Breaking Deadlock WW1 Uncut

SHELL APPROACHES

EXPLOSION

DAN SNOW: It's late 1914

and the combination of lethal firepower and barbed wire

has led to both sides literally digging in.

So, we're in these trenches. Every time I try and get out of one,

every time I pop my head up there, it gets shot off.

DAN: 'Yeah.'

Agh! Agh!

And the trenches got more and more sophisticated, so now...

They'd got quite comfortable,

they're digging deep bunkers,

some of them have got electricity in them and carpets on the floor.

These are basically cities, these trenches on the front line.

They don't want to live in these things.

Presumably, they want to get out. How do you get out?

Every time you over there, you get killed.

That's true and, basically, for three long years,

the Brits and the Allies try little things.

They try new things, they try ways of getting across no-man's-land.

And they don't work. There's terrible bloodshed.

But the silver lining is, in each attack,

they learn a little bit more about trench warfare.

They slowly start to crack it

and by 1918, they work out how to get out of these trenches,

over the top and successfully defeat the Germans.

How do they do that? How do they break the deadlock?

I'll show you.

They turn to machines. They think about a technological solution,

a vehicle that can cross this broken ground,

crush barbed wire, bridge German trenches -

the tank!

Wow! Look at that!

It's amazing, isn't it?

It looks even futuristic now.

I mean, if you saw that in 1916, coming at you,

I mean, it looks like it's from outer space.

It does. It's like science fiction,

the way it floats across ground. It's eerie, isn't it?

It's weirdly intimidating, that, isn't it?

What about the guns?

You've got, what, two guns on either side?

Big six-pound guns, and also machine guns all round.

- Really? - There are also little holes.

If enemy jumped on the tank, you could open little holes

and stick your pistol out, as well.

One of the legendary barriers on no-man's-land

was obviously barbed wire.

It sort of came to haunt the nightmares of British infantrymen.

I'll show you what the tank does to a bit of barbed wire.

That's what happens.

Sometimes, it would actually drag it off, rip it to bits,

it would often clear it completely.

So the foot soldiers, the infantry, can be walking along behind it.

There were big columns of them behind it

and just following the path that it crushed and made in the barbed wire.

Can you imagine the sense of excitement,

having spent years being machine-gunned out in the open

and now having something like this protecting you?

It's incredible.

And is this it at full speed, do you reckon?

That is the alarming truth.

It does about four miles an hour.

- Crikey! - You spotted the problem there!

Another problem is, it was rushed into production so fast

they used what they had, they used an old tractor engine,

so there were lots of problems with breakdowns.

- It wasn't all of the answer... - No, no.

..but it was a long way down the road.

I tell you, it's one of

the most impressive things I've seen on two wheels.

Four wheels? However many wheels it's got!

It's amazing.

So, tanks didn't win us the war, exactly, did they? Or did they?

No. Tanks, basically, they were one of the dominant factors of warfare

in the 20th century,

but in the First World War, there were still big problems with them -

they weren't reliable, they broke down, they were slow...

What is it, then, if it's not the tank that breaks the deadlock?

Tanks are really good.

It's tanks in combination with lots of other things,

and one of the most important of them - aircraft.

If there is one piece of machinery

that gets completely revolutionised by World War I, it's aircraft.

At the start, there's little scout planes held together by

bits of string, and they were so primitive

that if you wanted to get an enemy out of the sky,

they sometimes used grappling hooks. They threw out anchors

- trying to drag you down. - Really?

It's unbelievable, but, basically, the speed of aircraft

pretty much doubled in World War I,

the height at which they could fly pretty much tripled.

Could you drop bombs and things from these planes?

Initially, in 1914,

you'd just carry a bomb in the plane and just drop it over the side.

By the end of the war, it's far more scientific,

and they're conducting air raids deep behind enemy lines.

So, if you've got planes, you don't have to worry about no-man's-land.

You can just drop bombs - pff! - win the war.

Well, not quite. It's not that simple. They do need...

what I think is probably the most important

last element of winning the war on the Western Front, and that is guns.

They already had lots of guns, didn't they?

They needed more. Check this out.

Now, that...is fired out of a gun towards the enemy.

This is a World War I shell. Have a go at that.

Ohh!

Crikey O'Reilly! That's a big gun, innit?

That's actually a medium-sized shell.

Some of the shells the British fired in World War I

went up to nearly 30kg in weight

and were about 20cm in diameter.

They were absolutely massive.

This one here is packed from there to there with high explosives.

The first thing you've got to do, because before the war,

Britain doesn't have many guns,

doesn't have many factories producing guns or shells,

so you've got to build all of those.

You've got to perfect them, get the design right

and then you've got to fire vast quantities towards the enemy.

So now you've got missiles like these,

you can fire them straight out the trenches, drop them from planes,

war is over, yeah?

Not quite. A lot of people hoped you could just win the war

by chucking enough of this stuff at the enemy,

but there's still, unfortunately, no substitute for young men

walking across the battlefield.

MAN SHOUTS ORDER

But it's putting them all together,

that's the invention of modern warfare.

So, I get it, right. It's a mixture of things - tanks on the ground,

planes in the air

and cannons firing these massive shells over, yeah?

But it's all very carefully coordinated,

so those shells, for example, are being fired

just beyond the tank, just beyond the infantry walking forwards,

it's a creeping barrage, a whole line of exploding shells

and poisonous gas, and all that kind of stuff.

Reconnaissance aircraft helped to coordinate

all the elements that provide vital information on the enemy.

It's all married together,

that's how complicated it is.

If we are a soldier, then right in front of us,

RIGHT in front of us,

there is just masses of rainfall of bullets...

- Yeah. - ..and explosions.

Presumably loads of us die?

Yes. The Australians believe if you're not taking casualties

from your own artillery bombardment, you aren't close enough to it.

It's so horribly dangerous, isn't it?

It was incredibly dangerous and incredibly complicated,

but it's less dangerous than walking by yourself with a rifle

across no-man's-land towards enemy machine guns,

and THAT is how they break the stalemate of the First World War.

Wow.

SHELL WHISTLES

EXPLOSION

Tanks. Invented by the British in World War I,

they were a source of fascination

for the soldiers who fought alongside them.

The public were just as mesmerised.

These were among the first images

people had ever seen of these lumbering metal monsters.

And when The Battle Of The Ancre film was released in early 1917,

millions of Britons rushed to see it.

And who can blame them?

Tanks were like nothing else seen before,

but looking back now at those early years of the tank,

it's astonishing how rapidly it evolved.

On 30th June, 1915,

right here on Wormwood Scrubs in west London,

Winston Churchill and David Lloyd George

first saw this -

an armoured vehicle that could cut through barbed wire.

Just three months later, it had become this...

This is Little Willie, it's the oldest tank in the world.

This one wasn't thought to be long enough

to get across the German trenches so subsequent models were stretched out.

Little Willie was replaced by Big Willie,

also known as Mother.

This was the first tank to hit the battlefield - the Mark I.

Its first engagement wasn't a resounding success.

But it showed its potential.

Independently, the French had come up with their very own tank designs.

But they were unreliable and frequently got stuck.

The real game-changer was this.

The Mark IV.

Into the Mark IV tank, and this was the real workhorse

of the middle years of the First World War.

It's bristling with armour. You've got the 6-pound gun here.

This would have been a Lewis gun or a light machine gun here.

And then you enter the main body of the tank.

Quite...tight for space.

There would have been eight people in here, eight crew required,

four of them just required to drive the thing.

Right in the middle, dominating the whole space, is the engine.

It's an old pre-war tractor engine.

As you can see, there's no partition here

between the engine compartment and the crew compartment,

and that meant that people had huge problems.

The crews often had to be hospitalised

after a day or two in the tank with...

They'd become asphyxiated by the fumes coming off this engine.

Also, incredibly hot. These exhaust pipes here

would have been glowing red hot,

and with all the bodies in here,

it would have been absolutely baking.

Even so, they were held in affection

and often named by their crews.

I'll clamber up here to the commander's seat.

The first thing about this is that they would have these windows

to see through, but if they were taking incoming fire,

they had to close these and look through little glass periscopes here.

More slots. A machine gun here.

More holes to put your pistol through

and shoot people off the outside of the tank.

It was a very, very heavily armoured vehicle,

but also one capable of really taking the fight to the enemy, as well.

They made 1,000 of these during World War I

and it went on to serve with great success

in battles like Cambrai.

The tank was becoming an integral part of the Allied strategy.

As armoured warfare evolved,

the number of different types of tank multiplied.

This was a so-called Whippet tank.

It was designed to follow the heavy tanks into battle,

then when they'd made the penetration,

these could spread out, speeding behind the German lines,

sowing absolute chaos.

The French had had a similar idea

and only a few months earlier, in 1917,

had launched the popular Renault FT17.

This was a light tank

and the first with a fully rotating turret.

But it wasn't as quick as the Whippet.

This can do eight miles an hour,

a dizzying speed,

around double what other tanks could do at the time.

The Germans were slow to pick up on the whole tank thing.

Initially, their High Command thought it was pretty unmanly

driving around the battlefield in a steel container.

Good old walking was good enough.

Quite rapidly, though, they realised their mistake,

and they produced this, the Sturmpanzerwagen.

The Germans were slow to produce them, though,

partly because of the lack of that top-down drive

and also, the lack of materials,

thanks to Britain's blockade of Germany.

Very few were built and they didn't really go into service

until the last days of the war.

In fact, the Germans probably used more captured British tanks

than their own home-produced models.

The Germans even set up special workshops

where they brought and repaired captured tanks.

Meanwhile, the British design just kept evolving.

After the Mark IV tank came - surprise, surprise -

the Mark V.

Now, this was the vehicle

that played its part in the titanic British victories

of the summer and autumn of 1918.

It spearheaded British attacks, like the one at the Battle of Amiens

on August 8th, which saw British and Allied infantry

advance further into German lines

than any other battle on the Western Front in World War I.

These Mark Vs were faster, more reliable

than the Mark IVs.

They are also able to be steered by one person,

unlike the four people required to steer this tank's predecessor.

Britain's massive industrial base and innovative culture

was producing tanks which, every year,

were becoming better and better by orders of magnitude.

In less than three years, tanks had gone from the drawing board

to becoming integral to Allied war plans.

They were no longer just a novelty,

but another part of the machinery of war,

one that was critical to the final Allied victory.