War Documentary Films

This Time Team Special was first screened to mark the 90th anniversary of the end of World War One. It follows the excavation of a large dugout, 14 metres beneath the surface of a corn field near Ypres, which was constructed on land captured from the Germans in the 1917 offensive to provide respite from [...]

In 1914, when WWI began, the aeroplane was so new that the British had never used it in battle before. Eager recruits, some as young as 17, rushed to join the British army’s new aircraft service – the Royal Flying Corps – and quickly came up against Germany’s hunting squadrons and most notorious fighter pilot, [...]

World War I was the first time aeroplanes were deployed for warfare. The then rickety flying machines fought crucial dogfights as both sides struggled for air supremacy. Flying aces like Manfred von Richthofen, aka The Red Baron, won fame and glory for their aerial expertise. Four Years of Thunder reveals, for the first time, the [...]

The Great War is one of the most ambitious and prestigious series ever produced by the BBC. Drawing on over one million feet of film, hundreds of exclusive interviews and contemporary diaries and letters, this documentary masterpiece is by far the most comprehensive film history of World War One ever made. A truly epic production [...]

Universally acclaimed as one of the finest documentary series ever made about the Great War, Channel 4′s The First World War is a powerful, original and truly comprehensive account of the conflict. It places the war in a truly global military context as never before, exploring many of the little known campaigns, battles and actions [...]

The story of the Great War told from a unique new aerial perspective. Featuring two remarkable historical finds, including a piece of archive footage filmed from an airship in summer 1919, capturing the trenches and battlefields in a way that’s rarely been seen before. And aerial photographs taken by First World War pilots – developed [...]

It began as a regional conflict and escalated into a war of empires that covered the earth. Here for the first time on DVD is the complete 26 volume CBS News series, “The Complete Story of World War I”. Narrated by Robert Ryan, this documentary series is more than just the history of this global [...]

Australians at War is a documentary series that shows the impact of war on Australians. It looks at Australian military history from the Boer War to East Timor. The series draws on a wide range of archive film and stills as well as interviews with those who took part in the various conflicts, and includes [...]

The 1st of July 1916 was the bloodiest day in British military history. But there was much more to the Somme than senseless slaughter. The Somme: From Defeat to Victory challenges the traditional view of the battle as a disaster and reveals how it was on the Somme that the British Army learnt to fight [...]

With his expert knowledge of weapons and warfare and using specially commissioned maps, Richard Holmes provides a clear picture of the events which led up to each battle, the conflicts themselves, and the people who fought them. Using practical “views of the field”, he travels the battlefields as they exist today, pointing out their places [...]

20th Century Battlefields is a documentary series presented by Peter and Dan Snow. The father and son team take a look at some of the world’s most bloodiest battles that happened during the 20th century.          

The largest amphibious assault, it became the most public disaster of the Allied campaign in WWI, destroyed reputations including those of Churchill and Kitchener, and created a war hero for the Turks, Kemal Ataturk, who went on to found modern Turkey. Military historians have consistently represented the Gallipoli disaster as the result of commander incompetence. [...]

Tony Robinson joins a unique dig near Mametz on the frontline of the Somme battlefield, where he uncovers British trenches with all their remnants of life and death from nearly a century ago. In the half-light of dawn, during World War I, a small metal nozzle pushed its way up through the ground in No [...]

In Their Footsteps is a 10-part series about Australian families rising to the challenges, enduring the deprivations and dealing with the lasting scars of war. In Their Footsteps will shine a bright new light on Australia’s wartime history, bridging the past to the present for a modern generation of viewers.           [...]

The First Blitz In January 1915, in a Zeppelin raid on the Norfolk town of Great Yarmouth, Sam Smith became the first British civilian to die as a result of aerial bombing. In the words of those who lived through it, Timewatch tells the forgotten story of the ‘First Blitz’. It was a three-year terror [...]