World War I: The Great War

Drawing on eyewitness accounts from survivors, expert testimony, rare photos and military documents from the battle, discover the events of April 22nd, 1918, when a flotilla of British warships led by the cruiser HMS Vindictive set sail for the fortified harbor of Zeebrugge, defended by coastal batteries, a deadly mole, and a seawall bristling with guns.

World War I: Jutland. May 1916. The British Grand Fleet, unchallenged since the Battle of Trafalgar, is moored in the peaceful harbor of Scapa Flow off the north coast of Scotland. The global dominance of the British Royal Navy is seemingly assured. But this is all about to change. The Battle of Jutland between Britain and Germany was the largest naval action of all time. It was a confrontation that the British wanted. An opportunity to unleash their lethal super weapons of the day--the great ships they called Dreadnoughts--and to prove that Britain did still rule the waves. Yet, in the cold grey waters of northern Europe, the showdown ended in carnage on a scale few could have imagined. Today, the ships with their vast gun turrets and thousands of shells still litter the seabed. Now, using the latest modern science, we try to determine what went wrong. Why was Jutland so disastrous for the British Royal Navy? And could it be, that in losing the battle, they won the naval war?

In just one day almost 60,000 British soldiers were killed or wounded. Why was this first day on the Somme such a disaster for the British? World War I, trenches and barbed wire ran across the entire continent of Europe from the Mediterranean to the North Sea. At 7:30am on July 1st, 1916, after a devastating artillery bombardment lasting more than a week, 100,000 British soldiers waited in their trenches ready to advance on the German lines. They'd been told to expect minimal resistance, but as they picked their way slowly across no-man's-land, guns opened fire. Shells burst overhead, and waves of men were machine-gunned down. It was a military catastrophe of unprecedented proportions. Filmed on the battlefield itself, in laboratories and on firing ranges - archaeologists, military historians, and other experts from disciplines as diverse as metallurgy and geology investigate the factors and conduct tests to replicate and understand the factors that turned one terrible day into the bloodiest in the history of the British Army.

He took a 128,000-man force and transformed it into a juggernaut of 4 million soldiers that won a war. His was a face made for monuments, and a life worthy of them. He was arguably more responsible for transforming America into an international power than anyone else. John J. Pershing started his career as an Indian fighter on the frontier. He ended it as the greatest war hero America had ever seen. In between was enough triumph and tragedy for several lives. This searching profile pieces together a portrait of an ambitious, driven man haunted by a searing tragedy--the loss of his wife and three daughters killed in a fire. Military historians detail how he transformed a tiny, 128,000-man force into an army of four million men, and then led it to victory in the greatest battle America had ever fought--the Meuse Argonne offensive in October 1918. That Pershing was no tactical genius is clear, but his crude force made up in numbers what they lacked in strategy. John Pershing, the senior U.S. Army General of World War I, was granted the rank of "General of the Armies" in 1919 in recognition of his performance as the commander of the American Expeditionary Force. "General of the Armies" of the United States is the highest possible land-based rank in the United States military hierarchy. From the fading frontier to the trenches of World War I, follow the career of one of the most important American generals of all time.