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Voices of the First World War

Factual: History

Archive interviews with those who experienced the First World War.

Voices of the First World War: 1917

09/11/2018

1917

BBC Radio 4 Extra - Voices of the First World War, 1917

The story of WW1 in 1917 told through archive interviews with those who were there.

Drawing on the archives of the BBC and Imperial War Museum, Dan Snow introduces the events of the First World War in 1917 through interviews with those who were there.

Reaching 1917, Dan Snow explores the events of the year through the recollections of those who were there. As the fighting became more and more desperate, in the air, on the Western Front - even below ground in extensive mining operations - the morale of those being sent into battle was at times becoming dangerously low. We reach the darkest days of the war with the Third Battle of Ypres. Dan Snow, based on location in Ypres and listening to the accounts of those who survived the place a century ago, attempts to grasp the unimaginable horror that marked this period of the war on the Western Front.

As they inched their way towards Passchendaele from July to November 1917, men witnessed scenes that would stay vividly with them for the rest of their lives. As Norman Macmillan, officer of the Royal Flying Corps, surveying the Battle of Passchendaele from the sky, said of it: 'Never at any time had I passed through such an extraordinary experience... Real damnation on the ground. And as we came out of it I felt that we had escaped from one of the most evil things I had ever seen at any time during that war'.

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