World War One

Season

1964

USA

8.5

A filmed historical survey of the First World War.

Episode List

S1 • E1

The Summer of Sarajevo

This half-hour documentary series uses film from news, official and private sources, to explore World War I. Tonight: "The Summer of Sarajevo." We see a complacent, confident Europe in 1914 shaken by the assassination of Austria's Archduke Ferdinand, an event seized by German and Austrian leaders as a motive for unleashing the war they had plotted for years. We see their reprisals against Serbia; the crowned heads of Europe mobilizing their armies; and people in Britain and France marching jauntily off to war. In Germany, there was cheering and waving as the Kaiser told his people they would "go to war with God on their side."

S1 • E2

The Clash of the Generals

"Clash of the Generals" examines the French and German battle plans and explains how and why each failed. Cameras view the generals of both nations; German terror weapons demolishing Liege; French poilus liberating and losing the lost provinces of Alsace-Lorraine; and the astonishing French victory at the Marne, won with the aid of the taxicab army.

S1 • E3

The Doomed Dynasties

S1 • E4

Atrocity 1914

This episode examines Germany's war on Belgium and the brutalization of the Belgian people.

S1 • E5

They Sank the Lusitania

"They Sank the Lusitania" examines the causes and effects of Germany's policy of unrestricted submarine warfare. Cameras view the Lusitania; the submarine that sank it; the reaction to the tragedy in the U.S. and England; and scenes shot aboard a German U-boat.

S1 • E6

Verdun the Inferno

Maps and cameras show the strategy and fighting at Verdun in 1916, when German generals attempted to break the Western Front stalemate in a bloody battle that lasted 10 months, wasted hundreds of thousands of lives, and accomplished nothing.

S1 • E7

The Battle of Jutland

S1 • E8

The Trenches

More than anything else, the trenches served to prolong the war and brutalize the soldiers who lived and died in their nightmarish squalor. Cameras view the trench fortifications, the weapons and the tactics developed to attack and defend them, and the Battle of the Somme, where the British introduced the first crude tanks in an attempt to break through the German trench lines.

S1 • E9

D-Day at Gallipoli

In 1915, the Allies attacked the Gallipoli Peninsula in hopes of breaking the stalemate on the Western Front and opening the Black Sea ports of tottering Czarist Russia. Maps and films show the strategy and tragedy on the bloody beaches, where First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill's plan met with disaster.