BBC – The Somme: From Defeat to Victory (2006)
English | Documentary | Size: 1.12 GB
Drama-documentary which offers a new perspective on the most infamous battle of World War I, revealing how it was on the Somme that the British Army learnt to fight a modern war.
The Somme is usually seen as the darkest hour of the British Army. Almost 20,000 British soldiers died on the first day of battle alone, and a further 37,000 were wounded. British commanders were vilified and the Somme became synonymous with military incompetence. But there was more to the Somme than just senseless slaughter – because it was of those blood-soaked fields that the British Army learned how to defeat its German enemy….
Based on real accounts, “The Somme – From Defeat To Victory” follows a group of friends from the north of England, mates from the local church, who joined up together to fight for king and country. Walter Fiddes was a shop assistant, Stephen Sharples a builder, and Thomas Mellor a travelling salesman. They would fight – and die – side by side on 1 July 1916, just three of the 20,000 who fell on the first day of the Somme. It was the bloodiest day in British military history.
But there was much more to the Somme than senseless slaughter. This program challenges the traditional view of the battle as a disaster and reveals how it was the Somme that taught the British Army how to fight a modern war. The film shows how men like Lt. Colonel Frank Maxwell and Private Frederick Edwards would help turn initial defeat into ultimate victory.
Two months after the failure of 1 July, Maxwell, a maverick battalion commander, led a daring raid on the German positions where Mellor, Fiddes, and Sharples had been killed. The fighting was savage, but with the help of innovative tactics – such as the ‘creeping barrage’ and one of the first ever tanks – Maxwell, Edwards and company eventually defeated their German enemy. Private Edwards, who couldn’t read or write, won the Victoria Cross for his heroics and Lt. Colonel Maxwell was promoted to command a brigade.
For the very first time this major BBC production - commissioned to mark the 90th anniversary of the Somme – reveals what it was really like to be an ordinary British soldier going ‘over the top’ in 1916 and how British tactics changed to turn a terrible defeat into ultimate victory.
The Somme mixes realistic drama based on historically- sourced actual events, archive and documentary footage and CGI to bring the extraordinary events of the Somme to life for a modern audience, while its dramatisation of real experiences provides a soldier’s eye view of the fighting as never before. It has been made with the advice of some of the world’s top military historians. The result is a film that is both deeply moving and offers a radical new perspective on the Somme, putting the terrible events of 1 July into their proper historical context.
Written, Produced & Directed by Detlef Siebert ; A BBC / Military Channel / The Open University / NDR Norddeutscer Rundfunk Co-Production
Narrator: Alisdair Simpson
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