Doctor Who - Documentary s06e21 Episode Script

Look, Zoe.
1917 Zone, Roman Zone.
American Civil War Zone.
This whole place is divided into Time Zones.
Jamie! MARTIN FARR: The First World War began in August, 1914 and ended in November, 1918.
It was a conflict which affected all parts of the globe.
It was also the first genuinely industrial or total war, as we call it.
CRISPIN SWAYNE: The First World War started with the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, by Gavrilo Princip, who was a Serbian Bosnian.
Although that's put down as the beginning of the First World War, it would be hard to say that it was one man's fault.
The European empires, which was the Austro-Hungarian, and the Ottoman, the English Empire certainly, and Germany and France, they all had territories all around the world.
Essentially, they were squaring up for a kind of European civil war.
The declaration of war is met not by public despair that a war was to take place, but by enormous enthusiasm and patriotism, and recruiting officers being overwhelmed by young men who want to go out and fight.
What are they dug into the ground like this for? Well, it's trench warfare, you see, Jamie.
These trenches stretch right the way across the continent of Europe.
FARR: The German advance through Belgium into France is stopped by the British and French.
To take advantage of the territory they have acquired, the Germans dig in.
SWAYNE: Although there were still men and horses on the battlefield, and that's how battles had always been fought, what was creeping onto the battlefield since the Industrial Revolution was metal.
It consisted of huge guns that could fire enormous projectiles into the opposing enemy's lines.
And also the development of something quite horrific, which I'm sure everyone knows about now, called the machine gun.
With the machine gun, it was hundreds of bits of metal, which were propelled through the air towards the enemy.
Come on! Get down.
Get down.
FARR: One of the problems with trenches for the generals, if you like, is that most of the generals were cavalrymen, who had been used to and had learnt their trade through fast-moving actions.
They suddenly find themselves with a war which is lead by technology rather than by mobility.
And their response to this is often to send troops, what we say is, ''over the top''.
Of course, when you have machine guns and mines and barbed wire, this often means the troops get slaughtered.
Which is the case in many of the actions in the war.
Along here, we shall have pill boxes, machine-gun nests, land mines.
You'll have no chance.
But it will be an excellent test of the morale of your humans.
Your entire force will be wiped out.
By 1916, the condition in the trenches was bad and it was getting worse.
FARR: The troops were faced with conditions which were very uncomfortable and often dangerous.
Flooding was quite common, which lead to trench foot, where the feet actually became mouldy and many of them had to be amputated.
Right, sir, we'll go over the top at 0400 hours.
Sir As you say, sir.
Battle of the Somme begins on the 1st of July, 1916.
It is in France.
It is in the British sector of the Western Front.
It is intended to punch a hole through the German defences and bring the war to a swift conclusion.
At 7:30 in the morning, on the 1st of July, 1916, British troops were ordered over the top.
And they walked towards the German lines that they felt had been devastated by the artillery bombardment of the previous few days.
In fact, the Germans come out of their much deeper holes in their trenches and open fire.
On the first day of The Somme, there were 67,000 casualties.
It was the worst day in British military history.
Social historians have described the 1st of July, 1916, as the day when a generation was lost.
This was warfare gone out of control.
This was This was the worst that war could possibly be.
Where's your hospital? Well, you're going to think me awfully silly, but I can't quite remember.
Memory's a funny thing out here.
Can't always remember things myself.
Sometimes wonder if I've got a touch of the old shell shock.
Today we have a recognised medical condition called Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
In 1914, the condition wasn't recognised.
And it was called, in a loose sense, shell shock.
And it was often interpreted by superior officers that shell shock was merely cowardice or a lack of moral fibre.
Many of these troops were actually sentenced to death.
And there's lots of very moving testimony from soldiers who were forced to go into a firing squad.
In many cases, there'd be nine soldiers firing at a convicted man.
Squad, attention! Present.
Aim! (GUN FIRING) And when the smoke had cleared, they'd find out that they'd all been deliberately missing the soldier.
In which case, the officer would come up and shoot the man through his temple with the officer's revolver.
The soldiers themselves couldn't bring themselves to kill what was often a teenager, who had broken down or couldn't fight any more.
SWAYNE: 1917 was a turning point in the war.
We started to see Americans coming over and so that was a great help.
As far as the war of attrition, having the Americans on our side meant there was a lot more resources, a lot more men to throw into the war machine.
What a way to fight, though.
Hiding in wee holes, and blasting each other with big guns.
(EXPLOSIVE RUMBLING) Oh, I wish we could get out of here, Jamie.
The war of attrition had absolutely wiped out the flower of European youth.
And we see the rise of America and Japan on the other side of the world after this, as new superpowers stepped onto the stage.
The empires, in a bid to outdo each other, had destroyed each other.
JAMIE: Well, where are we going, Doctor? Anywhere but the 1917 zone, Jamie.
(INHALES DEEPLY) That's better.
(MAN SHOUTING) What's that? Oh, come on! SWAYNE: There were drills, tactics and weapons that made the Roman army the most unassailable, the most brilliant empire in the ancient world.
Roman warfare was very much a formal event.
They preferred to fight in serried ranks.
They had set techniques for dealing with certain situations.
If they were trying to attack a gateway of a town or something, they had what was called the "Tortoise Formation", where they used their shields to form a wall around the men and over the men.
So, anybody on the town walls throwing things down on the soldiers, it was just going to bounce off the shields.
Much of the evidence available to a classical archaeologist, is in the literary evidence and the sculptural evidence.
But you need things like Vindolanda writing tablets to put the meat on the bones, to find out exactly how an individual soldier felt.
You get letters home asking for more socks and underpants.
You get chitties asking for leave.
You get a splendid report where somebody has been sent off somewhere in charge of a group of men, but hasn't been told what to do with them when he got there.
You get a wonderful picture of the day-to-day life of an ordinary soldier, and it wasn't all battles.
It was mostly complaining about weevils in the bread and such like.
ZOE: Where do you think we are, Doctor? I think we're about there.
America, 1862.
That was the American Civil War, wasn't it? The American Civil War was a war fought between 1861 and 1865, between the Northern forces of the Union, and the Southern forces of the Confederacy.
The North had this concept called "The Slave Power", and it related to what they perceived to be Southern dominance of the federal government.
With the election of Lincoln in 1860, South Carolina, which was a state that had a history of long run-ins with the Union, finally decided that it wanted to leave and govern itself.
And many other Southern states agreed with it, with some pressure being put on them.
They do know there's a risk of war.
And, we can tell this because they start trying to get control of federal arsenals in the South.
So they suspect the Union is not going to let them go easily.
Where do you come from? What are you doing here? Well, that's rather difficult to explain, actually.
But, you're English.
I'm not, I'm a Scot.
You're English.
Spies for the South.
Oh, not again.
Look, we're not spies.
We are nothing to do with your war.
We're neutral.
In a civil war, ma'am, no one's neutral.
Lincoln believed in the territorial integrity of the United States.
And he also believed, that this really wasn't, this wasn't a war for a separate nation.
This was rebellion within one nation.
Go out on sentry duty.
(GUNSHOTS) Rebs! Sergeant, too many of them.
SWAYNE: It was the beginning of total war.
The Union troops realised that the only way that they could beat the Confederate spirit was if they wiped out their base of support.
And this reached its ultimate conclusion in Sherman's March to the Sea.
GRANT: Sherman's March is seen as this ultimate act of destruction on the South.
He was marching fast, so his men were living off the land.
It was a 60-mile-wide swathe of the army.
I mean, that's what was moving through Georgia SWAYNE: Destroying farms, whole communities, towns, grain silos, anything that could support the Confederate army, and then headed north and destroyed the capital of the Confederate Alliance.
The two most famous Generals of the American Civil War are Ulysses S.
Grant, who fought for the Union, and Robert E.
Lee, who led Confederate troops.
By the end, really, Grant is effectively besieging Petersburg and Richmond.
And, they were in trenches, and Lee is trying to hold them off.
And it becomes obvious that he can really no longer do so.
Grant gives very, very lenient terms of surrender.
So, officers were allowed to keep their side arms and go home.
Of course, Americans lost the Civil War, as well as won it.
So from the American psyche point of view, it's a very challenging conflict for them to come to terms with.
I am not your prisoner, Moor.
I am your commanding officer, do you understand? I'm not, I'm not in the army.
The resistance I'm in.
You're in the British Army, Private Moor.
The year is 1871.
You're in the British Army.
And I am your commanding officer.
The mystery of Private Moor from 1871 was that there were no wars actually going on at that time.
British private, aren't you? 19th century? You can see that, can't you? He looks like he's wearing a red coat.
There would have been red coats everywhere.
But as far as actual fighting, maybe putting down some local insurrections, and that could've been Abyssinia, Afghanistan, or in New Zealand, perhaps.
But maybe they got the date wrong.
Very well, if you prefer to die, that's your affair.
(GUNSHOT) SWAYNE: Watching The War Games, first off, with Doctor Who arriving in World War I, I thought, that's not a bad World War I landscape for a limited budget, late '60s filming.
You've got these actors pretending to be Confederates with wonderful accents.
Now, don't you worry, ma'am.
You're safe now.
I'm sure very accurate.
(CHUCKLES) And then the Union is represented by a black soldier.
And that's quite dramatic, because generally people believe, quite rightly, that African-Americans were not properly portrayed in terms of their role in the Civil War until the film Glory, which was about the Massachusetts 54th Regiment from Boston.
-Pull them off.
-Where to? -The trail due north going south.
-Right.
I was very confused when I saw the group of soldiers that Doctor Who was facing because they didn't seem to be the right number for any known unit in the Roman Army.
And a small unit like that shouldn't have been wandering around with a legionary standard.
Is this where we were attacked by the Romans? Yeah.
(MEN YELLING) ALLISON-JONES: They certainly shouldn't have had a war chariot.
And I wouldn't have liked to be on a war chariot, on that rough ground.
War chariots don't have springs.
Would've been very uncomfortable.
I think as a child watching The War Games, Doctor Who, may well have sparked some kind of interest in what all those uniforms were.
What was that history? Where did it come from? Because, certainly, Doctor Who had me gripped when I was watching it as a boy.