WWI: The Hundred Days Offensive
Witness History
BBC
4.5 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 7 September 2018
⏱️ 12 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
First-hand accounts of the Allied offensive which finally brought the war to an end. The offensive took place on the Western Front in the summer and autumn of 1918. After years of trench warfare, Allied forces managed to break through and force the German army into full retreat. In November 1918, Germany was forced to sign an armistice to end the war. But the human cost of those final battles was immense. The Allies and the German army suffered more than one million casualties each, Using BBC archive recordings of veterans, Alex Last tells the story of the final 100 Days Offensive.
Photo: A British tank rolls through devastated Bapaume, which was shelled during the Hundred Days Offensive in 1918. (Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Choosing what to watch night after night the flicking through the endless |
| 0:06.8 | searching is a nightmare we want to help you on our brand new podcast off the |
| 0:11.8 | telly we share what we've been watching |
| 0:14.0 | Cladie Aide. |
| 0:16.0 | Load to games, loads of fun, loads of screaming. |
| 0:19.0 | Lovely. Off the telly with me Joanna Paige. |
| 0:21.0 | And me, Natalie Cassidy, so your evenings can be a little less |
| 0:24.9 | searching and a lot more watching listen on BBC sounds. Choosing what to |
| 0:32.1 | watch night after night the flicking through the endless |
| 0:36.5 | searching is a nightmare we want to help you on our brand new podcast off the |
| 0:41.5 | telly we share what we've been watching. |
| 0:43.7 | Cladie Aide! |
| 0:45.7 | Loads of games, loads of fun, loads of screaming. |
| 0:48.2 | Lovely. |
| 0:49.0 | Off the telly with me Joanna Paige. |
| 0:51.2 | And me, Natalie Cassidy, so your evenings can be a little less |
| 0:54.7 | searching and a lot more watching listen on BBC sounds hello and welcome to |
| 1:00.6 | the witness podcast from the BBC World Service with me Alex Last. |
| 1:04.9 | This episode is part of our centenary series on the First World War. |
| 1:09.4 | I've been listening to first-hand accounts from the BBC Archives to tell the story of the |
| 1:14.1 | huge Allied offensive on the Western Front which finally brought the catastrophic |
| 1:18.9 | war to an end. You could feel a hair pickling up your spine with excitement because we knew that that was going to be the end of the war. |
... |
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