All language subtitles for 1996-The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century-EP3-What if... total war

In 1915, German airman Peter Strunberg,
was in command of the Zeppelins that flew

over Britain and carried out the first
systematic bombing of civilians from the sky.

We who strike the enemy
where his heart beats have

been slandered as baby
killers and murderers of women.

What we do is repugnant to us too,
but necessary, very necessary.

A soldier cannot function
without the factory worker,

the farmers and all the
other providers behind them.

Nowadays, there is no such animal as a
non-combatant.

Peter Strunberg would not live to see the
end of the war.

His zeppelin would be shot down.

But in 1915, he knew that the nature of
battle had changed forever.

War in the 20th century would be a new
kind of war.

early on April the 25th, 1915,
an amphibious force of British,

French, Australian and
New Zealand troops began

landing on the Turkish
peninsula of Gallipoli.

Their aim?

To knock Germany's ally, Turkey,
out of the war.

Opposing them, on cliffs overlooking the
shore, was a smaller Turkish force.

From his battleship, the
Allied commander, Sir

Ian Hamilton, watched
the spectacle unfold.

The day was just breaking over the jagged
hills.

The landing of the lads from the south was
in full swing.

We could see boatloads making for the
land.

Swarms trying to straighten themselves out
along the shore.

God, one would think, cannot see them at
all.

Or he would put a stop to this sort of
panorama altogether.

The peninsula chosen for the assault guarded
the entrance to the Dardanelles Straits.

Four weeks earlier, the
British Navy had failed to open

up this route to the Black
Sea and its ally, Russia.

Now, it was the army's turn.

An amphibious expedition is the most
difficult operation of warfare,

especially if you're sending it against
something like the Gallipoli Peninsula,

which must be one of the most defensible
pieces of geography in the world.

What you've got is a very few beaches and
then high cliffs, overhanging cliffs,

towering hills.

An absolutely ideal place for a defending
force to place itself.

By mid-afternoon on the first day,
8,000 Allied soldiers were on the beaches.

The outnumbered Turks began to retreat.

But Lieutenant Colonel Mustafa Kemal, the
man who would become Ataturk, faced them.

I said to the men who were running away,
You cannot run away from the enemy.

We have no ammunition, they said.

If you haven't got ammunition,
you have your bayonets.

And shouting to the men, I made them fix
their bayonets and lie down on the ground.

I said, I don't order you to attack.

I order you to die.

The Turkish troops stood their ground,
allowing time for reinforcements to arrive.

They knew they
would die in about three

minutes, but they showed
not the least dismay.

There was no wavering.

Those who could read, prepared to enter
Paradise with the Koran in their hands.

Those who could not, recited the martyr's
prayer as they went forward.

By holding the high
ground, the Turks had trapped

the Allies between
the cliffs and the sea.

From his ship, Hamilton
could do nothing but order

his men to hold the narrow
beaches they occupied.

You have got through the difficult
business.

Now you have only to dig.

Dig.

Dig.

Until you are safe.

It's not really an episode in a great
European war between industrial powers at all.

It's the old British imperial tradition.

And once it started not working,
people decided, but good heavens,

British prestige is at stake.

That the whole Muslim world will feel that
we have been humiliated.

Gallipoli, which was to
have been a quick victory, was

turning into an Eastern
version of the Western Front.

A war of trenches and stalemate.

As we approach the shore, what an aspect
opens up before us.

Valleys and valleys, scrub-covered
hillsides.

Men getting about everywhere and looking
all the world like ants.

But above all, the
thing that meets, or

rather hits the eye, is
the number of dugouts.

The whole landscape is covered with them.

It looks for all the world like a mining
camp.

Cyril Lawrence was one of the Anzacs,
Australian and New Zealand soldiers,

who went ashore at Gallipoli one month
into the campaign.

The trenches are totally different to what
I expected.

It is sure death to put your head up to
look around.

Even the periscope mirrors,
measuring three inches

square at most, are picked
off one after the other.

When the Turks charge, they usually cry,
Allah!

Allah!

And our boys reply, come on you bastards,
we'll give you Allah.

And from the frequent
use of this word, poor old

Turk wants to know if
bastard is one of our gods.

At some places, the trenches were very
close.

They could hear the voice of each other.

They could hear the Turks singing songs in
the evening.

They asked questions at each other.

Why are you fighting?

Why are you here?

It's very interesting.

I mean, can you imagine a war?

During the eight and a half months,
they were fighting, thousands of soldiers

were killed on both sides, and still they
were not hating each other.

The Turks were not simply fighting for
their homeland.

The Turkish soldier, Hasan Etem,
a teacher and law student before the war,

described how they were also fighting for
their faith.

My dearest mother, I can
see a line of soldiers washing

their clothes in the stream
near the emerald green hillside.

One soldier, with a beautiful voice,
is saying prayers.

Everyone, everything, is listening to that
heavenly voice.

I forgot all about the chaos and the war
and the worldly troubles.

I opened my hands, looked up at the
heavens and said, God of Turks,

master of the birds,
the sheep, the leaves, the

mountains, you have
given all this to the Turks.

Please leave it to the Turks.

God, all this soldier wants is to keep
this land from the British and the French.

Grant me this wish.

Please make the bayonets of the soldiers
sharp and destroy our enemies.

By summer, the allied troops had still not
moved.

Hamilton realized that to take the high
ground, he needed more men.

His badly planned campaign and poorly
equipped army had nowhere to go.

The war office urged me
to throw my brave troops

yet once more against the
machine guns in redoubts.

To do it on the cheap.

To do it without asking for the shells
that give the attack a sporting chance.

People slur over my
appeal for the shells and yet

continue to urge us on as
if we were hanging back.

The allied troops clung to their strip of
sand throughout autumn and into winter.

In November, Lord
Kitchener, the British Secretary

of State for War,
took a look for himself.

He concluded the Gallipoli campaign,
a waste of officers and men.

In December 1915, with a quarter of a
million men killed, wounded or missing,

the allies began to evacuate the
peninsula.

They had got little further than their
original beachhead.

The encounter of Turk against Anzac on the
cliffs of Gallipoli was confirmation that

the European war had now expanded into
something else.

The First World War.

By 1915, nearly every family had at least
one son who had marched off to battle.

Left behind at home were
millions of women, for whom

every day brought the
possibility of terrible news.

21-year-old Vera Britton, a
student at Oxford University,

described the endless wait
for news of her fiancé, Roland.

Ordinary household sounds became a
torment.

The clock, marking off
each hour of dread, struck into

the tension with the shattering
effect of a thunderclap.

Every ring at the door suggested a
telegram.

Every telephone call, a long-distance
message giving bad news.

Vera's fiancé was serving at the front.

So were her brother, Edward, and their
close friend, Victor.

They'd been known as the Three Musketeers,
and Vera saw herself as a fourth.

She left Oxford to become a nurse in
London.

In a surgical ward, I had told Roland,
the nurses hardly occupy the

silent-footed, gliding role which they
always do in storybooks.

The mixture of gramophones and people
shouting or groaning after an operation

relieves you of the necessity of being
quiet.

They were blaring, blatant gramophones.

Though the men found
them consoling, perhaps

because they subdued
more sinister noises.

They seemed to me to
add a strident grotesqueness

to the cold, dark
evenings of hurry and pain.

As Christmas 1915 approached, Vera
received good news.

It was a note from Roland.

Shall be home on leave, it read.

Land Christmas Day.

Two days later, the phone rang.

Believing that I was at last to hear the
voice for which I had been waiting,

I dashed joyously into the corridor.

But the message was not from Roland.

It was not to say that he had arrived home
that morning.

But to tell me that he had died of wounds
on December 23rd.

Roland, I reflected bitterly,
was now part of the corrupt clay

into which war had transformed
the fertile soil of France.

He would never again know the smell of a
wet evening in early spring.

It was a bitter, grey afternoon.

I wondered however I was going to get
through the weary remainder of life.

I was only at the beginning of my
twenties.

I might have another 40, perhaps even 50
years to live.

Victor died next.

Vera prayed that her brother, Edward,
would survive.

But in the war's final year, he too was
killed.

Edward, like Roland, had promised me that
if a life existed beyond the grave,

he would somehow come back and make me
know of it.

I'd thought that of the two, Roland,
with his reckless determination,

would be the more
likely to trespass from the

infinite across the
boundaries of the tangible.

But he had sent no sign.

And Edward sent none.

Nor did I expect one.

I knew now that death was the end.

And that I was quite alone.

There was no hereafter.

No Easter morning.

No meeting again.

I walked in a darkness.

A dumbness.

A silence.

Which no beloved voice would penetrate.

The manpower of Europe was not enough to
satisfy the appetite of war.

Imperial powers had to call for
reinforcements, millions of them,

from their colonies and dominions.

Through local
newspapers, the voice of the

Empire demanded that
Africans rally to the flag.

The present war is a world war.

Without you, your white comrades cannot do
anything.

Everyone who loves his country and
respects the British government,

join this war without hesitation.

A West African, Kande Kamara, was one of
those who volunteered for the French army.

The decision upset
his father, who saw no

reason why his son
should die for white men.

Please forgive me.

I'm simply doing this for our house.

If I die, I die as a man.

I'll simply be buried as a man.

Within particular strata of
African society, service in

the war represented an
opportunity to serve the Empire.

The Great War opened up for people like
Kamara, a great opportunity to reach back

into the past, reconnect
with the warrior lineage of his

father, and to demonstrate his
worth and value as a warrior.

Not just in Africa, but in a great
worldwide conflict.

Tens of thousands of Africans were shipped
off to Europe.

Some served as labourers, others as
frontline soldiers.

Kande Kamara never forgot the journey.

Huddled in the lower decks
of a transport ship, he found

his six-day voyage was not
the adventure he had expected.

Some were getting very seasick.

Some were vomiting.

The smell of the ship.

The oil.

The gut.

Was too unbearable.

Some people.

Some people didn't know where they were
going.

Even why they were fighting.

A lot of people spread the rumour that we
would never come back.

That we were going to be sold as slaves.

Some said, if the ship sinks, who gives a
damn?

Because we're all going to die anyway.

After arriving in France, Kamara's unit
began training.

When we arrived at Bordeaux, we were sent
directly for parades.

After resting, we went back for more
parades.

There were all kinds of nationalities.

There were Fulas.

Karanko.

Yelonkas.

Pambaros.

Sanufis.

Kese.

Toms.

Becerra.

And a lot more.

Kamara described the site of his first
aircraft as...

a steamship that flies in the air.

But at the front, he was puzzled by orders
to dig what he called gutters,

where soldiers hid for weeks while
fighting continued both day and night.

It seemed a strange way of waging battle.

For many African warriors, or those who
inherited a warrior tradition or a warrior

lineage, were baffled and had
great difficulty in comprehending

the way in which this war
was being waged in Europe.

The First World War seemed to be a war
without meaning, a war without gain.

It's one aspect that comes across really
strongly for African soldiers in the

Western Front, that there seems to be a
war without benefit.

And what they meant by that was that this
was a war which was not only a war which

was not conducted honorably, in terms of
the treatment of your opponent,

but it was a war that produced,
for them individually, no gain.

You couldn't hold your teeth because of
all your trembling.

Because during those days, everything was
going boom.

It was terrible and hard.

In the white man's war, you never say I'm
thirsty.

You never say I'm hungry.

You fight and fight and fight until your
heart tells you you're afraid.

Precise casualty figures for Africans are
unknown.

But it is thought that
at least a quarter of

a million men were
killed, wounded or missing.

Their sacrifice did not always get them
the recognition they deserved from their

imperial rulers or from the men in the
opposing trenches.

We were black and we were nothing.

Because of the color of our skins,
the Germans called us boots.

This hurt every black man because they
actually underestimated us.

Disgraced and dishonored us.

Not all imperial troops shared this
experience.

In the Middle East, Indian troops made an
essential contribution to allied victories.

But for Kamara, in the French army,
what he experienced on the battlefield

made him doubt what Western civilization
had to offer.

The guns out there are roaring fast.

The bullets fly like rain.

The aeroplanes are cavetting.

They go and come again.

The bombs talk loud.

The mines crash out.

No trench their might withstands.

Who helped them all to do their job?

The girls with yellow hands.

As men marched off to war, women marched
off to work.

The result was a dramatic,
if temporary, gender

shift in the workforce
of every fighting nation.

Of all the trades women took over,
none was more important than shell making.

In Britain, one million women poured into
munitions factories.

28,000 of them worked here, on Warren Lane
in South East London.

The Woolwich Royal Arsenal was Britain's
largest.

But like all munitions factories,
it was a hazardous workplace.

The first time you go around, you think,
what an interesting place.

Then the evil smell becomes more
noticeable.

The particles of acid
land on your face and make

you nearly mad, feeling
like pins and needles.

Gabrielle West had
shocked her father by

joining the newly formed
Women's Police Service.

Her assignment was to keep order inside
factories.

The fumes often mean 16 or 18 casualties a
night.

You're blind and speechless by the time
you escape.

The conditions varied a lot.

Some women had very, very bad conditions
and women were killed.

So there were the immediate dangers of
industrial accident and injury,

and lesser injury as well.

I mean, women cut their
fingers, got grit in their eyes,

experienced noxious fumes
from all sorts of processes.

But the other really major
danger for women, which

was very much hushed up
at the time, was from TNT.

And several hundred women did die from TNT
poisoning.

The first signs of TNT
poisoning resembled those of the

common cold, nasal
congestion, headaches and coughs.

But prolonged exposure produced more
alarming symptoms, as one young worker,

Caroline Webb, would discover.

It was all bright ginger, all our front
hair.

And all our faces were bright yellow.

They used to call us canaries.

This doctor, he was
looking at us girls one day,

and he'd say, half you
girls will never have babies.

And the other half are too sick.

God help you.

The Woolwich Arsenal employed virtually no
women before the war.

By December 1917, there were 24,719 of
them, making up 73% of the workforce.

Women knew that without
their supply of shells

and bullets, their men
would lose the war.

It was very important for them that they
were actually supporting the war effort.

Although lots of them didn't really think
much about what the war was about,

they knew that their friends' relations,
husbands, sons, were abroad, they were

dying, there was a shells
shortage, and they felt they

really could do something
to support the war effort.

Sometimes, when we
come upon our little train,

it will be all packed
with different people.

There'd be all the officers sitting there.

Some of them used to look at us as if we
were insects.

And others used to matter, well,
they're doing their bit.

We said, well, we don't mind dying for our
country.

No end of Zep excitements lately.

A few weeks ago, we heard distant guns in
the middle of the night.

We looked up, and there was the Zep, so low
you could see the cars hanging underneath.

My word, we did scoot!

There was a tremendous din of firing,
and things began to patter on the roof.

I thought I was dead that time.

The war on the battlefields
of France had spread across

the Channel, and was reaching
out to civilians in Britain.

Zeppelins first appeared over London in
1915.

A favourite target, Gabrielle West recorded
in her diary, was the arsenal at Woolwich.

We were just going back to our hut,
when we heard wild yells of cheering.

Saw the whole sky turn red.

Then we saw the Zepp, in flames to the
north.

All the workers in the arsenal roared and
shrieked.

All the boys sang Tipperary,
and all the neighbours

scattered about
congratulating each other.

Even as the first Zeppelins
bombed London, the rules

of engagement were
changing on the battlefield.

In April 1915, at Ypres, the German army
used a new weapon.

Poison gas.

First came chlorine, the yellow gas.

Then came the green gas.

Then came mustard gas, the granddaddy of
napalm.

And each of these had appalling effects on
men who were trapped in the trench system.

It didn't break the defensive lines.

It made the level of suffering much worse
than it had been before.

Wilfred Owen witnessed a man dying from
gas poisoning.

In one of his most famous poems, he
captured another dimension of total war.

Gas.

Gas.

Quick, boys.

An ecstasy of fumbling, fitting the clumsy
helmets just in time.

But someone still was
yelling out and stumbling

and floundering like
a man in fire or lime.

Dim through the misty
panes and thick green

light as under a green
sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless
sight, he plunges at me, guttering,

choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could
pace behind the wagon that we flung him

in, and watch the white
eyes writhing in his

face, his hanging face
like a devil's sick of sin.

If you could hear at every jolt the blood
come gargling from the froth-corrupted

lungs, obscene as
cancer, bitter as the cud

of vile incurable sores
on innocent tongues.

My friend, you would not
tell with such high zest to

children ardent for some
desperate glory, the old lie.

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.

In 1915, the Germans declared that
passenger ships, sailing to allied ports,

were at risk of being sunk without
warning.

Civilian passengers too were now potential
targets at sea.

It was rapidly becoming evident that there
was no way in which you could advance the

war unless you broke with early ideas of
rules of engagement.

and conceptualize the war as a
totalizing experience, accepted

the fact that the war would
now have to be a total war.

And the way in which to
break the enemy would not just

be through slaughtering
soldiers on the battlefield.

The way in which you would break your
enemy would be by attacking the home

front, by waging the war against civilians
as much as against soldiers.

On May the 1st, 1915, the Lusitania,
the world's finest luxury liner,

set sail from New York for Britain.

It was owned by citizens of a so far
neutral country, the United States.

On board were nearly 2,000 passengers and
crew.

On the evening of May the
6th, the ship's captain received

warnings of German U-boats
off the coast of Ireland.

Among the first-class passengers was
Margaret Rhonda.

We were, most of us, very fully conscious
of the risk we were running.

We used to discuss our chances.

I can't help hoping,
said one girl, that we

get some sort of thrill
going up the channel.

My father and I had just come out of the
dining room after lunching.

I think we may stay up on deck tonight to
see if we get our thrill, he said.

I had no time to answer.

I saw that the water had come over onto
the deck.

We were not, as I had thought,
60 feet above the sea.

We were already under the sea.

The ship sank, and I was sucked right down
with her.

When I came to the surface, I remember
looking round at the sun, and pale blue

sky, and calm sea, and wondering whether I
had reached heaven without knowing it.

And devoutly hoped I hadn't.

Twelve hundred men, women, and children
were drowned.

Everyone was now a target.

On a scale never seen
before, children were

becoming exposed to
the violence of total war.

They fled from their homes.

They feared being gassed.

And they were bombed from the skies.

But they were absorbed into the war in a
more insidious way.

As tools of propaganda.

You can find a very young baby of less
than one year old with a gun in the hands

going out from an egg and asking if there
are some Bosch's, some Germans somewhere,

because they want to kill them.

To consider that a baby less than one year
old has to be a fighter and has to kill

the enemy, that is, I think, impossible to
stand.

But that was the reality of the propaganda
of these times.

Children were taught to hate in specially
adapted nursery rhymes.

This is the house that Jack built.

This is the bomb that fell on the house
that Jack built.

This is the Hun that dropped the bomb that
fell on the house that Jack built.

This is the gun that killed
the Hun, that dropped

the bomb, that fell on
the house that Jack built.

Through their magazine,
Little Folks, British children as

young as three would learn
certain verses off by heart.

Little girls and little boys
Never suck your diamond toys

Diamond sodders it will make
Turning baby's tummy ache

Mobilisation of men required mobilisation
of minds.

The emerging film industry added an epic
dimension.

Hollywood's The Little American became a
box office hit.

The propaganda against the
German was extremely widespread,

but nowhere was it more
powerful than in the cinema.

The Little American was really an attack
on America's neutrality.

Cecil B.

DeMille put in the lead Mary Pickford,
the most popular star of the era,

the most popular figure of the cinema that
has ever lived.

And this has to be borne in mind.

She was even more popular around the world
than Chaplin.

So the power of that propaganda cannot be
underestimated.

And he went into
production a few days after

the United States
obligingly went into the war.

So he had an ideal
vehicle of Hun hatred into

which he piled everything
he could think of.

Total war demonised the enemy.

It demanded all the resources of a nation.

It transformed civilians into military
targets.

But in 1915, total war went a step
further.

Only hours after the first Allied soldiers
had stepped onto the beaches of Gallipoli,

the 20th century's first genocide began.

The presence of a thriving and wealthy
community of Christian Armenians in

northeast Turkey was seen by Turks as a
festering irritation.

Armenia's cultural links
with Russia, a wartime enemy,

provided Turkey with the
excuse it had been looking for.

Their leaders were rounded up and
executed.

Then entire communities were marched off
into the desert to die.

A young medic in the German
army, Armin Wegner, defied

orders and smuggled the
camera into a refugee camp.

In the last few days, I've taken numerous
photographs under penalty of death.

I do not doubt for a moment that I am
committing an act of treason.

Hunger, death, disease, despair,
shout at me from all sides.

I was seized by terror and hurried out of
the camp, my heart pounding.

I was overcome by
dizziness, as if the earth were

collapsing on both
sides of me into an abyss.

The First World War was the biggest war
ever to date.

The Second World War was bigger still.

It's no accident in my mind that both of
them were marked by genocide.

That is the logic of the brutalization of
total war.

In years to come, Armin
Wegner would send a letter

to Adolf Hitler, pleading
for the Jewish people.

It was a plea which
fell on deaf ears, for

Hitler had learned a
totally different lesson.

He told his inner circle, who remembers
the Armenian massacres today?

The BBC's 90 Years of Remembrance website
gives you the opportunity to share your

family members' personal stories on the
BBC Remembrance Wall.

And 1914 to 1918 continues here on BBC4 on
Thursday at 20 to 8.