WORLD WAR I IN COLOUR
(6 X 52 minute episodes)
THE SERIES
'WORLD WAR I IN COLOUR' is based on the highly successful Nugus/Martin Productions series ‘The Century of Warfare’.
World War I consumed the lives of 10 million soldiers and civilians. It was fought mainly by young men in the fields and trenches of Northern France and Belgium. It saw the development of the fighter plane, the introduction of poison gas, the invention of the tank, the flamethrower and the wide use of machine guns and heavy artillery. It was caused by the industrial and territorial rivalry which accompanied the industrialisation of Europe at the beginning of the 20th Century. It was exacerbated by the rivalries and jealousies of the royal houses of Europe which strangely enough were related and descended from Britain's Queen Victoria. In addition to the vast strategies of the High Command officers on both sides there were far ranging naval battles in the world's greatest oceans, blockades and the sinking of merchant ships en-masse by surface raiders, mines and submarines.
The conditions of the ordinary private soldiers in the trenches of Flanders were absolutely wretched. The War continued for 5 years largely because civilian populations were shielded from the horrific events which were taking place in their name. The carnage became unstoppable.
Vast armies of Russian conscripts ebbed and flowed across the Polish plains whilst a virtual stalemate in France and Belgium ensured a stagnation embedded in mud accompanied by the permanent risk of exposure to high explosive and withering gunfire.
Using rare archive film from worldwide sources, including Russia, Germany, France, Italy, the USA and Britain's own Imperial War Museum, this landmark series now brings to the screen for the first time the gritty reality of life in the trenches and the other theatres of war in full colour. With the assistance of technical experts at Sony Entertainment in Los Angeles and the technical resources of hundreds of skilled colourising technicians, Nugus/Martin Productions one of the UK's most respected historical documentary producers, has collaborated with FIVE and 3BM to bring to the screen for the first time WORLD WAR I IN COLOUR. The series includes interviews with eye witness survivors and documents material which has never previously been shown on television.
FOR WORLDWIDE VIDEO AVAILABILITY
PLEASE CONTACT:
PETE KALHAN
FREMANTLEMEDIA
1 STEPHEN STREET
LONDON
W1P 1PJ
TEL: 020 7691 6753
FAX: 020 7691 6079
E-MAIL: pete.kalhan@fremantlemedia.com
FOR INTERNATIONAL TV RIGHTS
PLEASE CONTACT:
DANNY GOLDMAN
SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT EUROPEAN DISTRIBUTION
SONY PICTURES ENTERTAINMENT
SONY PICTURES EUROPE HOUSE
25 GOLDEN SQUARE
LONDON
W1F 6LU
TEL: 020 7533 1227
FAX: 020 7533 1235
E-MAIL: dannygoldman@spe.sony.com
FOR WORLDWIDE BOOK AVAILABILITY
PLEASE CONTACT:
CAREY SMITH / PUBLISHING DIRECTOR
EBURY PRESS
RANDOM HOUSE
20 VAUXHALL BRIDGE ROAD
LONDON
SW1V 2SA
TEL: 020 7840 8721
FAX: 020 7840 8406
THE STORIES
(each programme = 52 minutes)
Programme 1
CATASTROPHE
“Not a tree stands. Not a square foot of surface has escaped
mutilation.
There is nothing but the mud and the gaping shell holes; a chaotic wilderness
of shell holes, rim overlapping rim, and, in the bottom of many, the bodies
of the dead…” CAPTAIN ROWLAND FIELDING
WORLD WAR I WAS ON A SCALE NEVER KNOWN OR IMAGINED BEFORE…
Queen Victoria, who had reigned over Britain and its empire for nearly 65 years, died on 22 January 1901. Her death marked the end of an era of relative peace, especially in Europe, which had not witnessed a war for 30 years. It was the longest period of stability that the region had enjoyed for hundreds of years.
Queen Victoria's going would, however, mark the beginning of a period of growing uncertainty and tension as rivalry between great power blocks in Europe built up.
And just over a decade later, the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne by a Serb nationalist in Sarajevo, started a spiral into war which engulfed most of the continent, and then the world.
The Austrians invaded Serbia; the Russians threatened to come to the aid of their Slav brethren. So the German Empire mobilised to back up its ally Austria-Hungary.
Driven on by a mobilisation plan which had been laid down many years before, Germany then launched a pre-emptive attack on France. The Kaiser's armies plunged into neutral Belgium to outflank the French. The aim was to seize Paris and knock the French out of the war before their ally Russia's armies were ready to threaten Germany from the east.
However, the plan failed. Belgium's ally Britain joined France and sent an army to fight alongside her. Then the Russians mobilised more quickly than anticipated and two armies lurched into East Prussia. Even though the small German garrison there shattered the Tsar's forces at the Battle of Tannenberg, their armies in the west were slowed down and then halted by the French and British.
Both sides then set off on a desperate 'Race to the Sea', which left them digging in along a 400-mile front from the Swiss border to the North Sea.
By the end of 1914, the stage was set for almost four years of bloody stalemate and trench warfare on the western front, and a sweeping and ultimately decisive war in the east.
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Programme 2
SLAUGHTER IN THE TRENCHES
“If any man tells you he went over the top and wasn’t scared, he’s a damn liar.” HARRY PATCH: DUKE OF CORNWALL’S LIGHT INFANTRY. BORN 1898 -
THESE YEARS WOULD PRODUCE A NEW AND DEADLY EXPRESSION – ‘GOING OVER THE TOP’.
The Germans' initial offensive on the Western Front in autumn 1914 failed, and by the end of the year both sides were bogged down in an unbroken line of trenches from the borders of Switzerland to the coast of the North Sea.
The unexpected power of the machine-gun, artillery, and barbed wire meant that it was almost impossible for infantry alone to break the stalemate. For more than three years, the commanders on the Western Front tried to find ways of doing so.
Massive artillery bombardments designed to pulverise the barbed wire and other defences, followed by massed infantry assaults proved ineffective. The Germans attempted to bleed the French army to death by attacking at the historic city of Verdun, but ultimately suffered as badly as their foe. Tanks were developed, but the early models proved too slow to exploit the breaks in the trench line that their first assaults created.
By the beginning of 1918, the front had only moved a few miles from where it had been in 1914, millions had been killed, and the French army had come close to collapse.
But two new factors had occurred - Russia had been knocked out of the war, and the United States had come in on the Allied side and its armies were building up.
The Germans knew that, if they did not use the extra troops that they could pull back from the east to win the war in the west swiftly in the spring of 1918, they were doomed.
For the Allies, it was a case of hanging on desperately.
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Programme 3
BLOOD IN THE AIR
“A glorious death! Fight on and fly on to the last drop of blood
and the last drop of petrol…
a death for a knight.” BARON MANFRED VON RICHTHOFEN
MILITARY COMMANDERS BEGAN TO REALISE THAT FLIGHT MIGHT BE USEFUL FOR WAR.
When World War I began, powered flight was barely ten years old, but all the major combatant armies had small air forces. These early aircraft were slow, primitive, and unarmed, and mainly used for reconnaissance and artillery spotting.
But soon pilots were taking up pistols and rifles to attack the enemy. Within months a way of mounting machine guns so that they could fire through an aircraft's propellors had been invented, and the first fighters were born.
For the next three years, flown by aces - such as Manfred von Richthofen, Albert Ball, and Georges Guynemer - whose exploits became legendary, they grappled over the Western Front in massive dogfights.
The impetus of war produced a whole new range of aerial combat:
In addition to reconnaissance and fighting scouts, specialist ground attack machines were developed to attack the enemy's trenches and supply lines, and then long-range strategic bombers to strike industrial targets and cities far behind the lines.
Aircraft went to sea - first airships, then seaplanes and flying boats, and finally proper aircraft launched from ships. By the end of the war, Britain had the world's first aircraft carrier on which planes could both take-off and land.
By 1918, all the types of aircraft which form the air fleets of today were in existence - and a new form of warfare had not only begun, but many theorists were arguing that it would be the decisive factor in any future conflict.
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Programme 4
KILLERS OF THE SEA
“The Lusitania is a godsend to the British. It’s quite the most
stupid thing the Germans could have done.”
PROFESSOR ANDREW LAMBERT, KINGS COLLEGE LONDON
THIS SEA WAR WAS ABOUT INNOVATION AND DAZZLING ADVANCES IN TECHNOLOGY…
Naval rivalry between the empires of Britain and Germany had played a major factor in the build up to World War 1. When the conflict began, the opposing admirals expected that the naval war would be settled by a massive clash between the two fleets of battleships. But in reality, fear of losing their ships meant that both fleets stayed in port for the first two years, and when the great battle did come - at Jutland in 1916 - it was indecisive.
Instead, the naval war became one of blockade and new technology. The British swiftly put a stranglehold on all German overseas trade, and gradually began to starve the country. The Germans responded by using a new and as yet untried weapon - the submarine.
The early success of their U-boats was offset by the danger that the United States would be provoked into joining the Allies, so the campaign was abandoned. More than a year later, desperate to bring Britain to its knees, the Germans tried again.
Their campaign of unrestricted submarine warfare came close to starving Britain into surrender, but had the unfortunate side effect of bringing the United States into the war against Germany. A result which ensured Germany's ultimate defeat.
The British fought back, introducing convoys, using airships and aircraft to spot U-boats, and developing depth charges to attack them and asdic to detect them.
The British also pioneered taking aircraft to sea - by the end of the war they had built the first proper aircraft carrier, and were planning a Pearl Harbor style raid on the German fleet in its harbours.
By the end of the war, far-sighted, but often junior naval officers could see that the submarine and the aircraft would eventually make the great battleships obsolete - but it was to take many years for this to be appreciated by the men who commanded the world's fleets.
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Programme 5
MAYHEM ON THE EASTERN FRONT
“Between the trenches are any amount of dead and decomposing
bodies of our own men and Turks lying on the heather.
The smell is awful.” CAPTAIN GUY NIGHTINGALE
THE WAR ON THE EASTERN FRONT WOULD RESHAPE THE MAP OF EUROPE FOREVER…
The other great battlefront of World War I was on Germany's eastern border. There the armies of three great empires - Russia, Germany, and Austria-Hungary - clashed in a series of titanic struggles which were to change the face of Europe forever.
The great plains, forests and mountains of the eastern Europe meant that this was a very different type of warfare from the trench stalemate of the Western Front. A war of movement, with sweeping offensives, involving millions of men, ebbing and flowing around isolated fortresses. Cavalry was much used.
As the war started, Russia mobilised more quickly than the Germans expected, and two great armies lurched into East Prussia. There they were soundly beaten at Tannenberg by a brilliant new German team - Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff - and put on the defensive against a succession of German assaults.
But, however hard they tried, the Germans could never knock Russia out of the war. However incompetent her commanders, the vast reserves of manpower she could call on meant that new armies were always available, to absorb horrific casualties and yet keep fighting.
It was not until the appalling death toll, discontent with the incompetence of the Tsar and his government, and collapse of morale on the home front, brought a popular rising to depose Nicholas II, that the Germans and Austrians finally achieved victory.
Russia collapsed into the turmoil out of which the Bolsheviks were able to seize power, but the end of the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires followed soon afterwards.
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Programme 6
VICTORY AND DESPAIR
“The First World War was certainly tragic, but it wasn’t futile. In the First World War the Allies achieved a great negative victory… they prevented the domination of Europe by militaristic Germany.” DR. GARY SHEFFIELD, KING’S COLLEGE LONDON
THIS IS THE STORY OF 1918 – THE YEAR THAT CHANGED EVERYTHING…
1918 was the ultimate 'Game of Two Halves'. As it opened, Russia's collapse meant that Germany had a brief window of opportunity to win the war in the West before the strength of the new American armies made the Allies unbeatable.
In March 1918, Ludendorff launched the first of a series of offensives - using new and daring Stormtroop tactics - to break the stalemate and knock the Allies out. But they hung on grimly until the storm abated.
Then in July the Allies began a series of rolling offensives, led largely by the British and American armies. Using a combination of artillery, armour, air power, and mobile infantry which had been perfected in more than three bitter years of trial and error, they started to push the exhausted Germans back all along the front, until defeat was inevitable.
But tragically for the future, the Germans were able to agree an armistice while their armies were still on occupied territory. They marched home apparently unbeaten - and the myth of the 'stab in the back' by corrupt politicians was born. A myth which, when combined with the harsh terms of the Treaty of Versailles, was to propel Adolf Hitler to power only fifteen years later...
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FOR WORLDWIDE VIDEO AVAILABILITY
PLEASE CONTACT:
PETE KALHAN
FREMANTLEMEDIA
1 STEPHEN STREET
LONDON
W1P 1PJ
TEL: 020 7691 6753
FAX: 020 7691 6079
E-MAIL: pete.kalhan@fremantlemedia.com
FOR INTERNATIONAL TV RIGHTS
PLEASE CONTACT:
DANNY GOLDMAN
SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT EUROPEAN DISTRIBUTION
SONY PICTURES ENTERTAINMENT
SONY PICTURES EUROPE HOUSE
25 GOLDEN SQUARE
LONDON
W1F 6LU
TEL: 020 7533 1227
FAX: 020 7533 1235
E-MAIL: dannygoldman@spe.sony.com
FOR WORLDWIDE BOOK AVAILABILITY
PLEASE CONTACT:
CAREY SMITH / PUBLISHING DIRECTOR
EBURY PRESS
RANDOM HOUSE
20 VAUXHALL BRIDGE ROAD
LONDON
SW1V 2SA
TEL: 020 7840 8721
FAX: 020 7840 8406
FOR WORLDWIDE BOOK AVAILABILITY
PLEASE CONTACT:
CAREY SMITH / PUBLISHING DIRECTOR
EBURY PRESS
RANDOM HOUSE
20 VAUXHALL BRIDGE ROAD
LONDON
SW1V 2SA
TEL: 020 7840 8721
FAX: 020 7840 8406