PegEntLtd's video: BRITAIN AT WAR - DEFENDING THE EMPIRE

DISC 1 THE HISTORY OF WORLD WAR TWO Britain's response to Germany's Blitzkrieg invasion of Poland in 1939 was the British Expeditionary Force, sent to Europe to prevent the Germans following their successful airborne invasion of the Low Countries with an armoured assault against France. The BEF'S enforced, heroic withdrawal at Dunkirk - shown here in dramatic film footage - left the Royal Air Force, under Sir Hugh Dowding, to win the Battle of Britain and postpone Nazi invasion plans indefinitely. The Royal Navy's early fortunes on the high seas under First Lord ( soon to be Prime Minister) Winston Churchill are followed, as are the desert tank battles in North Africa, where British armour prevailed under general O'Connor at Torbruk. DISC 2 THE BOER WAR The Story Of Britain's Last Great Imperial War. When Britain went to war against the Boers in October 1899, the British public expected the fighting to be over by Christmas. As it turned out, The Boer War, in Kipling's famous phrase, gave the British 'no end of a lesson'. Using accounts of the soldiers who fought in this bitter and bloody clash-of-arms and remarkable contemporary photographs, the programme tells the story of Britain's last great Imperial war. DISC 3 THE GREAT WAR - THE STORY OF WW 1 1914-1918 On 20th June 1914 the assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire at Sarajevo set the stage for the global conflict diplomats and dynasties alike had said would never happen. But the holocaust that followed was all too real. Within weeks of Archduke Ferdinand's death, Europe was mobilising to fight the war to end all wars - a war that would leave nine million dead and change the face of the globe. The tinder suspicion, smouldering for decades, was fanned into violent life by German ambition: the union of 35 states forged in the 1870 Franco-Prussian war was ready to test its strength, and three decades of covert construction saw them in a position to enter the superpower stage on more than equal terms. On August 1914, the German s rampaged through neutral Belgium, but lost their momentum: in the Flanders fields, Howitzers carved out a blighted wasteland strewn with the dead of both sides. The air was in its infancy, and cavalry gave way to tanks, but this was a war fought hand-to-hand in trenches: Verdun, the Somme and Passchendaele were names that passed into the language as symbolic of the massive waste of life. Verdun survived a ten-month German bombardment the longest ever in the history of warfare- but at the cost of 700,000 lives overall, while British losses at Somme were the greatest of any wartime army to date. As soldiers faced their third winter, they bitterly recalled the promise made in 1914 that they'd be 'home by Christmas'. They were not told which one... The slaughter on the battlefields of Europe still had far to go, as the entrenched armies of Germany and the Allies wiped out a whole generation of young men to control a few yards of mud. But the utter exhaustion of men and nations was relieved by the new theatre of conflict in the skies with air supremacy becoming a key factor in the war, and a symbol of a new era of glamorous warfare. Germany's all-out-U-Boat offensive, America's declaration of war and the subsequent battle of the Atlantic proved a turning point in allied fortunes as the development of the tank also helped break the impasse of arms movement back to the trenches. Available to buy from: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Britain-At-War-Defending-Empire/dp/B00061RYZM/ref=sr_1_1?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1308750583&sr=1-1