Lesson video

Hello year six and welcome back.

I'm Mr. Hutchinson, and this is less than two of our unit on 20th century conflict.

Really excited to be with you.

Really excited to be learning a little bit more about this fascinating period of history.

If you haven't already had a chance, stop the video now and do the quiz, the pre-quiz for this lesson, which will recap all of your knowledge on the last lesson when we were learning about the First World War and the events that led up to the First World War, the different conditions in Europe that meant that every country in Europe became involved in this huge conflict.

So, if you haven't had a chance, pause the video and do the quiz now.

Okay, done? Knowledge whizzing around in your head? Great.

Doing those quizzes regularly is a brilliant way to fix the knowledge in your head.

So keep doing those quizzes, well done.

Let's go straight into today's lesson.

And in today's lesson, we're going to look at the actual events of the First World War.

And our key question is, why were so many lives lost on the Western Front? So we're going to look at this place called the Western Front and why so many lives in this war were lost.

Like you're going to need an exercise book.

So if you're lucky enough to have a book knocking around the house, then you can use that book so that all of your work is together in one place.

If you don't, not to worry, you can just use some pieces of paper that you have around the house to write down your answers.

But it is important to pause the video and write out those answers.

It will stick in your brain so much better if you do so make sure you have a piece of paper ready to go and do those tasks.

Of course you will need a pen so when I say pause, you're ready to go and you can start writing those answers down.

That's going to help you.

And, as always, I need your brain in tip-top condition, ready to be filled with lots more knowledge all about 20th century conflict and the First World War.

Remember we have our knowledge organiser, a really useful way to get an overview of all of the key facts and lots of the quiz questions are going to come from this knowledge organiser because it's all of the key people, the key events, the key vocabulary that you will need to be successful in these lessons.

In today's lesson, we're going to be looking at a few different areas.

First, we're going to look at some of the new weaponry, the new weapons that were used during the First World War and how it made it a little bit different to wars that have come before it.

We'll also be looking at life in the trenches.

What life was like in these trenches and trench warfare.

We're going to focus on one particular battle.

There were lots of battles, the Battle of Ypres, there was a Battle of Verdun.

There were lots and lots of really important battles, but we're going to focus on perhaps the most famous, which is the Battle of the Somme.

Then we'll look at when America joins the war later on, key turning point in the First World War.

And finally you have your end of lesson quiz, tie everything together, summary to make sure you fix in your brain those key pieces of information that you need to remember so you've really mastered this subject.

First part of our lesson, new weaponry.

Here we go.

In the First World War, there were lots of new weapons, some had kind of been used before, but not to this extent and the technological advances were huge.

And so it changed the way that warfare went.

First of all, we're going to look at five different weapons that really made the First World War an utter bloodbath and meant that millions of lives were lost during this war.

And the first was this, the Mark V tank.

This tank, it was used by the Allies and it was especially helpful during the trench warfare.

One of the reasons for that is because it was bulletproof so it could drive across no man's land into the opposition trenches and the enemy couldn't shoot it with their guns.

It also had either a cannon or some had a machine gun.

So one version, and it was called the male version, had a cannon, and the female version had a machine gun.

So once it got to the opposition, it was able to unleash those weapons.

But it wasn't really ready until later on in the war and it's one of the reasons that the war starts to come to a close and trench warfare started to not be such a big problem.

Our second big weapon.

So this is called, well, its nickname was the Big Bertha.

You can see here the people standing next to it.

So you can see just how big this weapon was.

A huge gun, a huge artillery gun.

It was used by the Germans.

This gun had a range of eight miles.

So the artillery could be way far back and it could fire this gun and still obliterate the opposition.

It was used across the war but often when attacking cities in Belgium, because you could park just outside the city and launch a huge shell, explosive shell on the enemy.

And those shells, I mean that they're huge.

They could be up to a tonne.

That's about the same weight as a car.

And that's a huge metal shell full of explosives being fired eight miles through the air, very, very high up and landing on buildings or the enemy causing a huge explosion.

So we've got the Big Bertha.

That wasn't the only artillery gun that the Germans had though.

Big Bertha had a range of eight miles.

This next artillery gun, the Paris Gun, also used by the Germans, had a range of 80 miles.

And you can see just how long it is.

So, whereas Big Bertha is quite stout, it's quite short, it's quite compact.

The Paris Gun is this huge weapon.

You can see the people standing for scale there, just how large it was.

And that meant that its range could be up to 80 miles.

So they didn't even need to be near a city.

They could be 80 miles away and it was called the Paris Gun because it was often used by the Germans to bombard Paris when they got to France.

Now, because it was such a long gun, it wasn't able to fire such large shells, but it could still fire a 90 kilogramme shell.

Now to put that in perspective, I'm about, I think about 70 kilogrammes, maybe about 70 kilogrammes.

So the shells that were going into this gun were much heavier than me and they were being fired 80 miles at the enemy.

The next gun, another German, sorry, the next weapon, another German weapon was the Type 93 U-boat.

And this was a submarine.

One of the first submarines used in warfare.

Now, its battery wasn't too good.

So when it went underground, when it went underground, when it went underwater, sorry, it could only last for about an hour underwater.

Otherwise it would have to be on the surface.

So it would, it would drive around on the surface until it saw an enemy ship.

And then it would go underground, because it could last for about an hour.

And once it was under the water, it will be able to fire torpedoes at enemy ships, at the Allied ships, at either American or or Allied British or French ships.

And it had six torpedo tubes and was able to reload those 16 times.

So it could find lots and lots of torpedoes at enemy ships.

Over the course of the First World War the Type 93 U-boat, the German submarines, sank 410,000 tonnes worth of Allied ships.

So this was really a bit of a game changer, because those ships would have been taking supplies, food, ammunition, weapons, to different countries around Europe to be used in the war.

And so if the U-boats were able to sink those ships, then they would have a huge advantage because they would stop lots of weapons getting to the Allied forces.

Our last weapon, perhaps most importantly, and we'll talk about why in a moment.

Our last weapons is the machine gun.

Now, before this, rifles, guns, they were very slow to reload.

So they were used in war before this way, way back, even in the American Civil War.

Those weapons took a long time to reload.

Sometimes they even have to be manually reloaded, shot by shot.

So you'd put a bullet into the bottom, into the barrel of the gun, a bit of gunpowder, dump it down.

You have to put a bit of cloth down there, fire, and then start loading it again and it might take a minute or two to reload your guns.

You only get one shot.

The machine gun is entirely different and in the First World War, the machine gun was improved and used across the war.

So the Allied version was called the Vickers machine gun.

The Germans had a version as well.

This gun could fire 500 bullets per minute.

Think about that for a moment.

Before we were talking about the muskets that might be able to fire one or two shots a minute, even the normal rifles, if you're a skilled rifleman or being able to reload, you might be able to get off five or six shots a minute, maybe a few more.

500 rounds per minute changed the way that war was done.

And those rounds were effective up to about 2000 metres, about two kilometres.

So if you have a load of field in front of you with all of the enemy and you had one of these machine guns, the enemy really didn't stand a chance.

You could tear them in half.

So here's your first task for today.

I'm going to put those weapons back up and I'd like you to describe each of them.

If you need to, you can skip back in the video and hear about them again.

If you'd like to, you could even do a little bit of independent research yourself, but describe each of these weapons that were used in the First World War and how they made the First World War very different to previous wars.

So we've got that Paris gun, the Vickers machine gun, Big Bertha, the Type 93 U-boat, and the Mark V tank.

Pause the video, write down a description of each of those guns and how they changed the way that war happened.

Okay, I hope you got some great notes about the importance of how these new weapons changed war.

Part of doing great history is thinking about change and continuity.

What changes, what stays the same, and the new weaponry, the new technology, really changed how war was done.

As a result of these weapons, especially this one, the Vickers machine gun, as a result of these weapons, the First World War was a trench war.

Trenches had been used in war before, but traditionally in war it was mostly done on maybe like cavalry, sort of horses.

People would meet in open fields and they might exchange shots or do close-quarter combat, maybe even using swords.

This was a different kind of war.

Now that you've got this machine gun, you can't do that anymore.

If you go into a field to face the enemy, if they've got one Vickers machine gun, they can just fire off those 500 shots per minute and take down an entire battalion.

And so to combat this, both sides dug trenches.

They dug ditches down and then hid in those so that if you fired a machine gun, it just whizzed over your head 'cause you're hiding in your trench and these trenches spanned right across Europe, right across the west of Europe.

And so these trenches were called the Western Front.

It was where the First World War was fought pretty much for the four years.

It's Germany on the east side here and France on the west side here and these trenches were dug right across the Western Front.

France and the Allied forces dug trenches on one side and Germany dug their trenches on the other side.

Sometimes they would be quite close together.

Sometimes they'd be quite far apart, but once each side is dug into their trench, it's very, very difficult for the other side to attack it, because as soon as they got out of their trench, they could just be shot down by those machine guns.

So there was a big sort of expanse of land in between the two trenches, sometimes called no man's land because no man would go in there because you would immediately be killed.

So we're going to read now a little bit about how these trenches were different to how trenches were used before.

So I'm going to stop talking so that you can listen, so that you can read this extract here from a book by two wonderful historians writing about trench warfare.

Pause the video now so you can read.

Okay, in case you weren't able to do that, I'm going to read this out for you as well.

This is by James Harvey Robinson and Charles A.

Beard.

"Trenches were longer, deeper, and better defended by steel, concrete, and barbed wire than ever before.

They were far stronger and more effective than chains of forts, for they formed a continuous network, sometimes with four or five parallel lines, linked by interfacings.

They were dug far below the surface of the earth out of reach of the heaviest artillery.

Grand battles with the old manoeuvres were out of the question." The old kind of battles out of the question.

You can't do those anymore.

"Only by bombardment, sapping, and assault could the enemy be shaken and such operations had to be conducted on an immense scale to produce appreciable results." Appreciable means results you can recognise, that you can notice.

"Indeed, it is questionable whether the German lines in France could have ever been broken if the Germans had not wasted their resources in unsuccessful assaults and the blockade by sea had not gradually cut off their supplies.

In such warfare, no single general could strike a blow that would make him immortal.

The glory of fighting sank down into the dirt and mire of trenches and dugouts." So we have a new kind of war.

It's not like previous types of wars and battles where amazing generals or soldiers and warriors could go out onto the battlefield and kill lots of people and with a really fantastic strategy win the day.

Now with each side is digging in to these trenches with incredibly sophisticated weapons that can kill hundreds of men a minute.

And so war has changed.

And so for your next task, I'd like you to answer this question.

Take a moment to think about it, write it down your answer in your book or on your piece of paper.

How did these improved trenches that were now being used change the way both sides fought during the First World War? If you need to read back that extract, read it back.

How did the improved trenches change the way both sides fought during the First World War? Okay, so I'm hoping that in your answer you've included some of the key ideas from this piece of text.

So it talked about how they needed to use bombardment.

So when we bombard, we use lots and lots of guns.

Sapping, so sapping energy.

It's sometimes called a war of attrition, the First World War, just wearing away at the enemy.

And assaults, so getting up out of trenches, running across no man's land, even though that was incredibly dangerous, and attacking the energy and so, attacking the enemy.

And so this war was ready fought inch by inch.

Each side just tried to get a little bit further on by maybe attacking a trench, winning it, and making only a few hundred metres forward.

And then would have to stop there and stay there and repeat the process over and over again.

We're going to watch a little video now, which really brings to life what life was like in a trench so you can you can visualise what it was like in a trench.

And there's some real footage from the First World War.

I'll warn you, it's a bit grim, but I think it's important to see what it was like for these men who were fighting during the First World War in 1914 to 1918.

Okay, so we're going to get a first hand now account of what it was really like in the trenches.

So this is a primary source.

So this is a source for who was really there.

And this person was called Private, so private is a rank in the army, Private H.

Jeary, maybe it stands for Harry or Henry.

And private H, Jeary was a part of the Queen's Royal West Surrey Regiment.

And he was fighting in the First World War and he wrote this in his diary.

He said, "As far as the eye could see was a mass of black mud with shell holes filled with water.

Here and there broken duck boards." Duck boards were wooden boards that they would put into the trenches, that they would build into the trenches, to try and stop themselves from getting wet feet because that would make their feet rot.

"Here and there, broken duck boards, partly submerged in a quagmire.

Here and there, a horse's carcass." A dead body of a horse.

"Sticking out of the water.

Here and there, a corpse." A dead body.

"The only sign of life was a rat or two swimming about to find food and a patch of ground." So life in the trenches was really grim.

It was boring.

It was terrifying.

It was incredibly unhygienic.

The water would fill up in the trenches and people's feet would be soaking wet, sometimes for days on end.

And that wetness would cause their feet to actually rot, a condition called trench foot.

And sometimes they would have to have their feet amputated because their feet were rotting away.

And that's what Private H Jeary's got to say about it.

So for your next task, I'd like you to write down what the source tells you about life in the trenches.

You might like to pick out a quote or two that Private H.

Jeary uses.

Being a great historian's all about using different sources, taking different sources and using it to help you understand what life was really like in the time that you're studying.

So have a look at that source and tell me, what does it tell you about life in the trenches? Pause the video and write out your answer now.

Okay, I hope you got a great answer to that question.

Maybe you could send it through to me.

You can use the #ONAESX, just like last time.

Next we're going to look at one of the most famous battles in all of military history, the Battle of the Somme.

And to begin with, we're going to look at another video.

We're going to watch another video, which is 100 year anniversary.

And this was just a few years ago, sorry, a few years just gone, the 100 year anniversary of the Battle of the Somme and so this special documentary was made and we're going to watch it now.

While the video is playing, I'd like you to make notes about what happened during the Battle of the Somme.

So it doesn't have to be in full sentences.

You can just jot notes, bullet points, but this is a really, really important skill when we're reading or watching videos or listening to interesting people talk.

We need to be able to write down the key pieces of information because our brain might not be able to remember everything when we try and think back to it.

And so jotting down notes is an important skill.

So you can practise now while you're watching this video.

Jot down the most important pieces of information that you learn while listening to this video.

So, I've had a go at jotting down some of the notes that I recorded when I was watching that video.

And I'd like you to look at your notes now and we're going to compare.

See if you've got down all the key facts that I noticed and that I jotted down as I was watching.

So if you haven't had a chance to jot them down yet, pause the video, go back and watch it again, and jot down your notes to see if you got the same ones that I did.

So the first key piece of information was at the Battle of the Somme, I noticed that right at the start of the video, the correspondent said that the Battle of the Somme was on July 1st, 1916, a few years after the war had started.

Secondly, there were trenches for 14 miles in that battle.

Thirdly, one and a half million shells were fired from the Commonwealth countries at the Germans in the hours leading up.

They started the attack.

The Allied forces started the attack at zero hour, 7:30 AM's zero hour.

Some of those Commonwealth soldiers didn't expect any resistance.

They thought that those bombs would have killed all the Germans, torn apart all of the barbed wire and so they just walked across no man's land, thinking that everything would be fine.

In fact, of course, bombs can't destroy barbed wire.

They can't tear it in two.

It just tangled the barbed wire up more, made it even more difficult.

So when they got across no man's land, they couldn't get to the trenches because there were tangling barbed wire that could cut them into pieces.

The Royal Engineers, a regiment in the army, dug a huge tunnel underground.

It took them months and months and months, seven months, they dug this huge tunnel underground until they were underneath the German trench.

And then they exploded a huge mine that left that massive crater that the correspondent was in.

It threw the earth a mile into the air.

That's how big the explosion was.

And on the first day, 57,000 Commonwealth soldiers were killed, injured, or left missing.

That's a huge number, 57,000.

If you imagine, I didn't know, at the final of a sporting event or the Olympics, a stadium packed full with people, that's about how many people were killed.

Just on that.

Just on the first day.

And there's now the largest Commonwealth war memorial to remember all of those soldiers But the Battle of the Somme didn't last just one day.

It continued for five months.

And over that time, a million people were killed or injured overall.

They were the notes that I jotted down as I was watching the video.

Have a look and compare it to yours.

Have you got the same? If you missed any, you can take some time now to pause the video and add to your notes so you've got great notes.

Okay.

Last section that I'm going to teach you about is about when America joined the war.

So up until now, we've got a European war.

America joins and it becomes a truly world war.

So all the countries in, all the major nations in Europe are fighting in the war by 1915.

And in 1915, a very important event happens.

And there's this sinking of a ship called the Lusitania.

Now the Lusitania was a passenger ship.

It had passengers on it, and it had about 2000 passengers on it.

We now know that there was some ammunition and things for soldiers as well being carried on this ship.

But what happened was a German U-boat fired a torpedo and destroyed this ship and over a thousand people, who were just normal civilians, they weren't soldiers.

They were normal passengers who were trying to travel were killed because the boat was sunk by that German U-boat.

And about 120 of those passengers were Americans.

Some of them really important Americans, a multimillionaire, some really important Americans were on that ship.

And when it was sunk by the German U-boat, it was a huge incident that changed what Americans thought about the war.

Up until that point, American feeling around the war had generally been, let's not get involved.

It's a big war, it's way across the ocean.

It's nothing to do with us.

Why would we put our soldiers at risk? It all starts to change when the Lusitania is sunk and over a hundred Americans are killed because America starts to realise, this can start to affect us.

This war is so large, it can start to affect us.

And the U-boats, the German U-boats, were shooting down lots of ships because, of course, the Allies were transporting all sorts of weapons and supplies using ships.

And so one of the main weapons that the Germans had were these U-boats to sink those ships.

And so America starts to make this propaganda.

You can see these posters here.

I'll let you pause and just read through these posters.

And so the sentiment starts to change in America.

This is way back in 1915, and America doesn't join the war until 1917, but this is the first event that really starts to make people think, hold on a second, maybe we should get involved in America.

They're using language like these crimes against God and man are committed.

Hundreds of women and children killed with the Lusitania.

And more ships are sunk over the next few years, including ships with Americans on.

And so this propaganda from America, trying to get people to change their mind, starts to have an effect.

Until in 1917 America joins the war.

And that really starts to signal the end of the war.

A few different things happened then.

First of all, there was a huge offence, a Spring Offensive in 1918 by the Germans called the Michael offensive, where they really went and tried to attack the Allied trenches.

But it wasn't really very successful and they wasted lots and lots of resources.

The French, especially now with the support of the Americans, because the Americans joined the war, were able to defend those trenches from the Germans.

And so they just lost lots of men and lots of resources during that, which started to cripple them in 1918.

Their army starts to collapse.

The naval blockades of the Allies are already beginning to work.

And so, the British Navy the American Navy, the French Navy, they were using their ships to block any supplies getting to Germany and their allies.

And so people in Germany were starting to starve.

They had no food, they had no supplies.

And whereas, at the start of the war, it wasn't so much of a problem.

They could use their stocks.

By 1918, four years into the war, those naval blockades were really working.

And that actually led the German Navy to go on strike.

So the German Navy said, we're not going to fight anymore.

We're not going to take part anymore.

And that has a huge impact.

And so the German Army says to the parliament, the German parliament, they say to their leader, Wilhelm II or William II, we can't carry on fighting.

We need to stop.

We've lost this war.

Everybody's going to die if we don't stop.

And so Wilhelm abdicates.

So when you abdicate as a leader, it's when you resign as the leader of a country and Wilhelm realises that that Germany have lost and he abdicates.

And those forces sign the Armistice Day or Peace Day on the 11th of the 11th, 1918.

They sign it at 11:00 AM.

And that's why every year still on the 11th of November at 11:00 AM, we all take a minute or two silence to remember everybody that's being killed in conflicts across the world.

So I'm going to leave you with one big task to bring everything together.

Could you write down all about the different factors that led to the end of the First World War? You might like to use language like, the first factor that led to the end of the First World War was.

This was significant because.

And really use this as a chance to practise your historical writing and talking about different causes and different factors so that you have a really great command of this topic.

Pause the video and have a go at that task now.

Okay, whoa, two lessons.

We're whizzing through this because I want to get across the whole of the 20th century.

Two lessons and we've already covered the First World War.

I would have loved to spend even longer on it, but we've still got the Treaty of Versailles.

We've got the Second World War, we've got the Cold War, we've got so much left to cover.

And so in those two lessons, we've gone from the beginnings of the First World War through to the First World War.

And in our next lesson, we're going to be looking at the Treaty of Versailles which is what happened after the First World War and many think laid the seeds for the Second World War only about 20 years later to happen.

You can finish off this lesson by clicking on the end of lesson quiz.

See how many you can get correct and and make sure that you lock in all of that key knowledge, ready for our next lesson.

And I'll really look forward to seeing you next week.

Thanks everybody, bye.