on getting his men to the front

will count for nothing if they can't perform in action.

What he needs is for his men to arrive disciplined,

with the right kit and the training how to use it.

Get it wrong and the consequences are almost always fatal.

This film is about the arms race and how it's paid for.

This projectile was effective at 1,000 yards.

We'll see how new weapons brought new injuries

to challenge battlefield surgeons.

Remember, you've a live patient on the end of this.

And why survival in World War I

depended on new ways of feeding the guns.

This gun fires 600 rounds a minute that's ten a second.

This is the story of kit and how it changed the soldier's life.

The uniforms he wore, how he lived and trained

and, most of all, how he fought.

All soldiers go through a rite of passage.

-Afternoon, sir.

-Afternoon.

Their first trip to the quartermaster to get kitted out.

But today's kit would baffle a soldier of even 50 years ago.

This is state-of-the-art protection for the soldier.

Major Chris Carling is responsible

for kitting soldiers for duty in Afghanistan.

A big ballistic plate in the front and a ballistic plate at the back

which provides protection to your vital organs.

So, Chris, what are all these pouches for?

OK, the system comes with 23 pouches for your grenades, pistol,

your small arms pouches and, if you just move round to the back,

you'll notice that we have utility pouches and medical pouches.

It's amazing, I mean, it's quite a weight

but you can see how you can move in it and, slowly but surely,

your body's getting used to it, isn't it?

This is the stuff of modern war - ballistic sunglasses.

Helmets with infrared ID to avoid friendly fire.

Ballistic underwear to protect against IEDs.

And finally, of course, his actual weapons.

An SA80 rifle.

And Sig Sauer pistol.

Saul, what you're equipped with now is the cutting edge in technology

that is available today.

Over 100 items, in terms of capability, this is world-beating.

So, this is what a frontline soldier looks like,

ready for anything.

Although, I have to say, I'm not sure I am.

But it's a far cry from the ragtag armies through most of history.

But, as kings and generals have always known,

it's getting the right kit, kit at the cutting edge

or at least better than your opponent's

that's the key to winning battle and wars.

Having better kit than the enemy has always been critical to success.

And for English soldiers 700 years ago,

that meant one thing in particular -

the longbow.

Tim Sutherland is an expert on mediaeval warfare.

This is what they call a self yew bow,

it's made from a single piece of yew

which has got horn nocks on the end to hold the linen cord.

This has probably got a draw weight of about 30 or 40 pounds.

In England, it was a statute of law

that you were forced to train to use the bow.

And, of course, English archers were renowned across Europe

for their efficiency on a battlefield with this implement.

And, of course, what that meant was,

if you could fill your army with archers instead of men-at-arms,

you are gaining a large artillery advantage

because, of course, you could loose arrows into your enemy

before they're anywhere near you.

Once an arrow like this goes through the air

and lands in anything other than on a piece of metal,

it will penetrate it.

It'll go through leather, it'll go through horseflesh,

it'll go through bone.

And, of course, what that means is there were thousands of these raining down.

What that introduces, more than anything else, is chaos.

Even mediaeval commanders knew that experts held the key

to supplying the best kit available.

To stay at the very forefront, in 1414,

Henry V set up a brand-new post

called Master of the Ordnance.

From the 16th century,

the Board of Ordnance met here, in the Tower of London,

to discuss the technological cutting edge of weapons.

From bows to swords and from muskets to artillery pieces.

And what I have here in front of me is quite an extraordinary document

because it dates from that period

and it's effectively a money ledger of the money paid out

from the Board of Ordnance to the people supplying it with weapons.

This page here is particularly revealing.

It starts off by saying, "Paid to William Bucksted, King's bowyer."

He makes bows for the King.

And then down below him, "Paid to John Clark, King's fletcher."

He makes the arrows.

And then thirdly, "Paid to George..." someone,

I can't quite make out his name, "King's bowstring maker".

So, on this one page, you've got the three constituent elements

of the longbow which, of course,

is still being used in the 16th century.

And yet, just a page later, we see the future of weapons technology.

The entry reads, "Paid to Robert and John Owen, King's gun founders."

And so, in just a page, we see the development of weapons

from bows to cannon, the future, of course.

Henry V's longbows were the end of an era.

A new age was dawning of muskets and cannon.

This was the beginning of greater complexity, specialisation and cost.

Just like today, commanders knew that cutting edge kit

had to be designed and specified...

One, five rounds. In you own time, carry on.

..that the soldiers using it had to be properly trained...

..and, somehow, that it all had to be paid for.

In the 1690s, after a series of wars against France and Spain,

England had run out of money.

And so, the government came up with a cunning plan.

They called it the Bank of England.

We might think of Threadneedle Street

as the heart of commercial finance

but 300 years ago it was all about military might.

The Bank of England underpinned Britain's rise to greatness

because sound finances enabled us to continue the fight

for as long as it took.

The Bank of England was a body set up not to lend money

but to borrow it in the massive amounts it needed to fund a better army.

In 1690, it was becoming more like the army we know today.

A professional fighting force

equipped with the very latest weapons of the highest quality.

The first general to take advantage of this extra finance

was the 18th century commander the Duke of Marlborough.

John Spencer has studied the kit the Bank of England funded.

The firelock here cost, on average,

22 shillings - one pound two shillings

that's more than a soldier would've earned in a month.

The most expensive part, perhaps, as you might expect, was the barrel.

This cost six shillings and sixpence.

The lock, the working part cost three shillings and sixpence.

And there was even a charge of four pence

for engraving the maker's details and date on the lock here.

To complete the stand of arms, as it was known,

the bayonet and its scabbard were another two shillings.

But, perhaps surprisingly, it was the soldier's uniform

that formed the most expensive part of the outlay on an ordinary soldier.

Each soldier received one of these coats, new, when he joined the army.

The whole price of his kit and enlistment

was something in the region of two pounds ten.

Of which, the coat cost one pound five shillings,

again a large sum of money in the early 18th century.

The equipment that Marlborough was supplying to his soldiers

was extraordinarily expensive.

But by providing them with the very latest technology,

he went on to secure stunning victories.

Most famously at the Battle of Blenheim

when he routed the French.

Even though they're separated by 300 years,

Henry V and the Duke of Marlborough

had their fingers on a similar pulse.

That to win at war, you needed armies that were properly organised.

With secure finance coming from the Bank of England

and the Board of Ordnance providing quality kit,

the army was ready to enter a new era.

After Marlborough,

there was a realisation that technology was changing.

Big improvements were being made in artillery,

a weapon that had formally been on the periphery of warfare.

Now, it was seen as the future.

And to make effective use of it,

armies had to become more professional.

In 1741, right here at the Woolwich Dockyards,

an academy was established to teach artillery officers.

It was the beginning of an effort to make training more technical

and professional.

This was to have ramifications right through the 19th century

with increasing specialisation, with the building of barracks

that set soldiers apart from civilian life and, ultimately,

with the legend of the highly-disciplined British Redcoat.

The docks themselves had connections to ordnance

since the time of Henry VIII,

when a gun wharf had first been built on the banks of the Thames.

But now, it was going to have a new role, not only for training,

but a place where the latest arms technology

could be designed and tested.

Developments in artillery would shape modern warfare

through World War I, World War II and beyond.

Large guns firing barrages from distance

would change the very nature of war.

All this started in the 18th century.

So, what we've got here is a typical gun of the late 18th century.

It's a British 6-pounder made out of bronze and it incorporates

a number of innovations that really increased the effectiveness of artillery on the battlefield.

The first of those innovations is this elevating screw here.

It doesn't look like much but what this did is hugely increased

the speed and precision with which you could aim this gun.

Before you would just have had wedges of wood

pushed underneath the barrel to raise it up and down,

not a very efficient or precise way of doing it.

This changed all of that.

You also had something known as a single trail.

This is the trail at the back of the gun here.

Formerly, you would have had two wooden trails to attach to a horse

but they weren't very stable

and it meant the gun was less accurate.

This gives it a really stable platform

and, at the end of it, you've got this hook.

Now, this hook would have been attached to a limber.

Limbers were new, they had two wheels and a box on the top.

And in that box, would have been the ammunition supply.

So, all of a sudden, for the first time,

when you're moving this gun around, you've not only got the fire power

but the ammunition supply right behind it.

It's a much more effective, self-contained unit

than it had been before.

By 1800, the Royal Artillery had expanded

from its original 200 men to over 6,000.

The sum total of all these innovations

was that artillery was becoming more effective than ever before.

And that itself was producing something new,

devastating injuries on a scale never seen before.

These remarkable watercolours were sketched by a battlefield surgeon

called Charles Bell.

They depict just some of the injuries he witnessed from Waterloo.

At battle of massed European armies

equipped with the most devastating fire power

they could lay their hands on.

And it was the artillery which caused the most horrific injuries.

This is a solid, iron cannonball known as a round shot

and it was designed to be fired from a cannon

at a relatively low trajectory

And after bouncing once

to then plough through whatever lay in front of it.

It's an incredibly fearsome antipersonnel weapon.

This is an original from the Napoleonic Wars.

Nine pounds in weight.

You would not want to be hit by a missile like this one.

On Sunday 18th June 1815, a force of Allied European armies

confronted Napoleon just south of Brussels

near the Belgian village of Waterloo.

So, down below me is the famous Waterloo battlefield

and directly opposite is where Napoleon commanded

on that side of the valley with the French armies coming this way.

The Allied commander, Wellington,

was just over there at the crossroads.

And the French artillery, key to the battle,

were in the base of the valley.

And they'd have been firing their bouncing cannonballs

up towards the ridge line, behind which most of the British troops

and Allied troops were gathered to protect themselves from that fire.

And yet, by forming defensive squares against French cavalry,

they became an easy target for French artillery.

One British square lost 400 out of 800 men

and another British officer described his own square

as a perfect hospital, full of dead, dying, mutilated soldiers.

But in the end, Wellington triumphed

and brought the final curtain down on Napoleon's imperial ambitions.

But it came at a heavy cost.

Nearly 50,000 men were killed or wounded that day.

One in four of every man fighting.

These fields would have been strewn with the dead

and men with horrendous injuries.

The most famous casualty of all was the Earl of Uxbridge,

commander of the British cavalry,

hit in the knee by grapeshot.

And, yes, you've guessed it,

this is the saw that was used to amputate the Earl's leg.

It's rather beautiful, isn't it?

Now, the Earl is said to have borne the operation very well

and it's not surprising when you think about his actions that day.

He personally leads one of the most successful cavalry charges

during Waterloo, he's said to have had multiple horses shot under him

and when he's finally hit in the knee, the wound, of course,

that leads to the amputation, he turns the Duke of Wellington

who's riding near him and he says,

"By God, sir, I think I've lost my leg."

And the Duke replies, "By God, sir, I think you have."

Trauma surgeon Mick Crumplin has made a special study

of battlefield surgery and knows just what the Earl of Uxbridge faced

on a farmhouse table at Waterloo.

If you take the knife and place it ready to start.

Remember, as you come round,

the pressure has got to be even and severe.

So, mind my fingers and yours too.

With no anaesthetic, patients could die of shock

if operations took more than two minutes.

Feel it tear through, even though it's very sharp.

And surgeons prided themselves on their speed.

Remember, you've a live patient on the end of this.

-So, no time for hanging around.

-No.

A very sharp knife. I mean, this is an original, is it?

It is. This is a 200-year-old shear steel knife with an ebony handle.

I can feel the bone there.

When you feel bone, desist from cutting hard

and concentrate on the bits that feel soft.

Once the flesh and tendons are severed, it's time for the bone.

It's not an easy procedure. Don't go push, pull, push, pull.

-It's push, push, push.

-OK.

Keep going.

-Very sharp, isn't it?

-Keep going.

-You can feel...

-Yes, a double row.

-..resistance. It's cutting beautifully.

It's quite a painful bit of the operation.

You think you're there, but it's just not...

It's like green sapling wood, cutting bone.

Roll it over a bit more, I think it's this last bit here. Yeah.

There we are.

The limb is removed and cast away into a heap with others.

Unfortunately, I took so long

that my patient would almost certainly have died.

In the real world of Waterloo, that would have been a human body

and the idea of actually cutting through bone

which must have felt very like that with this kind of shuddering,

flinching human who wasn't using anaesthetic,

it felt quite chilling to me, I have to say

and I didn't have any noise and any movement.

And what it must be like under real conditions I can't even imagine.

It's a pretty scary procedure.

Modern soldiers still face an everyday risk of injury,

or even death.

All soldiers undergo training to administer life-saving first aid

on the battlefield.

Start getting the safe area around that casualty too.

It's something alien to most of us in the civilian world.

The modern soldier is a professional -

a trained specialist who occupies an unique place in society...

You're all right, you're going to be back in here in a minute.

..ready to go into action as a last resort when diplomacy fails.

But this idea of the soldier as someone apart from society

only emerged in the 19th century.

A striking example of this evolution was the building of barracks.

One of the few early examples still standing

was built in the 1840s above Pembroke Dock in west Wales.

One of the things you can clearly see from this picture

is the separation of the military who were very much kept

within the boundaries of the barracks.

And also, of course, the civilians who were there, beyond,

on the fringes, kept well away from this forbidding military structure.

And what's remarkable is that

there are only two places like this left in the world -

this one and Fort Worth in Texas.

It's fascinating to look at this place

because all the architecture is absolutely from the Victorian era.

Now, the military moved out in the 1950s

and it looks pretty much to me like nothing's been done since then.

It's almost a time warp.

It reminds me of other Victorian institutions -

hospitals, lunatic asylums and even prisons.

All places to keep certain people in and the rest of society out.

Roger Thomas from English Heritage

is an expert in the architecture of military buildings.

The space each man had was actually quite small

because if I, sort of, come here, this distance over to the wall

and out to about here, that is the space each individual man had.

And that really is quite tiny.

That's smaller than a man in a prison would have had at the same time.

Down here, we've got a soldier's box.

Inside here, he kept all his personal belongings and clothing.

The bed itself, here we have an example.

And you've got a mattress but if you squeeze it

you can hear it rustles.

And that's actually full of straw.

You would have also been issued with other kit and equipment

and here we see what's known as the accoutrements

on the accoutrement rack.

And this is all the belts and bags that you carried on you

when you are actually in your full uniform and equipped.

So, all of this, all the issuing of new kit,

improvement in the quality of equipment,

the standard of keeping it clean,

the soldiers' presentation, their health, the discipline,

the petty rules which all seem absurd

really were there to ensure that we got a better soldier.

Shoulder!

Arm!

What came out of the barracks was the stuff of legends.

The stiff-upper-lipped British officer

and the bulldog of a regular soldier.

The mid-19th century saw the appearance

of the professional Redcoat

who distinguished himself on the battlefield

through his training, discipline and kit.

That legend was cemented in the hills of the Crimea

between 1854 and 1856.

Because it was here that the 19th-century powers

of Britain, France and Russia fought for control of the Near East.

What was at stake was nothing less than the balance of power in Europe.

The small peninsula of the Crimea was the setting

for the ill-fated valour of the Charge of the Light Brigade.

But, on the same day, another British action

to protect the supply base of Balaklava also went down in history

as the Thin Red Line.

This time, it was the Russian cavalry

charging at a small unit of British infantry.

Normally in a situation like this,

infantry would form a square to receive cavalry

but if they'd done so,

the Russians could have flown past on either side and taken this port.

So, instead, Colin Campbell, the 93rd commander,

ordered them to form two seemingly fragile lines,

bellowing at the same time,

"Men, there must be no retreat, you must die where you stand."

Fortunately it never came to that

because, having unleashed two volleys,

the Russians were stopped in their tracks and forced to withdraw.

Balaklava was saved.

But successes in the Crimea

were about more than discipline and training.

They were also about technology

as higher standards of manufacture were leading to ever better weapons.

This is an original gauge set for an 1853 Pattern Enfield rifled musket.

It's completely unique in the sense that it's the only one of its kind.

Now, inside it...

a huge number of instruments to measure every aspect of the weapon,

down to a thousandth of an inch.

If the individual part that corresponds to this measurement

doesn't fit, it won't be assembled into the final weapon.

Probably the best example I can give

is something that's immediately familiar

to anyone who's seen a rifle -

is this, the trigger guard.

Now, that's the piece would have come off the assembly line.

If it doesn't fit into this measuring tool here, exactly,

so the screw holes correspond,

it's not going to be turned into the final weapon.

This was Victorian engineering pushing the bounds of accuracy

to greater lengths than ever before.

And it wasn't only about precision guns but also precision bullets.

Up till this point,

all European armies had been using this, the musket ball.

And, in fact, the Russians still were.

The problem was as it was fired it bounced along the barrel

and you'd be lucky to hit something at 100 yards.

What you needed was rifling,

that is little grooves on the inside the barrel

to impart spin and accuracy.

The problem was the rifling would only work

if the projectile fitted snugly.

And if fitted snugly, it was hard to load.

The answer with the minie bullet

which had a hollow base and an expanding rim.

The genius of this little skirt is that, as the gun is fired,

the gases force the skirt outwards

and enables the rifling to grip, impart spin and accuracy,

so that this projectile was effective at a thousand yards.

It made all the difference.

And you could go so far as to say

this skirt married to the much larger skirt of the highlanders

and of course, their discipline,

proved the Russian's undoing at the Thin Red Line.

Some historians would go even further and say the minie

cost the Russians the whole of the Crimean War.

What we have in the Crimea, a war that is a historical midpoint

between Waterloo and the First World War,

is a soldier who was also at something of a midpoint.

He's dressed and used tactics that would've been familiar at Waterloo,

but with new technology

that would soon change the way wars were fought.

He's a professional, housed in barracks apart from civilians,

tightly disciplined

and armed with the latest and most powerful weapons.

He's rapidly becoming a cog in the great machine of war.

By the middle of the 19th century,

the industrial revolution was in full swing.

Manufacturing was changing all aspects of life.

It's effect on the military arms race was no different,

as new machines could make weapons of ever greater power,

as well as unprecedented accuracy.

And the very best of Victorian machine tool engineering

is this weapon here, the Whitworth, named after its inventor,

and it's a very, very special weapon.

Joseph Whitworth was a perfectionist with an obsession for measurement

that made him one of the greatest engineers of the Victorian age.

When the government asked him to design a rifle,

Whitworth used precision tools

to make the most accurate firearm the world had ever seen.

The most extraordinary development of all was its bullet,

which worked in a completely different way

to the minie of the Crimean War.

It's hexagonal and it's hard to believe this could fire through a barrel, but it can and why?

Because the barrel is also hexagonal-shaped

and I'll just show you here with this cut out.

This is an example of a Whitworth that's been sectioned

and you can actually see on the inside of the barrel,

is this extraordinary hexagonal rifling,

all the way along the barrel.

That's deliberate to impart extra spin on the bullet

so that it will fire further and more accurately than ever before

and in that sense, this rifle was a huge success.

GUNFIRE

Bill Curtis owns one of only a handful of operational Whitworths still in existence.

It's this hexagonal barrel and bullet

that always strikes me as so unusual.

What was it that made this gun so special?

Whitworth designed around a series of really complicated experiments.

The true relationship between the weight of a bullet,

the diameter of the ball and the rate of spiral,

and he revolutionised the rate of spiral

by bringing it down from one turn in 78 inches to one turn in 20,

and his design shot accurately twice as far as a government rifle.

We know in theory it's accurate. This is 150 years old.

Am I going to be able to hit that target?

-I think you can frighten it very badly.

-OK, let's have a look.

GUNFIRE

What a noise. What a sight too.

The huge puff of smoke comes out at the end. I can't see a thing.

How on earth do you know if you've hit anything, Bill?

Well, in battlefield days, you didn't.

Unbelievable, the amount of power being forced back into my shoulder.

For the first time, you've got to hold it firmly

-but not too tightly, haven't you?

-Yes.

-Amazing.

That can't be it, can it, Bill? Look at that! That is amazing.

I'm afraid it is, that's what you've managed to do. Well done.

That is astonishing.

I'm firing for the first time from 200 yards away,

with a weapon that's 150 years old,

and I can get that close to the bull.

You know how to shoot, I know the rifle,

we put the two together and that's what you can do.

I do, but I'm hardly a trained marksmen.

It's terrifying to think what it could've done in the hands of someone who was.

The new Whitworth travelled all the way to America,

and in May 1864, during the Civil War,

a union general called John Sedgwick was seriously caught out by one.

GUNFIRE

The story goes something like this...

During the charmingly-named Battle for Spotsylvania Courthouse,

General Sedgwick is berating his men for cowering from fire

that's coming from the distant Confederate trenches, at least half a mile away.

So convinced is he they're under no danger, he shouts out,

"They couldn't hit an elephant at that distance."

GUNFIRE

Just seconds later, he's shot just below the left eye

and killed outright.

What Sedgwick didn't know is the Confederate sharpshooters

were armed with the Whitworth rifle.

MACHINE GUN FIRE

Precision, mass-produced weapons are a given in today's modern armies.

But the accuracy of weapons

that took such a leap forward in the 19th century

was to utterly transform another part of the soldier's kit -

his uniform.

Because the days of the redcoats were very much numbered.

To see why, I've come to Suffolk,

where there's a remarkable private collection of kit,

and some very special uniforms.

This is an original British redcoat from the 1880s.

This colour is not a coincidence.

It's deliberate, it's designed to say, "We've arrived,

"the British have arrived, be afraid, be very afraid."

It's the coat that won victories at Blenheim, Waterloo,

the Thin Red Line at Balaclava and yet, by the 1880s,

this was becoming more of a liability

than a help to the British soldier,

because it was all very well if your enemy was armed,

in Blackadder's words, "With nothing more than sharp fruit",

but if he had the latest rifled weapons,

THIS meant you were in big trouble.

Now the best single example of this

was the Battle of Bronkhorstspruit, in December 1880.

DISTANT GUNFIRE

Britain's desire to control the resources of southern Africa

prompted the first Boer War.

The Battle of Bronkhorstspruit was one of the earliest clashes,

taking place just outside Pretoria,

deep within territory occupied by Dutch Boer settlers.

250 British soldiers, wearing this kit

were marching to Pretoria to reinforce the garrison there.

And in the hills around, unbeknownst to them, was a force of Boers.

These farmers had been trained since childhood to fire weapons.

They are expert marksman.

Moreover, they are armed with the latest breech-loading carbines.

And when they see the British soldiers

set against the green of the veld,

red against green, there can't be more of a contrast.

They decimate them.

GUNFIRE

Within 15 minutes, more than 150 of those 250 soldiers are shot down.

GUNFIRE

And when they took on the Boers again almost 20 years later,

this had been replaced...

..by this, khaki.

Khaki is an Indian word, meaning "ash coloured",

and it was a British weaver called John Haller who discovered it

after experimenting with dozens of different dyes.

Khaki was just the right colour to blend in with dusty surroundings.

This was the first camouflage uniform ever to be worn by an army.

DISTANT BATTLE CRIES

The Boer Wars were a wake-up call to Britain's commanders.

Its army couldn't rely on easy victories anywhere, any longer.

And with the possibility of greater conflicts in Europe

always on the horizon, a whole new, very modern kit was needed.

Taff Gillingham has one of the largest private collections

of early 20th century kit in the country.

The equipment itself was literally state-of-the-art for its time.

Invented by an officer called Major Burrows,

in a leather version originally,

and the thing that separated this from anything that had come before

was that for the first time somebody had designed a set of equipment

which was the best for the soldier to do his job,

not just as an adaptation of what had come before.

Major Burrows was a Boer War veteran

who was convinced kit could be improved.

After years of campaigning for his own designs to be adopted,

the War Office finally agreed.

In 1908, the entire army was upgraded.

Burrows' design featured this unique figure-of-eight design

so the strap comes from the bottom of the belt,

across the pack, across the shoulders and back the other way.

What that meant was that it held it to you, so whatever you needed

didn't keep sliding around on separate slings.

You'd find the water bottle was where it should be,

the bayonet, you'd be able to reach,

and it was a very practical fighting set of equipment

and the only other thing was the rifle itself.

The short magazine of the Enfield rifle,

another improvement after the South African War,

it's a slightly shorter rifle

and because of that, it wasn't quite as accurate

over distance as the German Mauser but it came with enormous advantages.

First of all, the thing carried 10 rounds instead of five,

whereas the German Mauser only had a five round magazine.

Even though the Mauser was more accurate because it was a longer rifle,

the Mauser had a real disadvantage in that it has a straight bolt.

And by that simple expedient, once you'd loaded it,

and you'd found the target, you then have to move your head

out of the way before you can then try and find the target again.

The Enfield on the other hand, simply because it had this bent bolt,

once the thing been loaded, with 10 rounds,

and found a target,

you then never need to take your eye off the target

until you've knocked him over.

A much better design and certainly a better battlefield rifle.

GUNFIRE

At the beginning of World War I in 1914,

the new Lee Enfield was so effective

that concentrated rifle fire was even mistaken for machine guns.

But as the conflict wore on,

artillery bombardment led to a key addition to Burrows' new kit.

The final addition to the soldier's kit is the steel helmet.

It looks pretty much like a helmet worn at Agincourt several hundred years earlier.

Again, really for the same principle,

that in those days it was about arrows dropping from above,

and by this time, we're in trench warfare and we're talking massed artillery,

with shrapnel, bullets, raining down from above.

Up to this point, the fellas are wearing cloth caps

with no protection whatsoever,

the only surprising thing is it takes them so long to actually come up with this idea.

GUNFIRE

World War I changed everything.

Modern, total, industrial war.

And that meant that the very same concerns of manufacture

that led to Henry V's Board of Ordnance

and the 17th century concerns over funding

that led to the creation of the Bank of England,

were now writ larger than ever before,

bringing even the economic superpower that was Britain to its knees.

The key to winning this new, modern war was not tactics,

they were literally stuck in the mud of Flanders,

but manufacture, supply,

and the end of the day, money.

At its peak in the winter of 1917-18,

the war was costing Britain the equivalent in today's money

of more than £20 million an hour.

That's over £3 billion every single week.

Week, after week, after week.

That money was going on transport, and supply and food and wages,

but much of it was also literally going up in smoke.

MACHINE GUN FIRE

That's extraordinary.

You really get a sense you've got a powerful killing machine in your hands here.

It seems to be accurate too.

The sandbag is literally obliterated in the exact spot I was aiming at.

But here's the problem,

because this gun fires 600 rounds a minute, that's 10 a second,

and it literally is firing more bullets than could be made to supply it.

Automatically feeding ammunition,

the Vickers machine gun used up bullets

at the same rate as 80 conventional rifles.

And it wasn't just machine guns.

As the warring sides dug in, more artillery pieces were used,

with ever bigger calibres,

in a desperate bid to break the deadlock.

GUNFIRE AND EXPLOSIONS

In March 1915, at the Battle of Neuve Chapelle,

more shells were fired in the initial brief bombardment

than during the entire Boer War.

And the biggest problem

was that munitions were being used faster than they could be made.

Britain had enough guns,

but it was fast running out of anything to actually fire.

By the spring of 1915, so serious was the so-called shell crisis that

most British guns had been reduced to firing just four shells a day.

And it seemed as if the war might be lost

not in the trenches of Flanders, but in the factories of Britain.

It was nothing short of a scandal,

resulting in the formation of a coalition government

and the establishment of a new government department -

the Ministry of Munitions.

It was estimated that the Allies needed to produce

nearly 2 million artillery shells a week.

British factories were producing just 11,000.

The new ministry set about building munitions factories,

transforming a civilian economy to one completely geared towards war.

Here at Holton Heath in Dorset

are the remains of one of those factories.

It was built in 1915 to make cordite,

the explosive that propelled bullets and shells.

So we're just here, on the edge of the service reservoir,

and if you just get a look around us, this whole concreted area here

is the service reservoir, and yet on the map it's just a tiny piece

at the centre of this massive factory.

It covered 500 acres and employed more than 5,000 people.

And the reason it was sited here on Holton Heath

was because of two key things -

One, the rail link.

The Southern Railway line ran directly through here,

so you've got a spur into the factory.

And two, the water links.

You can see this channel coming out of Poole Harbour

right to the doorstep - it had its own docks.

Not much of the original factory remains, and this is the first sense

I've got of the sheer magnitude of this operation and its importance.

This is bricks and mortar, this was Britain's war effort.

And this was just one small part of it.

You can just imagine the reek of this place.

A key constituent of cordite was a chemical called acetone.

Before the war, Britain imported most of it from Germany,

but this was now clearly impossible.

Unable to produce acetone in any quantity,

cordite production was crippled, and without cordite all British guns,

from the Lee Enfield to the artillery, were mere metal pipes.

It was potentially a fatal blow to the war effort.

The newly created Ministry of Munitions

needed to find a different source.

Enter this man, Chaim Weizmann,

a professor at the University of Manchester

and a brilliant biochemist.

Using grain and maize as raw materials,

Weizmann found that he could produce acetone in large quantities.

And this huge concrete vat behind me, almost 100 years old,

is what he actually used in the fermentation process.

But Weizmann's new way of producing acetone soon ran into problems.

Grain and maize were also in short supply as they were needed

to feed the civilian population.

I suppose it's typically British,

the solution to this second acetone crisis,

because instead of turning to some wonderful chemical compound,

they turned to this - the ordinary British conker.

Now, tests had shown that this could be fermented into acetone

and so the British Government asked schoolchildren across the country

to go out and gather these,

not for fun, not for playing conkers in the schoolyard,

but for vital munitions work.

And it's extraordinary to think that this...

..powered this.

Weizmann's solution to the acetone shortage was so successful

that from 1917, the British Empire was able to supply

more than 50 million shells a year

and billions of bullets to the front line.

A century later, many still lie in the fields of France and Belgium.

It makes rich pickings

for battlefield archaeologist, Tony Pollard.

What keeps bringing you back to this place, the First World War?

The Western front is very particular.

It's weird in that it's so huge.

We almost can't get our head around the numbers,

but what archaeology allows us to do is to look at the intimate.

It almost allows us to bring a microscope into play.

I've always said archaeology's the closest we have to a time machine.

You can read all the history books you want,

but the words that aren't written, they're out here in the field.

Tony, as a historian who spends his time

poring over documents in libraries and archives,

it's really interesting to get an insight into your world.

And I got that yesterday when, hands on my knees,

looking for an artefact but not thinking I'd find one,

-I actually turned one up. And here it is.

-Excellent.

Nice to see a historian getting out every now and again, Saul.

That's a 303 bullet, British rifle bullet. This is unfired.

It's still got the head, which is the bit that kills you, on it.

That has been lying around for 90-odd years,

but it's still a very dangerous piece of kit.

This is quite a nasty piece of work.

This is a Mills bomb, a hand grenade to you and I.

And these do pop up regularly. And they are not to be played with.

I did an excavation on the Somme last year

and it was a stretch of British front line.

And behind that we found a small bunker, effectively,

and it had boxes of grenades in it, dozens of them.

And needless to say, we steered well clear of it after that.

This one's safe because this is the fuse on the bottom,

and it's been made safe.

-Right, I see.

-The charge has been removed.

But these will quite often come up in a farmer's field.

It's not unusual to drive past the corner of a field

and find a huge pile of unexploded shells which the farmers collect up

after they've ploughed the field and the French military come along,

take them away, blow them up and make them safe.

It's unfortunate that, almost every year, some poor soul will hit

an unexploded shell the wrong way with his plough and, "Boom!"

The First World War is still killing people, unfortunately.

Ever since the First World War,

superior force was no longer measured in terms of men or horses,

but in the means to wreak destruction.

In World War II, the Allies dropped 3.4 million tonnes of bombs

across Europe and Asia.

And during the Vietnam War, an incredible 7 million tonnes of bombs

were dropped on Indo-China.

Such a scale of destruction

can never be matched by factory production.

World War I invented the idea of stockpiling -

continued production of munitions in times of peace,

ready to be unleashed in times of war.

But stockpiling can have sudden and unintended consequences.

At eleven minutes past eleven on the 27th of November 1944,

a routine maintenance blunder at the RAF munitions depot here at Fauld in Staffordshire

trigged the largest non-nuclear explosion in history.

It was so huge it registered as an earthquake

as far away as Rome and Vienna.

This is a picture that was taken almost directly after the explosion by the Air Ministry,

and you just get a sense of the sheer scale here.

Here's the main crater

and all this area around looks like a lunar-scape.

Buildings up to a mile from the crater were damaged,

and more than 70 people were killed.

It's just absolutely huge and you can see the way the ground

completely falls away beneath me.

It's said to be 50 metres deep, but it looks more to me.

It's said to be 100 metres across.

4,000 tonnes of high-explosive went up here,

sending the earth, of course,

out of the crater, this huge pock mark.

And all around the surrounding countryside

the earth and the boulders had to fall,

and in some places, the land is 15 or 20 feet higher

than it would have been before the explosion.

It's quite moving, coming to the crater,

because although in some ways you can't see the devastation any more -

the trees and brush have covered the crater floor -

we know that amongst the roots of all this vegetation

lie the bones of some of the dead who couldn't be recovered

because also down there is another 4,000 tonnes of unexploded munitions.

Those bombs that exploded were not, in World War II,

destined for static howitzers but Bomber Command.

Whereas World War I was a static war of attrition,

World War II was fast-moving and mobile.

And the fighting kit didn't just include rifles, machine guns or even artillery,

but machines of quite staggering destructive power.

The dominance of science and technology

reached its height in 1945

when 13 young men released a single bomb

on the Japanese city of Hiroshima.

It was the culmination of a project that had involved 130,000 people...

..and cost an estimated 2 billion.

Today, it seems as if technology can do almost anything,

as long as someone is able and willing to pay for it.

In the second Gulf War,

America launched its wave of shock and awe against Iraq

by firing 800 Tomahawk missiles

over a period of just 48 hours.

Each one cost half a million dollars.

Today, a single Eurofighter Typhoon costs around £50 million.

And its planned replacement is likely to be twice as much.

For entire campaigns, the scale of spending is staggering.

It's estimated that Afghanistan

has already cost the British taxpayer £18 billion.

It seems the Bank of England is as crucial as ever.

In this series,

I've looked at how developments in military kit, in food

and in the movement of troops have changed the course of wars.

The story of the 20th century

has been one of extraordinary and rapid changes,

of technology and scale

and, as we've seen, also cost.

But just ten years into the 21st century,

it's clear there are new challenges and ones very different

from those of the two World Wars and the Cold War that followed.

Today, we spend 2.7% of our GDP on defence -

the latest weapons, battle tanks and fast jets.

And yet our enemies, at least for now,

are armed with little more than AK-47s and home-made bombs.

Are we buying the right kit to defeat them?

And how do we know a more sophisticated opponent isn't just round the corner?

How that plays out over the coming decades

is a challenge for the people over there -

the politicians and the service chiefs

who have to plan and budget and procure the kit required for the immediate future.

But at any time, while you can plan for the immediate future,

it's impossible to see what ultimately becomes important

in the wider time-span of history,

the great tipping points of military kit and logistics.

As a historian, what I also know

is that those tipping points are rarely seen for what they are

until after the event.

History is a discipline of hindsight

and we can only wonder what the historians of the future

will make of where we are today.

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