A group of French soldiers, including the patrician Captain de Boeldieu and the working-class Lieutenant Maréchal, grapple with their own class differences after being captured and held in a World War I German prison camp. When the men are transferred to a high-security fortress, they must concoct a plan to escape beneath the watchful eye of aristocratic German officer von Rauffenstein, who has formed an unexpected bond with de Boeldieu.
Hosted by actor and historian Sir Tony Robinson, this one-off special tells the powerful and moving story of five men, all members of a unique volunteer army – the Sheffield City battalion – as it recounts the soldiers’ last days, leaving their homes and loved ones to go and serve alongside their friends and neighbours, completely unaware of what lay ahead of them. Central to the programme is the story of Private Frank Meakin, who recorded his unique personal testimony of the war. Frank and his friends could never have anticipated what they would experience, but 100 years on we know in detail, thanks to his diary – an account that shouldn’t have existed, because keeping one was forbidden for servicemen on active duty on the Western Front. Frank’s diary, which was smuggled back from the Front, reveals the intimate details and dramatic stories of one battalion – and one British city – in the words of one man.
Richthofen goes off to war like thousands of other men. As fighter pilots, they become cult heroes for the soldiers on the battlefields. Marked by sportsmanlike conduct, technical exactitude and knightly propriety, they have their own code of honour. Before long he begins to understand that his hero status is deceptive. His love for Kate, a nurse, opens his eyes to the brutality of war.
Paris, France, during the First World War. While thousands of soldiers die every day on the battlefields, Henri Landru, a seemingly respectable furniture dealer, married and father of four children, relentlessly feeds his own sinister factory of death.
In 1911, a willful and determined man from peasant stock named Charles Saganne enlists in the military and is assigned to the Sahara Desert under the aristocratic Colonel Dubreuilh.
Wounded and left for dead, a British soldier in the midst of the First World War embarks on a daring escape from a booby-trapped German dugout.
A WWI veteran decides to build a memorial to all of the people who have mattered to him but are now dead.
The adventures of the Lafayette Escadrille, young Americans who volunteered for the French military before the U.S. entered World War I, and became the country's first fighter pilots.
At the end of May 1918, released prisoners return to the Rumburk garrison from Russian captivity, hoping that the war is over for them. The only thing they want is to get their withheld ...
The story of British officer T.E. Lawrence's mission to aid the Arab tribes in their revolt against the Ottoman Empire during the First World War. Lawrence becomes a flamboyant, messianic figure in the cause of Arab unity but his psychological instability threatens to undermine his achievements.
A young Catholic priest from Boston confronts bigotry, Nazism, and his own personal conflicts as he rises to the office of cardinal.
Based on diaries, records and eyewitness accounts, this is the story of the two Battles of the Somme from the perspective of British and German soldiers. It shows how the major lessons learned by the British Army leadership after the disastrous first attacks of July 1916 were turned into victory at the second attempt in September 1916, arguably the turning point for the First World War.
Two Australian sprinters face the brutal realities of war when they are sent to fight in the Gallipoli campaign in the Ottoman Empire during World War I.
France, 1914, during World War I. On Christmas Eve, an extraordinary event takes place in the bloody no man's land that the French and the Scots dispute with the Germans…
A documentary of early airplane pilot and WW1 fighter ace Manfred von Richthofen, famously known as The Red Baron.
The Gallipoli campaign of World War I was so controversial & devastating, it changed the face of battle forever. Using diaries, letters, photographs and memoirs, acclaimed director, Tolga Ornek, traces the personal journeys of Australian, New Zealand, British and Turkish soldiers, from innocence and patriotism to hardship and heartbreak.
An account of the revolutionary years of the legendary American journalist John Reed, who shared his adventurous professional life with his radical commitment to the socialist revolution in Russia, his dream of spreading its principles among the members of the American working class, and his troubled romantic relationship with the writer Louise Bryant.
Produced by the Fox Movietone News arm of Fox Film Corporation and based on the book by Lawrence Stallings, this expanded newsreel, using stock-and-archive footage, tells the story of World War I from inception to conclusion. Alternating with scenes of trench warfare and intimate glimpses of European royalty at home, and scenes of conflict at sea combined with sequences of films from the secret archives of many of the involved nations.
A documentary about World War I with never-before-seen footage to commemorate the centennial of Armistice Day, and the end of the war.
The wife of an Irish school teacher is branded a traitor when she falls for a British officer who is part of an occupying force in 1917 Ireland.