Original subtitles

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.