On Track to Victory Railways of the Great War with Michael Portillo

World War I was a railway war.

I'm going to find out

how the railways helped to precipitate a mechanised war,

defined how it was fought,

conveyed millions to the trenches

and bore witness to its end.

I've taken to historic tracks

to rediscover the locomotives and wagons

of the war that supposed to end all war...

..and to hear the stories of the gallant men and women

who used them in life and in death.

The war changed Britain.

The stream of men joining Kitchener's army left many young mothers alone

and vital industries suddenly had unfilled gaps.

Meanwhile some railwaymen who had joined up

found themselves doing familiar work

but in an environment that was alien and hostile.

Today, I'll be learning

how the war fundamentally changed British society.

-Women wearing the trousers.

-Yeah, quite.

About the extraordinary exploits of Belgian spies.

They used several different methods.

-You know the pole...

-Pole vaulting?

-Yes, pole vaulting.

And how the end of the war

marked the beginning of the decline of the railways.

In future, road transport would become more important

than rail transport as a source of army logistics.

I'll travel to Yorkshire to discover the role

played by women in running the railways,

visit Bristol to hear a first-hand account of the front line.

I'll discover a vital war-time rail route through London

and travel to a key junction in Belgium used by the Germans,

ending at British headquarters in France.

The Western Front was hungry for railwaymen.

In 1914, the Royal Engineers

had just under 700 railway personnel in their ranks.

By 1917, this number had swelled to 40,000.

This was thanks in part to the efforts

of former railway manager Sir Eric Geddes.

He'd shown how,

in a war where the front line had barely shifted in three years,

railways could efficiently keep the troops supplied.

I always find it moving to hear first-hand accounts from the front.

Sue Jenkins' railwayman grandfather, Leonard Atkins,

wrote a diary during the war.

I'm travelling to the West Country to meet her

at the station where he later became station master,

Bristol Temple Meads.

You knew your grandfather reasonably well, what sort of a man was he?

He was actually quite stern. He was devoted to duty.

He wasn't really the sort to bounce his grandchildren on his knee.

What do you think are the characteristics of Railway men?

Well, we've had five generations of railwaymen in our family

so I'm quite familiar with them.

They all seem to be conscientious and methodical.

It was this meticulous approach that allowed the Royal Engineers

to keep the army infrastructure running smoothly,

feeding ever more men and munitions into the ravenous war machine.

And by 1917, the Royal Engineers were still desperate

for skilled, young recruits, like Leonard Atkins.

He joined the army at the age of 19 in 1917

and he went to France

as a member of the Number One Light Railway Operating Company of the Royal Engineers.

So he went really

to do the sort of work that he had learnt to do in civilian life.

Yes, very similar.

This, I imagine, is he, is it?

This is him, yes.

What sort of experience did he have at the Western Front?

Well, he never actually talked about it but he did leave a diary

which has been passed down in the family and which I have got here.

A wonderful treasure.

So does he tell us what kind of work he was involved in?

Well, he did a variety of different tasks.

He started out by laying sidings for a 2 foot gauge railway.

The roll-out of narrow-gauge light rail

was one of Sir Eric Geddes's recommendations.

It enabled the tracks to reach all the way to the front line.

Did his work put him in danger?

Well, he refers at one point to "...shells flying all around us.

"We didn't know where to go but it has finished now.

"A quiet day otherwise."

"Otherwise"!

Is there any evidence in the diary

of some of the horrors he must have seen?

Well, on 12 February 1917, he refers to "...the River Somme

"running through the camp

"and thousands of German bodies underneath the ice."

That's terrible

The railways sustained the trenches

and in part anchored this slow, grinding war of attrition.

In 1916, each side had attempted to break the stalemate and failed,

partly because of problems of supply.

By 1917, when Leonard Atkins joined up,

neither side had gained much territory.

Do you think he has much feel for the war outside the tasks

that he has been given to do?

Well, he certainly heard rumours,

he says here, "I heard this morning

"that the cavalry chased the Germans 23 miles.

"I really think this is the beginning of the end"

And what date is that?

That's on the 20th of March in 1917.

So unfortunately he was probably about a year ahead of reality.

Yes, I think so.

Do we get much feeling from the diary of casualties,

of fallen comrades and so on?

Very little, but on the 10th of April in 1917

he says that he has heard

his greatest friend, Jim Piller, has met with a serious accident.

"A tractor became derailed and dragged off some wagons

"also onto Jim's leg. It is Blighty for him."

The railwaymen's sacrifices didn't go un-noticed

especially by Geddes.

On the 20th April, "Heard that a big supper was held last night

"when Sir Eric Geddes, director of railways, said

"that it was Number One Light Railway Operating Company

"who had made the light railways a complete success."

Brilliant, yes, I mean, Geddes has become one of my heroes.

-Oh, really?

-Obviously, it meant a lot to him

to receive that sort of praise from Geddes.

I should think they got little enough praise.

The railwaymen who enlisted must have made good recruits,

being fit and skilled

but the industry that they left behind

was almost as vital to the war effort as the army itself.

The resulting manpower crisis

required some cherished social taboos to be broken.

To find out how, I'm travelling north

to Knaresborough Station in Yorkshire

to meet Lucy Adlington, a social historian and author.

Lucy, before World War I,

are there many women in paid employment?

There are surprisingly, actually.

They're not all at home in the parlour looking fine in lace gowns.

We've got nearly six million women gainfully employed.

But overall how many women are there on the railway?

Very few. We have three female porters at the start of the war,

it's next to nothing.

But as soon as war broke out,

railwaymen disappeared to the Front in droves.

Nearly 100,000 joined up in the first month.

That left a huge gap.

# It's a long, long way to Tipperary

# But my heart lies there... #

Nobody thinks to look to women, they tell them to go home

and be quiet and sit and knit.

But by 1915, particularly after agitation by Mrs Pankhurst

and other former suffragists, we had this idea that women need to step up

and do their bit so instead of the three porters

we're eventually going to have 10,000 female porters

working on the railways.

In transport in general, we've got coming up to 18,000 women in 1914,

at the end of the war there are nearly 118,000 women,

so that's a huge change.

Now what was the pinnacle of what a woman could expect to do,

not I imagine, driving a train?

They were definitely steered away

from anything to do with moving trains at first.

It was not considered suitable.

But they take up almost every other job available. It's extraordinary.

-Including signalling?

-We do have female signal operators, yes.

The signal box is the nerve centre of the railway network.

And was traditionally a male domain.

How were women received doing jobs of responsibility on the railway?

It's mixed. Particularly at first,

people are worried that the work is immodest for women,

because it was very much a male preserve,

the signal box, this is where men work,

the railways is a man's job.

And so to see a woman in uniform, pulling levers,

was a real shock to some people.

They were actually in uniform, were they,

and did that consist of a jacket and trousers?

Well, at first they didn't get uniforms

because they were considered only

as "temporary gentlemen", as they were called

and so they had to make do but then they got lovely smart uniforms

with all the insignia

and they very much appreciated the opportunity to wear uniforms

because not only does it give you a sense of identity and belonging,

it gives you status and authority

which is something women had hardly ever had before the war.

And so they are wearing skirts, the skirt hem lines do rise

so they've got more movement but eventually women do

almost the unthinkable, those working in workshops, er,

they actually start to wear britches, men's trousers

and they wear them in the streets

and it causes quite a furore to see women in britches.

-Women wearing the trousers.

-It's extraordinary, yes.

While newspapers seized the opportunity

to feature photogenic young women in fetching outfits,

these women were doing vital work on the home front.

The numbers of female railway employees

jumped from 13,000 in 1914 to almost 69,000 by 1918.

So they were doing jobs on a par with men.

Were they being paid on a par?

No. Is the very simple answer.

It's complex because the unions

wanted to fight for men to keep their jobs

and their wage levels after the war.

They didn't want women to undercut them

but the companies don't want women to get the same wages

and so women are paid sometimes two-thirds

or sometimes only one-third the wage of men for the same work

and in one case, a woman is getting a twentieth of the wage.

This pay inequality really hurt, as by the spring of 1917,

the cost of food had doubled in three years.

At the end of the war, vast numbers of men come back,

many of them wounded, looking to get their jobs back in the railways,

so what impact does that have on women?

They're out. That's it, and very little recognition of their work.

There's almost, one historian has called it,

"The Great Silence" after the war.

We almost forget what women did.

Do you think there was a longer lasting impact,

maybe a political impact from the fact that women had done jobs

like railwaymen during the war?

There is an argument that women were rewarded for their war work

by getting the vote.

It doesn't hold up, in as much as it was only for women over 30

and lots of the girls on the railway were 15 to 25 years old.

However, it does at least blow this myth that women cannot do this job

and by the time the Second World War comes around

and we need the women back on the railways again,

they've already shown they can do it

and women are ready to step up to the mark once more.

-To do it again.

-Mmm-hmm.

While women kept the railways running at home,

there was one very large obstacle to supplying the front line,

London.

The British Railway network was, and still is centred on the capital,

with only a handful of lines going through or around the city.

London commuters have been helped in recent years by new services

that circumvent the capital,

passing through Olympia or along the North London Line

or through that tunnel that links Blackfriars and St Pancras.

Londoners living by those lines a century ago

would have seen the British war effort trundling by

as countless trains carrying food and munitions

headed for the Western Front.

To learn more, I'm meeting Professor Nick Bosanquet of Imperial College

on the old North London Line.

Once British Forces have been committed to the continent,

they've got to be reinforced and supplied.

What sort of problem does that represent for the British?

Well, it was a massive one.

Suddenly London was as big an obstacle to the British war effort

as Paris had been to the German war effort.

They had to find three very quiet lines.

They had been used for a few "sunshine specials"

down to Brighton before.

Now, suddenly, they were the main arteries of the British war effort.

The men, the supplies, the weapons,

they all went out through these three lines.

Trains clattered through London,

heading for Folkestone or Dover and on to the Front in France.

So suddenly what we call nowadays Thameslink

and that line through Olympia and the North London Line,

suddenly these became vital arteries?

Those were the places where the British war effort came together.

At the heart of this web of supply lines

was Willesden Junction in North-West London.

What was the significance of this place during World War I?

This was the centre for the British war effort.

So why here at Willesden?

It was where all the railways systems got together

and there was the best linkage between all the lines

so they could come down from the munitions areas

in the North and the Midlands

and then get on the North London line

and then get through any one of the three lines down to the coast.

So if I'd been here during World War I,

and looked out on what are now these marshalling yards,

what would I have seen of the British war effort?

You would have seen hundreds of wagons being shunted and sorted

into trains and consignments.

The wagons would have had 60 million pairs of boots

in the course of the war.

Later in the war, 35,000 trucks, 22,000 aircraft,

in fact many of the engines were made in Ladbroke Grove,

millions of bandages and even hundreds of thousands

of bottles and barrels of beer.

Over 20,000 trains used these sleepy suburban lines during the war

as munitions, armaments and finally tanks and trucks

trundled through the capital.

So an observant Londoner

really would have known what was going on in the war

just by looking at this junction.

Yes, the thousands of people living along these lines or near these lines

would have felt the pulse of the war effort

by the length and number of the trains.

They would have felt a shiver down their spines

as they knew an offensive was coming

when there were a lot of very heavy trains

with guns and ammunitions going on their way out.

This was where the increasing British war effort was most clearly visible,

all through this one channel down to the Front.

While the population of London could sense the rhythm of the war

by observing the ebb and flow of train traffic through their capital,

the enemy was making ever more use of the railways.

Germany's overland supply lines were longer than Britain's

and had to pass through occupied Belgium.

I'm travelling deep into the heart of Belgium,

behind old enemy lines

to a strategic junction at Ottignies,

the scene of dangerous, covert operations

during the First world War.

Train spotters are known for their attention to detail.

During World War I, spotting turned to spying.

The supply of precise information about German train movements

was invaluable to the Allies, and very dangerous for the secret agent.

Here, I hope to find out more about these brave men and women

from historian Emmanuel Debruyne.

Emmanuel, we are evidently at a busy junction.

So if in a place like Ottignies we saw a change in the train movements,

some sort of build up,

how much notice would that give to the allies of maybe an attack?

Germans need really weeks to concentrate many divisions.

For example, if you transport one division of more than 10,000 men,

you will need 20 convoys on the same tracks so it takes a lot of time.

This was the most elaborate international spy network

that the British Government had ever organised.

The first stage was to persuade members of the Belgian public

to risk their lives.

Was the Belgian population willing to help

the British and the French with this spying on the trains?

In Belgium, especially at the beginning of the occupation,

there was a real climate of terror,

so yes, there was a desire to help the Allies

but also a real fear to do that.

And another problem was the fact that spying

was not very well seen at the beginning of the 20th century.

A spy was not a hero, a spy was a kind of traitor.

For Belgians living under the occupation,

espionage for the Allies was an opportunity

to remain committed to the war.

And a room in the hotel overlooking the junction

provided the perfect lookout.

So the old Hotel Duchene that stood here

has a fantastic vantage point over the railway

and spies could use these windows to observe the movements.

Yes, of course, from here you can watch the track

and you can notice every detail of every convoy

coming down here from Ottignies to Charleroi.

And then would all this be written down?

How could that be noted?

They used some methods to write it very quickly with some abbreviations

so that you have only a few figures and a few letters

to note everything.

So you can have, on a small sheet of paper,

you can have all the traffic on one or two days

but it means maybe 20 convoys.

So they had to watch from the window during

all the day and all the night.

Then things became really dangerous.

Passing the information over to the Allies

involved crossing the border with Holland,

which was protected by a 200km 2,000 volt electric fence

known as "the wire of death."

And so how would they cross this electric fence?

It was very difficult.

They used several different methods

and some are today Olympic sports like, you know, the pole...

-Pole vaulting.

-Yes, pole vaulting.

Er, there was also shooting an arrow through the border

with the report around the arrow.

They also used some bottomless barrels.

-They crawled through the barrels through the electric fence.

-Yes, indeed.

Were the Germans successful in capturing some of these spies?

Yes, they were generally successful

because most of the networks had a duration, a life duration

of only a few months.

This network, which was called the Cologne network, was destroyed

after maybe, more or less, one year of functioning

and three of the main agents were condemned to death

and executed in Brussels.

It was a perilous business.

Up to one in three were caught

and 234 individuals were executed for espionage.

The information gathered at places like Ottignies

was essential for the British High Command

in planning the final, protracted stages of the conflict.

I'm leaving what was occupied Belgium

and heading for the nerve-centre of British operations in France.

The war, which some had hoped would be over by Christmas 1914,

in fact dragged on into 1918.

Four years in which the railways were burdened

by massive quantities of troops and munitions and supplies

and ploughed up by enemy gunfire.

The question was

whether the networks would be able to sustain a huge advance

as the Allies and the Germans each planned their final great push

to victory.

British headquarters was based

in the ancient walled town of Montreuil-sur-Mer.

I'm meeting Professor David Stevenson deep under the citadel

to find out about the railways' role at the end of the war.

From 1917, our map looks different

because we've got American forces on it,

what impact do they have on the logistical position?

A very considerable difference.

The Americans were actually having to be moved south of Paris.

If you think of the French railway system as spokes of a wheel

radiating out from Paris,

the Americans were actually having to cross the spokes

and this created an enormous extra burden on the French railway system

which was already under heavy pressure.

Why did the British choose Montreuil for their general headquarters?

If you look at the map,

you'll see that Montreuil is located on a railway line running up

towards Arras and the British front line.

All behind Montreuil you have the channel ports

of course, of Calais and Boulogne

where British supplies and troops were coming in.

Both sides had trunk railways running behind the Western Front

so they could constantly shuttle reinforcements into position where attacks took place

and hopefully halt the attacks.

Under constant strain,

these railways had kept both sides supplied,

but they had also locked them in stalemate.

With Russia's withdrawal from the conflict

soon after the October Revolution in 1917,

Germany was free to redeploy hundreds of thousands of men

to the Western Front.

The aim - to break the deadlock,

starting with Operation Michael.

There are five major German offensives

between March and July of 1918.

The biggest one, which is known as Operation Michael

took place in this area here, north of the city of Saint Quentin.

Are the Germans, who have now moved great distances in a very short period of time,

hampered by their supply lines?

Hampered because they are far ahead of their railways?

Yes. The leading German positions, for example,

here as they advance towards Amiens,

these were 40 to 50 miles in advance of their rail heads.

Remember beyond the rail heads, how do the Germans get their supplies forward?

All they have available are lorries,

but they had only a tenth of the number of lorries that the Allies did,

the roads were unsuitable,

the lorries had steel tyres instead of rubber tyres

and there wasn't enough petrol for them.

Beyond that the Germans had horses, but they also had too few horses.

The Germans were running short of supplies, particularly ammunition,

so they had to stop short of Amiens and call the offensive to a halt.

So now the Allies are in a position to counter attack,

where does that begin?

The first part of the scheme was to free up the Allied railways the Germans had threatened

and the second part was to advance on and threaten the German railways.

This two-stage attack was a resounding success,

but the danger was that the Allies would suffer the same fate as the Germans

and struggle with their supply lines.

With the Allies now advancing so fast,

do they reach a stage where they run ahead of their rail heads?

The Allies are much more successful in sustaining their advance,

the Allied advance is more or less continuous from the 18th July onwards.

The pressure is uninterrupted.

I get the impression through much of the War that railways are king,

lorries don't feature very much.

Does this begin to change?

Yes, this is changing by 1918.

The Allies had made very deliberate plans in the winter of 1917/18

to use lorries for kind of rapid deployment

and to get their troops very quickly

to the areas where they were most needed.

So lorries were extremely important in the defensive phase

in funnelling French troops northwards to help the British against the German attacks.

As the Allies went on the offensive,

lorries supported their advance as they pushed the enemy back.

By this time, lorries were far more reliable and robust

and more available than previously

and the road began to usurp the railway in this new mobile war.

So we're in a situation by the autumn of 1918

where this is not only the climax of rail transport

in support of army logistics

but also we're beginning to see the transition here

towards a new situation where in future,

road transport would become equally important

and eventually more important than rail transport

as the source of army logistics.

The Allied offensives reached their zenith on 28th September 1918

when the German railway system effectively broke down.

Facing Allied breakthrough,

the German high command finally decided

that the Reich must seek a ceasefire.

After negotiations during October,

the armistice was signed in a railway carriage,

parked far from prying eyes in a remote glade

north of Paris in the Compiegne forest.

The armistice came into effect at the 11th hour of the 11th day

of the 11th month of 1918.

The armistice held and marked the end of the war.

When the war began, women defied social convention by serving on the railways,

filling the places of men like Leonard Atkins

who, in and around the Somme, applied his civilian expertise

to lay tracks and keep the trains running.

In even greater danger were those Belgian agents

who tipped off the British about enemy movements

of soldiers and ammunition.

The reward for all of them came when late in 1918,

well-supplied British forces surged forward towards victory.

On my next and final war journey,

I'll hear the stories of the railways' war heroes...

What a privilege for the passengers

to have two VCs working on the train. Extraordinary!

Absolutely, but then they probably never knew.

..encounter a historic railway wagon, used to honour the fallen...

It's a replica of the coffin of the unknown warrior,

whose remains were conveyed in this van.

..and hear how the railways helped give birth to battlefield tourism.

You've got the British Legion organising 11,000 people

-to come for a ceremony.

-I mean, that is, in itself,

pretty much a military scale operation.