World War One

How did WW1 change America's place in the world? Jonathan Dimbleby presents a public debate from the US Library of Congress in Washington

How did technological and industrial development revolutionise World War One? The tank, gas, flame throwers, Zeppelins were like nothing that had been experienced before.

A century ago a shot rang out in Sarajevo which set the world on a path to war. How did the peace made after WW1 influence the ethnic conflicts in the region during the 1990s?

How did World War One change the face of the Middle East? And, how did this seismic and controversial period shape the century to follow?

What drove men to volunteer to fight during World War One? What drove them to the edge of sanity when they got there?

Australia's experience of WW1 is like no other country's. What role has the 'legend of Anzac' played in the hundred-year history of Australia?

Audrey Brown chairs a discussion on the effects of World War One in Africa. She hears the stories from African fighters, on both the German and British sides. And she speaks to Tanzanians who tell their family memories, like Oswald Masebo from Dar es Salaam University.

Life in the trenches during World War One, amongst rats, mud, shelling, barbed wire and unprecedented numbers of dead, called upon new reserves of both endurance and courage. But what did the war do to the ancient idea of heroism?

How Manchester’s Baghdadi Jews fought to be recognised as friends of Britain and Jim the dog who helped keep the Kent coast safe.

Hugely influential in the outcome of the war, its aftermath had a huge effect on India and its role in the British Empire.

The technical innovation that led to the birth of the tank, tales from the grandsons of the Guernsey soldier who travelled all over the world and the factory in Grimsby that supplied the frontline in jam.

Santanu Das tells the story of the Indian Army on the Western Front, from disembarkation in Marseilles where the troops were greeted by excited crowds, to the grim reality of the trenches.

One and a half million Indian men were recruited from the villages and towns of British India to serve the Empire in the First World War. Santanu Das tells the story of how they were recruited to travel across the Kalopani, the "dark waters", to take part in the world's first industrial war.

The Romanovs ruled Russia for centuries until World War One brought revolution and an abrupt end to their imperial reign. Allan Little explores the legacy of revolution and the hidden impact of WW1 on Russian policy today.

A place in the heart of London where the American soldiers got a little taste of home; a project mapping the lives of nearly 2000 men in Tynemouth, Tyne and Wear, who died in WW1 & a song to love and loss based on letters to a Bristolian wife.

Don Black tells the fascinating story of Ivor Novello and the song that made his name. Keep The Home Fires Burning marks the centenary of a song that became popular both in the WW1 trenches and on the home front, and continued to be sung by soldiers in conflicts well into the 1950s. The programme features the best Ivor Novello tunes, some extraordinary Imperial War Museum archive and explores how music was used as a morale booster in the First World War.

The two Merseyside ferries who earned their 'Royal' title in a daring wartime raid, a Coventry memorial which marks the Sikhs role in World War One, and why thousands of mules trotted through the town of Minehead.

In the third part of his documentary looking at the Asian contribution to WW1, Sarfraz Manzoor examines the effect of WW1 on India, nationally and locally. Through letters from servicemen and families, the loss to loved ones becomes clear - not just on an emotional level, but also leading to hardship for farming communities often losing their strongest workers. The beginnings of nationalism can be seen just before the war with the violent activities of the Ghadar party, but a more mainstream nationalist voice gathers increasing strength as the war comes to a close. Besides the contribution of men, in 1918 and 1919, India comes very close to famine as a result of the huge amount of foodstuffs it supplied for the war effort.

Kate Adie reports on the Nottinghamshire munitions factory disaster. Also - the ambulance trains of Lowth & forces sweetheart, Gertie Gitana, who became a wartime music hall star.

Three WW1 characters. Flora Sandes, who enlisted and fought as a soldier in Serbia. Mick Mannock, the British 'Ace of Aces'; and 3 yr old Khaki George, who collected funds for the war effort on the streets of Halifax.

The story of Captain Fryatt - a civilian naval officer executed by the Germans, and the Royal Navy tactic of deploying 'Q ships'. These resembled British merchant ships, to lure the enemy to the surface, but were actually heavily armed with concealed weapons.

Turkey emerged from the First World War as a new republic, with a secular and modern identity, attempting to break from its Ottoman past. How has this influenced Turkey today? With historians Aksin Somel and Ahmet Kuyas, and novelist Elif Shafak.

In the second part of his documentary looking at the Asian contribution to WW1, Sarfraz Manzoor charts the experiences of soldiers and labourers in Mesopotamia and Gallipoli. The story for India changes as the war wears on. Recruitment becomes more draconian, British officers are killed, leaving a void which is not easy to fill, and the pressure on India for food supplies and the resources of war increases. As Turkey enters the war, German and Turkish propaganda plays on the Muslim soldiers' faith and the British Authorities take very seriously the threat of mutiny.

Sarfraz Manzoor tells the story of the 1.27m men from the Indian Army who fought valiantly in the Great War, through a series of the soldiers' letters written home from Western Front. This first episode of a three part series focuses on the make-up of the army in 1914, including the colonial policy to recruit from what were considered the martial races - communities with a warrior tradition.

Two time Olympic gold medalist Steve Williams tells the story of Frederick "Clegg" Kelly, Olympic rowing champion and one of Britain's leading composers, who lost his life on the battlefield in WW1.

Ex-Northampton Town player Clarke Carlisle tells the story of Walter Tull, the first Afro-Caribbean outfield player in the top division of English football, and the first to be commissioned as an infantry officer in the British Army. Clarke retraces the steps that took Tull from the playing field of Northampton Town to the place where he lost life fighting for his country.

Radio 1's Greg James hears from British troops who served in Afghanistan as they contrast their experiences with those who fought in World War One. Mixing new interviews from Afghanistan veterans with archive of those who endured the trenches, this story brings out the universality of experience of going to war: the joining up, the camaraderie, the killing, the trauma and the loss, as well as asking if all wars change those who fight in them in similar ways.

Woman's Hour goes behind the scenes at new Radio 4 drama Home Front, as it begins its four-year run. Actor Harriet Walter talks about her cameo role as Emmeline Pankhurst, and we hear from the writers about the opportunity to dramatise the domestic lives of people whose stories aren’t told in military history books. Plus Emma Barnett is joined by Home Front editor Jessica Dromgoole and academic Dr Angela K Smith to discuss the war's impact on the lives of women far away from the trenches.

The valiant Sikh contribution, the drama of those first training flights above the meadows of Oxfordshire, and a bittersweet story of two families brought together by love and loss.

Leading Whitehall historian Peter Hennessy examines Britain's secret war planning and preparations before 1914. Drawing on official papers, sound archive, and interviews with historians, Hennessy discusses what was in the minds of Asquith, ministers, officials and top soldiers and sailors, as they prepared for a possible conflict and as they finally took Britain into war in August 1914. He explores tensions between senior military and naval officers, between the Admiralty and the War Office, and within the Cabinet, and shows how debates and divisions shaped the war plans and influenced their effectiveness.

The tank, gas, flame throwers, Zeppelins - the weapons of World War One were like nothing that had been experienced before. At a special event with the British Council, Amanda Vickery and her guests explore the waging of war, its methods and morality, at the German Military Museum in Dresden.

Poet Ruth Padel reflects on German artist Kathe Kollwitz's memorial for her son, who died on the battlefields of the First World War in October 1914. The German painter, printmaker and sculptor created some of the greatest and most searing accounts of the tragedies of poverty, hunger and war in the 20th century. The death of her youngest son Peter prompted a prolonged period of deep depression, but by the end of that year she was turning her thoughts to creating a monument to him and his fallen comrades. The final memorial, entitled The Grieving Parents, was finally completed in 1932 and placed in the cemetery where Peter lay.

Santanu Das discusses Indian poet Sarojini Naidu's 1917 collection The Broken Wing. Born in Hyderabad in 1879, Naidu became known as "the Nightingale of India" for her work as a poet and also as an Indian independence activist. Das reflects on the importance of Naidu's work and on the impact of the First World War on the Indian fight for independence.

BBC Correspondent Lyse Doucet introduces novelist Edith Wharton's reportage from wartime France. Wharton, best known for The Age Of Innocence and The House of Mirth, was granted unique access to the Western front and wrote one of the most evocative and undeservedly neglected accounts of life in France in World War One. In its pages, penned early in the war, are Wharton's painterly descriptions of the country's overnight transformation from peace to war, her deep love for France and its people, and her accounts of the destruction wrought upon the villages and towns in the path of the German invader.

For Russians of director Sergei Eisenstein's generation, the experience of the First World War was overtaken by the revolution of 1917, which took Russia out of the war and plunged it into a bitter civil war from which the infant Bolshevik Soviet state emerged. Eisenstein seized the opportunity of serving in the Red Army to become a radical theatre director, which led him into film as part of the first generation of Soviet film-makers, who would astonish the world in the late 1920s with films like The Battleship Potemkin and October. These films would shape the cultural and political landscape of the interwar years - championed by those who wanted to condemn the Great War as an imperialist struggle, and also foreshadowing the Second World War. Film historian Ian Christie untangles this complex story.

Completed in 1916, Le Feu was the first explicit account of conditions at the front. French soldier Henri Barbusse's novel proved a revelation to a French public sold a sentimental line by the press of the time. Yet Le Feu, with its deep insights into the emotions of men at war, was not seen as damaging to home-front morale. Here was a new kind of writing in which rural dialects and working-class accents conveyed heroism, and could be literary, even transcendent. Dr Heather Jones reflects on Barbusse's novel.

The declaration of war in 1914 was initially met with jubilation by the people of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and, in Vienna, Sigmund Freud shared their mood. But, like his fellow-citizens, Freud expected a quick war. By February 1915, with two of his sons fighting and thousands of injured and traumatised soldiers returning from the front, his feelings had changed. Michael Shapira reflects on Freud's 1915 text, Thoughts for the Times on War and Death.

Professor David Edgerton reflects on a WW1 clarion-call from the British scientific establishment. In a letter to The Times in 1916, many of the great names of British science declared their belief that both academic and applied science were being treated as Cinderella subjects. The Germans, they surmised, had got their act together and were outflanking the British military effort in chemical warfare, armaments and generally taking science more seriously. Edgerton finds out what was going on at the time and looks at how the First World War advanced British science.

In 1924, six years after the end of hostiliies, the painter Otto Dix, who had been a machine-gunner in the German Army, produced his 51 Der Krieg prints. Gruesome, hallucinatory, and terribly frank, these postcards of conflict tell the soldier's ghastly tale. Cartoonist Martin Rowson, whose own work is similarly direct and uncompromising, tells Dix's story and ponders why Der Krieg remains such a powerful statement.

Rose Macaulay is perhaps best remembered for her final novel, The Towers of Trebizond, but her biographer, Sarah LeFanu, has long believed that her earlier 1916 novel, Non-Combatants and Others, is a work of striking originality. She argues for its importance to our understanding of the impact of the First World War, not only on soldiers at the front, but on the entire nation.

CRW Nevinson's painting Paths of Glory is a distant cry from the rallying recruitment posters that appeared at the start of the war. It depicts the bloated corpses of two dead soldiers, stretched out in the mud, against a backdrop of tangled barbed wire somewhere on the Western Front. Unsurprisingly, it was censored at the time. Allan Little considers the continuing power of Nevinson's painting and the role of art both in recruiting soldiers and in denouncing war.

'Oh what a lovely Savas' begins Rana Mitter in this edition of Free Thinking, using the Turkish word for War. Rana and guests discuss the roles of Turkey, India, China and Japan in World War I, and how the very legitimacy of the idea of Empire was possibly the biggest ideological casualty of WW1.