Original subtitles

We've passed on the act of remembrance for 90

years, in Britain and across the Commonwealth.

From one generation to the next, discover your own personal connection to

World War I at free events across the country.

To find out more, go to bbc.co.uk slash remembranceevents.

Now on BBC4, with footage depicting the harsh realities of the Great War,

the Americans join the fight as the end draws nearer, in 1914 to 1918.

Germany, 1918.

A princess witnessed just one of the consequences of four years of war.

The pathetic tale one hears wherever one goes makes the heart bleed.

A poor woman in the train the other day was

holding up her hand and counting the fingers on it.

One...

Two...

Three...

Four...

Five... Over and over again.

The passengers gradually began to smile at her, until at last the man sitting next to

her looked up and said simply, Don't laugh at my wife, ladies and gentlemen.

I'm taking her to the asylum.

Her wits are gone.

She's lost her five sons.

All killed in action.

As 1918 began, the German people were approaching the limits of their endurance.

The Allies too were close to exhaustion.

Revolution had knocked Russia out of the war.

The French army had been rocked by mutiny.

The Italians routed at Caporetto.

The British offensives had failed to break the stalemate.

Europe was running out of fighting men.

But the end would come suddenly, and before the year was out.

There is intense cold here, such as has not been known for more than half a century.

There are shivering throngs of hungry, care-worn

people, picking their way through snowy streets.

We are all gaunt and bony now, and have dark shadows around our eyes.

Our thoughts are chiefly taken up with wondering what our next meal will be.

And dreaming of the good things that once existed.

Princess Evelyn Blucher, English by birth, had married a German nobleman.

Then war came, and tore her loyalties in two.

Although devoted to her native England, she had followed her husband back to Berlin.

Strikes are breaking out in different parts.

Leading to disturbances which have already

caused the deaths of a few unfortunate policemen.

We are now entirely at the mercy of the military courts of justice.

Anyone who strikes is being sent off to the front at once.

In the darkest days of serfdom, men could not have been more in a state of

slavery than we are in these days of militarism.

Naturally, the people begin more than ever to say, Why should we work?

Starve?

Send our men out to fight?

What is it all going to bring us?

More work?

More poverty?

More men crippled?

Our homes ruined?

Our homes ruined?

What is it all for?

While the German people suffered, their ruler, Kaiser Wilhelm II,

continued to live in isolated grandeur.

Once the embodiment of German authority, the

Kaiser's power had been eroded by the men around him.

His advisor, Admiral Georg von Müller, was adamant.

There was no room for royal extravagance in the midst of war.

Very many people feel the dangers of this situation,

and are fully aware of the life led by His Majesty.

Hunting and house parties, which is in grievous contrast to the gravity of the times.

The Kaiser must appear as a true ruler and father of his people.

A ruler must rule wisely and with a warm heart.

The Kaiser increasingly is an embarrassment.

In fact, I suspect the answer is that in practice he doesn't have much power at

all, and he can rattle his sabre and make all kinds

of irate noises about the forces of democracy.

But when it comes to the crunch, it's very rare that the Kaiser really gets his way.

Real power in Germany was now in the hands of two generals.

Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff.

Hindenburg's the front man.

He's the sort of face of respectability.

Ludendorff is the radical technocrat and the advocate

of total war, who's the brains of the partnership.

As a result of the great victories that he and Hindenburg achieve on the Eastern

Front, they ascend into a position of not only

institutional power, but genuine popular power.

I mean, they become national heroes.

Far more important in the public psyche in Germany than the Kaiser.

Hindenburg and Ludendorff knew that Germany could

be starved into defeat by the Allied blockade.

Now they decided to unleash Germany's submarines in unrestricted warfare.

All shipping bound for Allied ports could be sunk without warning.

But the risk was high.

Unrestricted warfare at sea could provoke a powerful, so far neutral nation.

The United States.

If they're going to have unrestricted submarine warfare, there's danger that

they're going to sink American ships, drown American

civilians and bring the United States into the war.

And so the Germans put everything, really, they wager everything,

on this gamble, that they can sink ships and bring Britain to its knees.

And the gamble is completely and utterly against all the odds.

Europe's war had brought economic boom to the United States.

The warring nations needed America's raw goods, the

weapons it could make and the money it could loan.

But while enjoying record profits, most of America, and especially its

president, wanted nothing to do with the fighting.

Deprived of glory, war loses all its charms.

The mechanical slaughter of today has not the same

fascination as the zest of intimate combat of former days.

As a young child during the American Civil War, Woodrow Wilson had seen the suffering

of wounded soldiers cared for in his father's church.

Now as president, he regarded the Great War as

Europe's civil war, and he wanted no part of it.

The Germans repeatedly provoked the United States by

sinking ships that cost American lives and American cargos.

The Lusitania in May of 1915 is probably the

most famous episode of that kind of provocation.

But Wilson, nevertheless, down to early 1917, was able to secure the economic

right to trade with belligerents without provoking

the Germans to the point of open warfare.

In 1917, early 1917, the Germans essentially called Woodrow Wilson's bluff.

Germany's announcement of unrestricted submarine

warfare brought the United States to the brink of war.

Then, a single German diplomatic message was intercepted.

It ensured that Wilson's bluff would be called no longer.

The telegram was a top secret message to the Mexican government.

It invited Mexico to declare war against the United States.

The Zimmerman telegram was decoded by room 40 of British naval intelligence and

planted just at the right moment to make sure that Woodrow Wilson would blow his

top, a very rare event given his temperament.

And when he saw the extent to which Germany was prepared to violate the

borders of the United States, there was no choice in his mind but to say that there

was a moral issue of vital interest to the United States.

On April the 2nd, 1917, President Woodrow Wilson

went to Congress and asked for a declaration of war.

It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people

into war, into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars.

But the right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight

for things which we have always carried nearest to our hearts.

The world must be made safe for democracy.

Wilson launched a massive government campaign to promote the war effort.

The results were spectacular.

German books were destroyed.

Some states banned the speaking of German altogether.

Over two million American men volunteered.

Three million more were drafted.

Woodrow Wilson knew that the prospect of so many

new men in uniform promised victory for the Allies.

Senator after senator has appealed to me most earnestly to cut the red tape.

I am now asking for the scissors.

The supreme test of the nation has come.

We must all speak, act, and serve together.

As white ranks swelled, black men too came forward for training.

Fears of arming Negroes, as they were universally known,

had been widely expressed amongst the white population.

Negroes, it was argued, should serve simply as laborers.

The scholar, W.E.B.

Du Bois, successfully campaigned against enormous

prejudice for the formation of two black combat regiments.

Let us, while the war lasts, forget our special grievances and close ranks.

Out of this war will rise an American Negro, with the right to vote,

and the right to work, and the right to live without insult.

These things may not and will not come at once.

But they are written in the stars.

Johnny, get your gun, get your gun, get your gun.

Back in on the run, on the run, on the run.

I am calling you and me.

Every time of liberty.

All in the way, not delaying to today.

Make your daddy glad to have a hand on the net.

And your feet are not fine.

To be proud of their boys in life.

Over there, over there.

Send the words, send the words over there.

And the boys are coming, the boys are coming.

April 28th, 1918.

It is the great adventure.

And I am in it.

We'll be over, we are coming over.

And we won't come back, it is over, over there.

Captain Harry Truman, future president of the United States.

Was one of two million American soldiers sent to France.

He had long wanted to serve.

But bad eyesight denied him a commission.

This time, he memorized the eye chart.

I am just now ready to go to a real artillery school.

I have had a splendid tour of the Atlantic Ocean and France.

And now I have a room with four of the most congenial first lieutenants in the

regiment at an old chateau with a beautiful garden.

The hardships of this war are sure easy to bear so far.

As British and French troops fought for their

lives, American troops continued training.

Their commander, General John Pershing, refused to fill the

gaps in British and French ranks with American soldiers.

His army would fight as an American army, he told the Allies, or not at all.

Certainly, Wilson and Pershing, by this time, had no reason to admire or

to have faith in the tactics of their Western allies, who had

thrown away the lives of millions of men up to this point.

So it's understandable that they were reluctant to fight in the trenches

alongside the British and the French, under British and French command.

When the moon rises, you can imagine that the ghosts of the half-million Frenchmen

who were slaughtered here are holding a sorrowful parade over the ruins.

As American reinforcements continue to cross the

ocean, Princess Blücher recorded daily life in Berlin.

The days come and go.

Every hour brings its fears, disappointments, and vague hopes.

The feeling towards the Kaiser is steadily diminishing in loyalty and respect.

The same people who greeted him so warmly a short time ago, with Ave Caesar,

are now distributing leaflets in the back streets of Berlin, proclaiming,

down with the Kaiser, down with the government.

More and more, Ludendorff and his adherents are perceiving the fatal

mistakes of the U-Boat War, and the madness of ever allowing

things to go so far that America should enter the war.

By the spring of 1918, the queues of the Hungary had grown even longer.

But Ludendorff was planning a death-or-glory drive for victory.

His U-Boat campaign had failed.

But victory could still be his, he believed, with

one more decisive thrust on the Western Front.

Well, that was the last hope of the Germans to

really definitely decide the war in their favour.

For the first time since years, we had been able to amass a great number

of troops, and they wanted to make this decision before

the Americans would be in France in great numbers.

And there was a very high spirit among the troops as well.

For weeks past, ammunition has been hauled and hauled, night after night,

to be piled in mountains round the guns.

All that is to be poured out on the enemy.

Rudolf Binding was one of a million German soldiers, secretly waiting in a 50-mile

line near the old battleground of the Somme.

The sight of so many troops and equipment

raised hopes that victory might finally be near.

I hardly know how to write.

Tomorrow there will be nothing to keep secret.

For then, hell breaks loose.

It will be a drama like a Greek tragedy.

Ludendorff believed he could accomplish what no

general had achieved in over three years of fighting.

He would break through the Allied defences, end the stalemate, and win the war.

There is an extraordinary moment in Germany when a society that has suffered

very severe shortages collectively holds its breath.

This is March 1918.

A month before, two months before, massive strikes in Berlin, major unrest,

political movements calling for compromised peace,

something to justify all the sufferings that had gone on.

And right then and there is the moment when virtually the entire nation stopped,

suspended judgment, suspended disbelief, and waited

for the army to deliver the victory that they promised.

That's the 21st of March 1918.

At dawn, the shelling began.

German gunners fired over a million shells at the British lines in just four hours.

British message runner Robert Cude was behind the lines when the bombardment began.

At 4.50 a.m., the barrage awakens us, only to

find a thick fog enveloping the whole ground.

All phone lines are down, and the only means of communication is by runners.

Mist obscures everything.

Jerry is all round and behind our lines.

It is a most impossible state of affairs.

German storm troops, armed with machine guns and

flamethrowers, pulverized what was left of the British lines.

The 5th Army's front virtually collapsed.

All wounded have to be left.

It has been a nightmare, and one that I do not want again.

He shells us all day, and in the afternoon, he gives us a touch of his gas.

It is extraordinary in its intensity.

I was on the ground writhing in agony, and was quite prepared for the finish.

In four days, the German army advanced 14 miles, the

greatest gain of territory since the stalemate of 1914.

90,000 Allied soldiers were taken prisoner.

My soul grows sick when I hear or read the particulars of these first victorious days.

Of the new long guns that are being used for the

first time, and that are now bombarding Paris.

And the awful effect of the devilish new gases.

There are whole batteries of Englishmen being found dead over their guns.

I feel a great wave of bitterness and hatred overflowing my heart.

Hatred for all those in this, and in other countries, who were the cause of this...

hell being let loose on earth.

The Kaiser declared the battle won, and celebrated with champagne.

Spirits were so high that His Majesty declared that if an English delegation

came to sue for peace, it must kneel before the German standard.

For it was a question here of victory of the monarchy over democracy.

But German success was short-lived.

Although Allied forces had been driven back,

they were able to regroup and hold new lines.

Over the next four months, the German army battered

the Allied line in three more major assaults.

The pattern was always the same.

A fierce bombardment, a lunge through the Allied lines, and then a loss of momentum,

as the German infantry failed to exploit their advantage.

It was not possible to really exploit the advances they had made, to really get

enough troops through the break in the front.

You had initially this great feeling of the troops, we will do the job now.

But once it became clear that there was no hope to really break the enemy's forces

decisively, then this feeling turned into the opposite,

a feeling of despair connected with exhaustion.

The elite German storm troops had nothing more to give.

Desperate now, Ludendorff threw into battle his reserves.

As usual, he came in mass.

At one place, seven waves, shoulder to shoulder.

But all he got was a devil of a hiding.

The Australian second lieutenant, Cyril Lawrence, saw the German army waste

away the best of its soldiers in these mass attacks.

Our machine guns had the day of their lives.

They all agree that it was simply murder.

The bodies piled and piled up.

Fritz's casualties must be enormous.

I think it will be all over shortly.

It cannot go on at this rate.

Ludendorff thought that by an act of will, he could

break the resistance of the British and the French.

Not by an act of power, but by an act of will.

And that's what a gambler does.

It's not rational.

It's supernatural.

Ludendorff's great gamble had failed.

In its last days, he visited the front to identify the body of his stepson,

the second he had lost in battle, and one of a

million German casualties between March and July 1918.

The war, he said, has spared me nothing.

Now it was the Allies' turn to take up the offensive.

On August the 8th, 1918, British, Dominion and French units, supported by

over 500 tanks, pushed through the German lines at Amiens.

I think there was a kind of mood that by the mid-summer, weakened as the BEF was by

then, that, well, if that's the worst you can do, Fritz, we've survived that.

Now it's our turn.

The German army began pulling back to its

formidable defences known as the Hindenburg Line.

The British commander, General Douglas Haig, launched a series of major assaults.

And the culminate in the breaking of the Hindenburg Line on the 29th of September,

which is really an amazing operation.

Haig received a telegram from the British government saying, in effect, if you

sustain large numbers of casualties attacking the Hindenburg Line,

you're done, we'll get you this time.

And Haig said, what a lot of...

no hopers these guys are, and went ahead

and attacked, and broke through in 24 hours.

The British, by now, have got the artillery game so well under their belts,

that they just devastate the Hindenburg Line.

It really is an extraordinary example of a well-planned, well-conducted military

operation on the Western Front in World War I.

You don't have too many of those.

The enemy appears to shoot all day and all night long.

Against us we shall have thousands of tanks, tens of thousands of airmen,

hundreds of thousands of hearty young men, behind whom

there will be an American army which may number a million.

I have seen too much in these last days.

Signs and tokens.

This generation has no future, and deserves none.

Until now, during four years of trench warfare,

every attack launched had eventually lost momentum.

Not this time.

From August the 8th, 1918, and for the hundred days that

followed, there was a rolling offensive, one that didn't stop.

One that gathered strength with every mile gained.

I think it's the fact that they at last feel that they're winning, something

positive is happening, that enables them to take, in

fact, some of the worst casualties of the entire war.

But the great persistence and doggedness of the British and Imperial soldiers and

the flair of the Aussies and the Canadians and the New

Zealanders in battle is by this time an irresistible mixture.

As the British and Dominion forces fought in the north, the

French were starting to push the Germans back in the south.

It was a big surprise for the German army, which was

for the first time in a completely defensive position.

The perspective is the perspective of a victory

of France, and it's the first time since 1914.

So it's a complete change of minds in the French army.

This fighting spirit was backed to a very deep desire of revenge against Germany.

Very soon, you know, we are going to enter in Germany and we'll

do them what they did to us during four years of occupation.

Now it was the turn of the Americans.

In the last weeks of the war, northeast of Paris, nine US divisions went over the top.

It will be the first, and last, great American battle of the First World War.

In just three hours, the US army fired off more artillery

shells than in the whole of the American Civil War.

The battle of the Meuse-Argonne lasted 47 days before the Germans gave ground.

The actual military contribution of the United States to the

fighting and the end of the conflict was absolutely minimal.

Insofar as the presence of America made a difference in Germany's decision to

surrender, it was not because of success on the battlefield

at the Meuse-Argonne or anywhere else, for that matter.

It was because the entrance of America into the war and its demonstrated capacity

to move its army across the Atlantic in huge numbers now faced the Germans with

the prospect of a virtually endless, limitless supply of

reinforcements that could be brought on the Allied side.

The German army was now in retreat all along the Western Front.

Exhausted and defeated men were surrendering in their thousands.

It's like a house of cards.

The whole of the edifice of German society is based upon the power of the army.

And when the army can't deliver victory, what can it deliver?

Two more years of stalemate?

Three more years?

Shortages?

Disease?

Time of the worst influenza epidemic in history?

What's the point of going on?

As Germany's army retreated to its frontiers,

its navy sensed that defeat was imminent.

The German fleet, too expensive to be scuttled, too weak to fight, had sat

listless at port since its only major sea

battle at Jutland, more than two years earlier.

The mood of my comrades is grave, very grave indeed.

Many of our younger men have had their heads turned by Bolshevik ideas.

Seaman Richard Strumpf had begun the war as a German patriot.

But for four years, he had been confined in cramped

quarters that he referred to in his diary as an iron prison.

Mass refusals to obey orders have become routine.

Our confidence, as well as our faith in the justness

of our cause, has suffered a staggering blow.

Our military system has accomplished what no book,

no newspaper, and no socialist could ever have done.

I have learned to hate and to despise authority more than anything else in the world.

I would feel proud to be a German if I had been treated as a human being during my

five years of service, rather than as an animal.

In October 1918, the German fleet was ordered to steam out

to sea to fight one final battle for the honour of Germany.

You can imagine what it was like in a boiler room to receive an order to,

you know, full steam ahead, go out to the North Sea, when everybody knew that it was

only a matter of weeks until peace terms had been agreed.

What's the point?

was a question that echoed all over Germany.

Years of injustice exploded.

The German Navy mutinied.

Now the revolution has arrived.

This morning I heard the first flutter of its wings.

It came like lightning.

It descended with one fell swoop and now holds all of us in its grip.

Within the past two days, an unbelievable change has taken place within me.

I have been converted from monarchist to a devout Republican.

The revolt spread from the ships to the docks and

from the docks to the streets of German cities.

It is a pitiful sight to watch the death throes of a great nation.

It reminds me of a great ship slowly sinking before

one's eyes and being swallowed up by storm-driven waves.

I feel intensely for Germany and her brave, long-suffering people who've made

such terrific sacrifices and gone through so much woe.

Only to see their idols shattered and to realize that their sufferings have all

been caused by the plundering mistakes and

overweening ambition of a class of supermen.

In late October, Ludendorff fled Germany.

The Kaiser was told what Admiral von Müller called the bitter truth.

Germany was going to lose the war.

In Syria, in Turkey, even in Austria, the Kaiser's allies collapsed around him.

The Kaiser admitted that he had not closed an eye all night.

He had seen visions of all the English and Russian relatives and all the ministers

and generals of his own reign marching past and mocking him.

Only the little Queen of Norway had been friendly to him.

The Kaiser was forced to seek asylum in Holland.

Now Germany stood alone, leaderless.

Monday, the 11th of November, 1918.

Armistice Day.

At 5am, as the document was being signed, news of

the approaching peace was signalled to the front.

Robert Cude described the last moments of war.

We're staggered to read the news that commencing

at 11am today, an armistice will be in force.

At Jerry's asking.

I'm up forward at the time, and the lads live off all their ammunition.

The artillery too do not mean to be saddled with spare shells.

And so, right up to the minute of the time fixed for the

armistice, they're pumping over shells as fast as they can.

The killing went on until 10.59.

Then, at the 11th hour, on the 11th day of the 11th

month of 1918, the guns of the Great War fell silent.

Allied cameraman caught the first moments of peace at the front.

Back home in Allied cities, as rumours were confirmed, people took to the streets.

The moment of this victory, on the 11th of November

1918, was the proof that they hadn't died for nothing.

That was the way the people interpreted their own mourning.

It's a burst out of joy, which can be explained only by national self-esteem,

back to the certitude that the war was definitely over.

Not only this war, but that the war would be definitely over for the rest of times,

for the rest of history of humanity.

That is what was so important to people.

In London, on the stroke of 11, the darkened

grey streets of the capital were transformed.

When Tomingham's marching home again We'll give him a hearty welcome then The men

will cheer, the boys will shout, The ladies, they will all turn and we'll

all feel gay When Tomingham's marching home, we'll all feel dead way Queen Mary

wrote in her diary that this was the greatest day in the world's history.

Oh, my darling boy And let's see once before we start to win with joy The

warrior thought that we'll all feel gay When

Tomingham's marching home And we'll all feel dead way

Princess Blucher saw only the misery and dishonour of a defeated nation.

The few people I have already spoken to Were

depressed and horrified by the terms of the armistice.

Especially that the blockade is not to be raised Which means for so many people a

gradual death from exhaustion As one woman said to me The idea of continuing to exist

and work on a minimum of food Was so dreadful That she thought it would be the

most sensible thing To go with her child and try to get shot In one of the numerous

street fights Another lady Is contemplating turning the gas on herself

And her two small children And putting an end To the horrors of living

Soldiers left the battlefield for the last time.

Nine million of them did not come home.

Cyril Lawrence reminded the victors of this lost generation.

Peace.

The boys will come marching home, happy, radiantly happy and victorious.

Upon the doorsteps and at the gates there will

be loving hearts and arms to gather them in.

But think again.

There will be empty doorways and gateways.

There will be tears of sorrow and behind many and many a

window will be a mother whose boy is not coming up the street.

There will be wives and little children to whom the word daddy can only be a memory.

After 1,551 days, the war was over.

But in the months to come, the world would learn a hard truth.

It was as difficult to make enduring peace as it had been to wage war.

And 1914 to 1918 concludes on Tuesday at ten past eight.

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

your family members' stories on the BBC Remembrance Wall.

All right.