Hopes for a new century of peace and progress die with the assassination of Austrian Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo. The great powers mobilize and seem unable or unwilling to stop the march to war.
"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.
This episode examines Germany's war on Belgium and the brutalization of the Belgian people.
"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.
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.
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.
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.