ITV - Great Battles of the Great War (1999)

For four years, from 1914 to 1918, World War I raged across Europe's western and eastern fronts after assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria ignited the war. Along the 1915 Gallipoli campaign, the savage combat on the Western Front in France and Belgium came to define modern warfare.
The Western Front evokes images of mud-spattered men in waterlogged trenches, shielded from artillery blasts and machine-gun fire by a few feet of dirt. This iconic setting was the most critical arena of the Great War, a 400-mile combat zone stretching from Belgium to Switzerland where more than three million Allied and German soldiers struggled during four years of almost continuous combat. It has persisted in our collective memory as a tragic waste of human life and a symbol of the horrors of industrialized warfare.
The great set-piece battles of the World War One - Gallipoli, the Somme and Messines/Passchendaele - are explored in this landmark series which combines unique archive footage with carefully researched location photography, transporting the viewer back to the exact spot where so many momentous events occurred.

Producer & Director: Ed Skelding ; Produced by ESP for Tyne Tees Television

– The last 3rd episode "Ypres: The Salient" includes 'Director's Extra' bonus chapter(7:51 min) –

Part 1: Gallipoli: The Last Crusade
In April 1915 this was the location for the infamous allied attempt to take the Turkish held Gallipoli Peninsula and control the entrance to the Black Sea.
The failed naval attack and subsequent seaborne landings at ANZAC and Cape Helles ended in humiliating retreat and cost over one hundred thousand lives from all sides.
What must it have felt like to be a soldier in an amphibious landing craft, heading for the beaches of Gallipoli on April 25th, 1915? The Allied troops - which included the ANZACS - had to cross the exposed beaches under a hail of Turkish rifle and machine gun fire. It was a terrible baptism of fire for the soldiers of the Australian Imperial Force.
In the nine-month carnage of Gallipoli, the Allies lost 50,000 killed and gained a tiny foothold which they then abandoned when the 100,000 survivors were evacuated nine months later.

Part 2: Somme: Here Comes the Kitchener's Army
In 1916 Kitchener's New Army was thrown into the chaos of the Western Front in an attempt to break through the German trenches and win the war. It took four and a half months and a million lives to gain only seven miles of blood soaked ground. Here, the machine gun and the tank inflicted killing on an industrial scale. War would never be the same again.
On 1st July 1916, a hundred thousand British soldiers went over the top to begin the Battle of the Somme. They were the raw recruits of Lord Kitchener's New Army. As they walked across no-mans land in perfect formation, they made a perfect target for the German gunners who mowed them down in their hundreds. Wave after wave were cut down and fell in perfectly formed lines, as if on parade. By the end of that first day 20,000 men lay dead, with another 40,000 wounded. It was the worst day in British Military History. By November 1916, the gains were minimal, the slaughter almost incomprehensible. In five months Britain, it has been said, lost her innocence in the face of the pointless loss of so many hundreds of thousands of lives.

Part 3: Ypres: The Salient
In 1917 this Belgian city was to become infamous as the centre of the greatest killing ground of the entire war. Here, in a sea of freezing mud, poisonous gas, a constant rain of high explosive and hail of machine gun fire brought hideous carnage as General Haig gambled his army in an attempt to take the high ground of Passchendaele Ridge.
Straddling the French-Belgian border, the flat, wet and muddy landscape surrounding the small Belgian city of Ypres was the scene of three great battles between 1914 and 1917. It culminated in the final battle known as 'Passchendaele' - in a blood-letting that matched The Somme in desperation and losses. But while the rolling, intimate landscape of The Somme makes it easy to recognise features that would have been familiar to the troops, it's not hard to see why the men who fought over the featureless landscape of Flanders often drowned in a sea of mud.
Of the million British soldiers who died in the Great War, most of them died here. Ypres became synonymous with killing on a grand scale and became a place of special dread for all who were sent there.