- 5/25/2025
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00:30I'm going to get you out of here, I'm going to get you out of here, I'm going to get you out of here, I'm going to get you out of here, I'm going to get you out of here, I'm going to get you out of here, I'm going to get you out of here, I'm going to get you out of here, I'm going to get you out of here, I'm going to get you out of here, I'm going to get you out of here, I'm going to get you out of here, I'm going to get you out of here, I'm going to get you out of here, I'm going to get you out of here, I'm going to get you out of here, I'm going to get you out of here, I'm going to get you out of here, I'm going to get you out of here, I'm going to get you out of here, I'm going to get you out of here, I'm going to get you out of here, I'm going
01:00to get you out of here, I'm going to get you out of here, I'm going to get you out of here,
01:30I'm going to get you out of here, I'm going to get you out of here, I'm going to get you
01:57out of here.
01:58essential supplies are carried forward to the front line,
02:01everything from bullets to biscuits,
02:03from blood to blankets.
02:05These helicopters are just the last stage
02:07in a long chain and a complex organization,
02:11without which the deadliest weapons would fall silent
02:14and the bravest soldier would die.
02:18At a US Army logistics headquarters in Germany,
02:20officers are planning the reception of an armored brigade,
02:2317,000 men and 50,000 tons of equipment,
02:26all the way from Fort Hood, Texas.
02:29Okay, sir, what we've got here,
02:30the first thing is the indications of the night draws.
02:32They're in a red dot.
02:36The object of war, according to an American Civil War general
02:39was to get there firstest with the mostest.
02:42Nowadays, we have a more prosaic word
02:44for achieving this, logistics,
02:46the practical art of moving armies and keeping them supplied.
02:50I'm trying to check on the rail schedule
02:52for the movements of the M1s, M2s, and M3s.
02:57We've had a problem with rail schedules
02:59and I'm concerned, especially in the northern area.
03:13For a modern army, it's a massive job,
03:15like shifting a small city with all its backup services,
03:18everything from warehouses and workshops
03:20to surgeries, cinemas, and shops.
03:23By air, ship, and road, the vast and deadly inventory
03:26of a 20th century army is assembled.
03:28This is the original schedule data.
03:33Attention to detail is vital
03:35to make all the pieces of the complex fighting jigsaw
03:38fit together at the right time and place.
03:46Men, trucks, tanks,
03:49America flexes her sinews of war.
04:02This unit came with only half the strength
04:05of what they were originally programmed for.
04:13You only put it on after I tell you to.
04:16All you're doing right now is offloading my truck.
04:19In the 19th century, almost every man in uniform
04:21was deployed within the sound of the enemy guns.
04:24Nowadays, the job of supplies becomes so large
04:27that most soldiers never see the front line.
04:29In Vietnam, only one out of every seven soldiers
04:32was actually involved in combat.
04:36However sophisticated its use of technology,
04:39in one respect, an army of today
04:40is like every other army in history.
04:43In Napoleon's famous phrase, it marches on its stomach.
04:49It marches on its stomach.
04:51It marches on its stomach.
04:57Soldiers, to remain an effective fighting force,
04:59need their 3,000 calories a day,
05:02even if it's served up in a stew few mothers would recognize.
05:13You're dropping more on the floor
05:15than you're actually on the board, thank you.
05:16Not what you're doing. Look.
05:18Slice.
05:20Cross.
05:21Mind the fingers. You'll need them.
05:23Down.
05:25Make sure you stir it well.
05:26Bring all the goodies to the top.
05:28I will complain.
05:30Give them the full portion. There you go.
05:33Lack of food obviously has a physical effect
05:36on a soldier's body,
05:37but it has an equally damaging impact on his morale.
05:41Hunger has hastened defeat all too often in history,
05:44so a wise commander takes immense pains
05:46to see that his troops are regularly fed.
05:49I've just been on to the CP,
05:50and they're telling me for the next eight-hour shift
05:52that they're expecting what was left of my lot,
05:55plus his own, so he should get about 6,000, really.
05:58That's right, it'll take us up to about 25,000, Mark.
06:01But there's no problems anyway.
06:03For much of history, it has been the feeding of soldiers
06:05that has been a general's greatest problem,
06:08and it's the problem that grew as the size of armies increased.
06:11Edward III, on his way to Crecy,
06:13had found it difficult enough to feed his 11,000 men.
06:17At the height of the Thirty Years' War in the 1600s,
06:20the Swedish king Gustavus Adolphus
06:22and his opponent Wallenstein
06:23each had armies of 100,000 men.
06:28These armies were like huge maggots,
06:30gnawing their way across the land,
06:31leaving a trail of famine and destruction behind them.
06:35When their food supply broke down,
06:37the soldiers took matters into their own hands,
06:39plundering the inhabitants of the areas they marched through.
06:43By the First World War, armies were numbered in millions,
06:47but the invention of tinned and dried food in the 19th century
06:50meant the feeding of armies was no longer a problem.
06:53One bakery boasted a record 172,000 pounds of flour
06:58in a single day.
07:00Graham Williams recalls other delicacies.
07:02In those days, you'd perhaps have half a side of bacon,
07:05a big sack full of loaves of bread,
07:07or a big sack full of bread,
07:09and you'd have a big sack full of bread,
07:12and you'd have loaves of bread,
07:13or a wooden crate full of tins of jam and things.
07:17The proper ration was fresh meat,
07:19or in place of fresh meat, a tin of bullet beef, corned beef.
07:24Then there was tinned butter.
07:26In place of bread or supplement of bread,
07:28there would be army biscuits, or dog biscuits.
07:32And other things called McConaughey.
07:34The McConaughey's beef and vegetable ration
07:36was stuffed in a tin.
07:38It was supposed to be heated and made a stew.
07:39It was fairly reasonable then,
07:41because one chap in our section would like to stuff cold,
07:44with a most revolting sort of taste.
07:48In our battalion, we never had any milk at all for our tea.
07:52There was a tremendous waste of food.
07:54Heaps of cheese, particularly, much more than we needed.
07:57There was always a lot of that wasted,
07:58and particularly, tins of bullet beef.
08:01In many cases, the bottom of the trenches was so muddy,
08:06the tins of bullet beef were put down there
08:08as a sort of pavement.
08:10An outstanding feature of World War II
08:12was the Allied ability to feed and supply troops
08:15anywhere in the world.
08:17But what the British Tommy wanted was tea.
08:20One medical orderly thought the five principal preventatives
08:23to shell shock were one mug of tea and four sugars.
08:28But when soldiers failed to get their regular food,
08:30as happened to the Germans on the Eastern Front,
08:33they reverted to the methods of a bygone age.
08:36We ran out of food, and we came to a village,
08:39a small village, and we made sure
08:41that there were no troops in there.
08:43We watched that village beforehand.
08:44Normally, we tried to skirt around the villages.
08:48We went in there, and there were about five,
08:5210 families living in those few houses.
08:56And we just went in there with our,
08:58we had the weapons, they had no weapons,
09:00and they were starving, too.
09:02They had very little to eat.
09:04There were children, women.
09:05You could see it, the people were starving
09:07because it was bitter, cold weather.
09:10And we took a lot.
09:16When we were in units and couldn't get any food,
09:19we just smashed into the villages
09:21and got everything we could get.
09:23When we found an animal, sometimes the Russians
09:25had hidden the pig somewhere, or some chickens,
09:29or what, we slaughtered everything.
09:32One gets ruthless.
09:33I think if one really starves,
09:35one looks after number one first.
09:41Soldiers have always needed other comforts
09:43to ease the tension of battle
09:44or relieve the tedium of life in the field.
09:47Away from the front line, most of these,
09:49like beer or brothels, have had to be bought.
09:54Regular pay, then, has usually been essential
09:56to keep an army contented.
09:58Indeed, the word soldier comes from the Latin word solidus,
10:02the coin used to pay the legionary his daily wage.
10:08At the front, cigarettes have been the great comforter.
10:11In both World Wars, chain smoking was widespread.
10:14Under the stress of battle,
10:15smokers were willing to risk their lives to get a cigarette,
10:18and captured tobacco was one of the great spoils of war.
10:32Good morale often depends on good supplies.
10:36The United States Army has long prided itself
10:38on its ability to look after its soldiers wherever they are.
10:42In Vietnam, forward positions were supplied by helicopter.
10:46Presents from home, mail, even newspapers kept flooding in.
10:50Indeed, there were times when the abundance
10:52and variety of supply were almost an embarrassment.
10:55In the United States, soldiers were often
10:57Indeed, there were times when the abundance
10:59and variety of supply were almost an embarrassment.
11:03The rain was so extensive
11:05that most of the fields were flooded.
11:06The helicopters would land and sink into the mud,
11:08so they weren't going to land.
11:10They would get about 30 feet off the ground
11:12and start kicking out the supplies.
11:14What they were kicking out
11:15were cardboard boxes filled with new uniforms.
11:17I can remember being without a square meal
11:20for about eight days,
11:21and a helicopter flew out with a supply,
11:23and what they dropped to us
11:25was what we called a PX ration,
11:26containing candy bars, toilet paper,
11:29cigarettes and things,
11:30but not a piece of bread or not coffee that you could brew.
11:33but not a piece of bread or not coffee that you could brew.
11:44Ammunition, of course,
11:45has always been a vital requirement for a fighting army.
11:49But for early armies, the supply of ammunition
11:51was in fact much less of a problem
11:53than the provision of food.
11:55See, a gun like this of, say, 1640
11:58rarely fired more than four or five times a day,
12:01using at most 100 cannonballs in a campaign.
12:04So an army of this period
12:06would take along with it its entire supply
12:08for the whole campaign.
12:10This Napoleonic cannon used more ammunition,
12:13but still didn't fire more than 300 times in a campaign.
12:18It's only when we come to the guns of the 20th century
12:21that the picture changes, and then dramatically.
12:24And this is an 18-pounder,
12:26the standard British field gun of the First World War.
12:29During the preliminary bombardment
12:30of the Battle of the Somme in 1916,
12:33the British artillery fired
12:34over one and three quarter million shells.
12:37And every one of these guns started that bombardment
12:40with a thousand rounds stacked on its position.
12:54During the First World War,
13:07ammunition had overtaken food
13:09as the largest item supplied to units in the field.
13:12By 1916, a British division in the line
13:14required 20 wagons of food each day, but 30 of ammunition.
13:18Moving grenades, small arms,
13:26and field gun ammunition was hard enough.
13:28But in the heavy artillery, the work was backbreaking,
13:32as Montague Cleave knows well.
13:35The men had a colossal job to do, absolutely colossal.
13:39Far greater in our case than in the case of the field artillery
13:45because our shells were very heavy,
13:47and they had to manhandle hundreds and hundreds
13:51and hundreds of them.
13:53I have a record of 400 shells being fired in 40 minutes
13:58from four guns, and they were added tooth and nail.
14:03And not only then, but when the ammunition
14:07had to be replenished from the lorries behind.
14:14So much ammunition was used
14:16that only the wholesale transformation of industry
14:18could meet the demand.
14:20Then, only the recruitment of women
14:21could keep the factories running.
14:23It took modern war's insatiable need for supplies
14:26to start the emancipation of women.
14:31With mechanization, the needs of armies
14:33have become more complex.
14:35Specialist units are required to keep all this equipment
14:38running and ready for battle.
14:40An increasing proportion of soldiers
14:41are not fighting men in the old sense of the term.
14:44Instead, they are servants of machinery
14:46in the age of industrialized war.
14:54Now, the essential ingredient in keeping a modern army moving
14:57is fuel.
14:58So vital is it to 20th century warfare
15:00that military campaigns have been launched to ensure
15:03a reliable supply of oil.
15:05In the day-to-day operations of an army,
15:07logisticians have the crucial job
15:09of getting fuel to its tanks, its planes, and its trucks
15:12by tanker, by pipeline, and if all else fails, in cans.
15:21Tank crews think not in miles per gallon,
15:24but in gallons per mile.
15:26A modern battle tank might average two gallons a mile
15:28on the road, but moving at speed cross-country
15:31will push its consumption up above three gallons a mile.
15:43In August 1944, the US Third Army
15:46found the tyranny of logistics more damaging
15:48than enemy resistance as it attempted
15:50to pursue the Germans across the River Meuse.
15:53General George Patton believed that lack of gasoline
15:56prevented him from shortening the war.
15:58He made the classic remark, my men can eat their belts,
16:01but my tanks gotta have gas.
16:05In the Western desert, the fuel regulated the tempo of war.
16:08In 1941, the plight of the British
16:10was worsened by one particular piece of equipment,
16:13the four-gallon petrol tin.
16:15Described as flimsy and ill-constructed,
16:17General Auchinleck thought it was the cause
16:19of losing a third of his petrol supplies.
16:23To calculate the tanks destroyed,
16:25wrote Brigadier Desmond Young,
16:26the number of men who were killed or went into captivity
16:29because of shortage of petrol at some crucial moment,
16:32and then the ships and merchant seamen lost in carrying it
16:35would be quite impossible.
16:37How many millions of gallons had gone into the sand?
16:43The Germans had a far more robust can.
16:46The Allies copied it and its nickname
16:47has now become part of the English language, jerry can.
17:07The Second World War emphasised the strong link
17:10between military power and industrial muscle.
17:15America's tremendous strength flowed from her factories
17:18and the scale of her war production was awesome.
17:21At the peak of production in 1944,
17:23they produced two million trucks,
17:25100,000 planes, 84,000 tanks,
17:28and 7,500,000 tanks.
17:31In 1944, the British were the first in the world
17:34to build 4,000 tanks and 7,500 locomotives.
17:51Even the Russians, who had to move hundreds of factories
17:54to safety in the Urals, managed in 1942
17:57to build nearly 25,000 tanks.
18:00Their factories turned out T-34s in only 30 hours apiece.
18:05For Germany, the cause was lost.
18:07At best, they could only produce 19,000 tanks a year.
18:15Right, we've got 26 ships, 4,300 passengers,
18:191,800-plus vehicles and 800 trailers
18:23coming through in the next 24 hours.
18:31Pull up close, convoy credit number off that side,
18:34go and pick up your real card from Scientology.
18:37OK.
18:46Supplying an army, and especially a modern one,
18:49with all its requirements, is a massive task.
18:52Indeed, most armies in the 20th century
18:54have created specialist units like this one,
18:57the British Army's 27th Logistics Support Group Regiment,
19:01whose job is not to fight,
19:03but to transport supplies to wherever they're needed.
19:06How well the fighting men in the front line perform
19:09may well depend on how effectively
19:12the soldiers here do their job.
19:22For centuries, armies had to rely on a cart
19:25for carrying their supplies.
19:27It was slow and cumbersome,
19:28and on the atrocious roads of the time,
19:30it meant that armies could rarely travel more than 10 miles a day.
19:33The size of the baggage train grew steadily.
19:36In the 16th century, an army of 24,000 men
19:39had 3,000 carts to accompany it.
19:41But even a column of this number
19:43could not carry enough food to feed the whole army.
19:48All too soon, soldiers were forced to live off the land,
19:51and often the army degenerated into little more than a rabble.
19:54Matters were made much worse
19:56if the march was going through countryside already exhausted by war.
19:59Then, soldier and civilian alike would starve.
20:07So the conduct of a campaign was governed
20:09by the problems of transporting supplies,
20:11and the successful commander was the one who mastered it.
20:16In the Austerlitz campaign of 1805,
20:19Napoleon swung more than 200,000 men
20:22and nearly 400 guns right across Europe,
20:25from the Channel Coast to what is now Czechoslovakia.
20:28His regiments moved dispersed,
20:30so as not to exhaust the countryside,
20:32and his transport units shuttled along
20:34food and ammunition in the army's rear.
20:36This mastery of logistics was a factor in his victory.
20:40In 1813, Wellington led his army against the French in Spain,
20:44where it was said a small army can be defeated,
20:47a large army starves to death.
20:49Poor farming and the barren Spanish countryside
20:52meant that Wellington's army could not live off the land.
20:55But by securing access to nearby ports,
20:57Wellington was able to import all the supplies he needed
21:00to drive the French from the peninsula.
21:05Even in this century, horses and mules
21:08Even in this century, horses and mules have remained essential.
21:11In World War I, armies could not have survived without them,
21:14and just as the war swept thousands of young men into the army,
21:17so too it emptied the stables of Europe.
21:20A single German army needed 84,000 horses.
21:27The Germans made widespread use of horses even in the Second World War.
21:31Their infantry divisions relied, as they had for centuries,
21:34upon the horse-drawn wagon,
21:36because their panzer divisions monopolised their motor transport.
21:40What shook many Allied soldiers in Normandy in 1944
21:43was not the sight of dead Germans, but this.
21:53It was not just the shortage of trucks
21:55that led to the survival of the transport animal.
21:59When terrain and climate proved impossible,
22:02horses and mules came into their own.
22:07For example, in Burma, conventional road transport was useless.
22:14The only track was one a man hacked through the jungle,
22:17but mules could follow soldiers anywhere.
22:20They were invaluable in the chinted operations behind the Japanese lines,
22:23and as Cyril Baldock remembers, they came in several shapes and sizes.
22:27The small ones, I suppose, carried about 100, 150 pounds,
22:31perhaps even a little more,
22:33and the very big ones probably had 200 pounds.
22:36And they carried everything from picks and shovels
22:39to medical supplies, ammunition,
22:42and most important of all, of course, the wireless set,
22:45without which we wouldn't have been able to conduct the campaign,
22:48nor get resupplied.
22:50The terrain that we covered during the operation
22:53varied from flat through to mountainous country
22:57where the slopes were almost vertical,
23:00and the vertical slopes weren't always dry.
23:02Sometimes it was very muddy and slippery.
23:05On some occasions, on this sort of going,
23:08the mules were unable to manage in the normal way.
23:11From time to time, they actually toppled over and crashed down
23:14with their loads right down to the bottom of crevices and ravines,
23:17and we had to go down and rescue them,
23:19and, of course, most important as well,
23:21the load that they had been carrying.
23:26From the time we started marching in till when we went out,
23:30we must have done 800 miles or perhaps even more.
23:34In any sort of battle, particularly in jungle area,
23:37you could be very near to the enemy without you knowing it.
23:43And, of course, one of the essentials
23:45was the maximum of silence that was possible.
23:48And one thing that couldn't be allowed to happen
23:50was a mule braying when the Japanese were near.
23:52So before we went in, they all had this fairly simple and quick operation
23:56to sever their vocal cords.
23:58It's not an irreversible operation.
24:00Towards the end of their campaign,
24:02some of their vocal cords would get to be workable again.
24:07We were told that the mules were a reserve larder of food for us,
24:10and it came to the crunch.
24:12And we were hungry, and we were often quite hungry,
24:14and the supplies didn't get through.
24:16Mules were offered to people.
24:18We had wounded mules, mules that couldn't go very well.
24:21It was very, very difficult.
24:22In fact, in my experience, we never ate any mule meat at all.
24:25People preferred to go hungry rather than to eat the mules.
24:29The mules were absolutely essential to the success of the campaign,
24:34and, of course, to our lives, really.
24:37The Bavarian Alps still posed transport problems
24:40even in the age of the helicopter.
24:42Here, the West German army retains a mule unit.
24:55These mules, in another strange fusion of ancient and modern,
24:59are carrying Milan anti-tank missiles.
25:03This is one form of transport which can be relied on in all weathers.
25:26The Bavarian Alps
25:37Modern armies make extensive use of the railway system
25:40to move heavy equipment over long distances,
25:43from far behind the lines and right up to the battle area.
25:47So familiar are railways on the 20th century landscape
25:50that it's hard to realise just how revolutionary the railway once was.
25:55The Bavarian Alps
26:00A hundred years ago, it really was the age of the train.
26:03In the 19th century, the railway changed the face of war.
26:07Once, it had taken two weeks for an army to travel 200 miles.
26:11But by 1846, the Russians had moved 14,500 men
26:15the same distance in just two days.
26:19In Europe, in 1866 and 1870,
26:22Prussia's use of railways enabled her to concentrate her armies
26:25with such unprecedented speed and efficiency
26:28that she overwhelmed Austria and France.
26:33Railways had already played a crucial part in the American Civil War.
26:36The Confederates had the better generalship and superior tactics,
26:39but they were repeatedly frustrated by the ability of the North
26:42to move vast numbers of Union troops and supplies quickly
26:45by train.
26:57In August 1914, mobilisation was controlled by the railway timetable.
27:01The Germans were experts in the military use of the railway
27:04and at the height of their mobilisation,
27:07one train left Cologne every minute.
27:11In World War II, a European double-tracked rail system
27:14would carry a load equal to that carried by 1,600 lorries.
27:19The rail system in Russia, however,
27:22was designed to make difficulties for any invader.
27:25As the Germans found in 1941,
27:28only Russian rolling stock could be used on Russian rails
27:31and most of the Soviet rail cars were destroyed or had vanished.
27:34German rail gangs had to convert an entire rail system.
27:37The railway lines in Russia,
27:40they have a wider gauge
27:43and as soon we occupied a certain railway line,
27:46the railway troops, they followed us
27:49and they knocked one rail back to the German gauge.
27:52But railways are vulnerable
27:55and Russian partisans made German supply trains a prime target.
27:58Towards the end of the war,
28:01the partisans were more effective
28:04and less fuel and ammunition supplies came through.
28:10The failure to recognise the importance of railways
28:13was to have a disastrous effect on the German invasion plan
28:16and was a fundamental factor in their defeat.
28:19When supplies did get through,
28:22they still had to be moved from railheads to the front line
28:25and it was the lorry which was to provide the last link in the chain of supply.
28:29It was during the First World War
28:32that the lorry began to take over from the horse
28:35and there were times when its contribution changed history.
28:53This is north-eastern France
28:56and this looks like any ordinary piece of French provincial highway
28:59but the kilometre stone indicates it must be something more.
29:02In fact, it's the road
29:05to the famous French city of Verdun
29:08from the tiny township of Bar-les-Ducs 20 miles back.
29:11It's the words that tell the story.
29:14This is the Voie SacrΓ©e.
29:17In 1916, when the Germans attacked Verdun,
29:20all the roads to the city were either cut or covered by their artillery,
29:23With ferocious energy, the French pumped men and supplies
29:26along this road to the defenders of Verdun.
29:29Every 14 seconds, a lorry went past this spot
29:32carrying its vital supply of food, ammunition and soldiers.
29:37It's been said that without the internal combustion engine,
29:40Verdun could not have survived.
29:43The Voie SacrΓ©e, or the Sacred Way,
29:46remains a monument to those lorries and the men who drove them.
29:54The Russian city of Leningrad also owed its salvation to motor transport.
29:57In 1941, it was besieged by the Germans
30:00and food ran short as winter set in.
30:05Behind Leningrad, the vast Lake Ladoga froze
30:08and the Russians built a road across the ice.
30:14Traffic control posts were set up along the route.
30:17Trucks drove day and night a distance of 220 miles
30:20with no room for error on the ice road.
30:26A single slice of bread was the daily ration for the people of Leningrad.
30:29During the siege, around 800,000 of them perished.
30:35As the Russian trucks moved across the ice road,
30:38the Luftwaffe tried to choke off the Leningrad lifeline.
30:50But the ice road stayed open until it melted in the spring.
31:04Leningrad was finally relieved in 1944,
31:07but it was the ice road of that first winter that saved it.
31:14Today's motor transport may seem to have a less dramatic role
31:17than that played out on the Voisse-Γ -CrΓ©e or the ice road.
31:20However, if soldiers are to receive the supplies they need
31:23to enable them to live and to fight,
31:26then the main supply routes behind them, roads, bridges, ferries,
31:29must remain open.
31:32Without this umbilical cord of supply,
31:35an army's hopes of victory are slender indeed.
31:47Keeping an army supplied is obviously crucial
31:50to the survival of its soldiers.
31:53But the business of logistics plays a much wider role in the conduct of war.
31:56It often dictates not just when and where a battle takes place,
31:59but the way it will be fought.
32:02130 years separate two task forces that set out from Britain,
32:05one to the Crimea, the other to the Falkland Islands.
32:08They had one thing in common, though.
32:11Each was very far from home with an immensely long line of communications.
32:14So the organisation of their supplies would be bound to determine
32:17what sort of war they could fight.
32:20For almost everything that those soldiers required to live and to fight
32:23had first to be transported thousands of miles by ship.
32:32Ships were the only link between Britain and her expeditionary force
32:35besieging the Russian fortress of Sebastopol in the 1850s.
32:38Life on the bleak uplands of the Crimea was hard at the best of times.
32:42In winter it was terrible.
32:45Incompetence mingled with inexperience to produce administrative chaos,
32:48and the campaign has become a byword for suffering and privation.
32:51Men died of exposure, while bales of warm clothing
32:54were flung into the harbour to form landing stages.
33:02All ranks looked like bearded scarecrows.
33:05Uniforms wore out and could not be replaced.
33:09Officers were requested to wear their swords,
33:12as there was no other way of distinguishing them from the men.
33:20For two years the British army fought and endured.
33:23The British organisation improved.
33:26The Russian resistance crumbled.
33:29Sebastopol fell, and a British victory was assured.
33:32When the Argentinians occupied the Falklands,
33:35they could easily reach the islands by transport aircraft from the mainland.
33:41Things were very different for the British.
33:44Simply getting the task force underway at all was a major logistic feat.
33:47Apart from the Royal Navy,
33:50merchant ships of all types had to be requisitioned.
33:53Then came the complex task of loading all the thousand and one things
33:56required by a fighting force.
33:59Brigadier Ian Baxter recalls those first hectic few days.
34:02By about five o'clock in the morning I was able to
34:05contact the various depots, alert them
34:08and get this uploading of some 5,000 tons of straws underway.
34:14We literally loaded as the ships came into harbour
34:17and this meant that we loaded
34:20not as we would want to do for an amphibious assault or amphibious landing
34:23but as the ships were there and indeed
34:26to meet the requirements of the Board of Trade
34:29to meet the conditions of loading merchant ships.
34:32This created great problems later on in that
34:35we found that 5,000 jerry cans for instance
34:38which we thought were full of fuel arrived totally empty
34:41because the Board of Trade refused to allow them to be loaded onto the ship
34:44containing petrol.
34:47Likewise we had ammunition in the lowest hold
34:50when we wanted it obviously in the upper hold so we could get it out.
34:53Canberra was going to be our major troop carrier.
34:56The first 72 hours had been equipped with one helicopter landing spot
34:59and sailed with 2,500 troops
35:02and another helicopter landing spot being built
35:05on the way to Ascension Island.
35:08The work did not stop when the task force sailed.
35:11Good use was made of a halt at Ascension Island
35:14midway to the Falklands.
35:17Now we were at Ascension Island for just under two weeks
35:20and during that time we were able to cross deck
35:23and re-stow so that we got the artillery ammunition
35:26alongside the artillery pieces and generally prepared ourselves
35:29for what we now began to realise was not
35:32a very splendid exercise but really was going to be
35:35going to war.
35:38The merchant ships chartered especially for the campaign
35:41carried most of the stores.
35:44Atlantic Conveyor was a floating ordnance depot.
35:47Atlantic Conveyor was carrying of course
35:50our Chinook helicopters and with a limited amount of road transport
35:53these were absolutely essential for logistic movement.
35:56But he was hit by an Exocet missile.
35:59Three of them were lost. Fortunately one was actually flying
36:02at the time having just bladed up and he was able to use
36:05ships across the ocean as stepping stones
36:08to eventually get himself into some cars
36:11and that one Chinook helicopter was then the major
36:14logistic mover that we had for the whole of the campaign.
36:17And this of course not only forced us to increase the loads
36:20which the men carried but ultimately was the reason
36:23why we sent Sir Galahad with the Welsh Guards
36:26and a vast amount of ammunition and stores
36:29round to Bluff Cove and the resultant very sad loss
36:32of some 50 lives there.
36:35Amazingly they did not attack
36:38those brightly coloured British rail ferries
36:41sitting there in St. Carl's Water or Canberra
36:44like the great big white whale, the main target
36:47carrying our men and carrying our supplies.
36:50They chose instead very bravely to attack
36:53the Royal Naval Escorts, the gunships
36:56and indeed sunk and damaged two of those.
36:59The British Railways, the British Railways
37:02and indeed sunk and damaged two of those.
37:13If the Argentinians turned their attack
37:16to our store ships remembering we were 8,000 miles away
37:19and we lost one of those store ships then quite clearly
37:22we were going to have a major problem.
37:26When logisticians have major problems
37:29soldiers suffer and if terrain and climate
37:32conspire against them they die.
37:35In 1812 perhaps a quarter of a million of Napoleon's soldiers
37:38perished frozen and starving in the snows of western Russia
37:41during the retreat from Moscow.
37:44He had fatally miscalculated the Russian winter.
37:52The same terrain was no kinder to the Germans
37:55130 years later.
37:58The soldiers of the invading armies found to their cost
38:01that they had not been properly equipped for the harshness
38:04of the Russian winter.
38:07Even our unit which had come from France
38:10we had no real winter clothing.
38:13I remember in the first winter I had summer uniform,
38:16summer coat and then already the temperature
38:19must have dropped to minus 50 centigrade
38:22which was very cold.
38:25I was not prepared for the Russian winter.
38:28I had three winters in Russia and I know that
38:31is a terrible experience.
38:34We were living in a very dangerous climate
38:37and we were being told when you feel very cold
38:40and then you suddenly feel warm and there's no reason
38:43for feeling warm, that is a danger point.
38:46And I had one friend of mine who went out
38:49to do his business and that was in the evening
38:52and next morning somebody said where is Helmut
38:55I think was his name, it doesn't really matter the name.
38:58And then we went out and looked for him and Helmut was still
39:01in the position, trousers down and rolled up
39:04lying in the snow and he had a very happy expression
39:07on his face and I saw quite a few who died from cold.
39:10They all have a very pleasant expression
39:13because feeling very cold is very, very bad
39:16and suddenly you feel pleasantly warm
39:19but that's death creeping up on you.
39:36What revolutionised logistics and did much to change
39:39the way an army fights was the appearance
39:42of the transport aircraft.
39:45The one I'm in is probably the most famous
39:48the Dakota, still going strong after more than 40 years
39:51and this one happens to be in service with the Israeli Air Force.
39:54It can carry over 20 fully equipped soldiers
39:57or two and a half tonnes of supplies.
40:00Tough and reliable, it can land on a rough and ready airstrip
40:03or drop its load by parachute.
40:06Aircraft like this have altered the course of campaigns
40:09like Burma in 1944. The Supreme Commander, Lord Louis Mountbatten
40:12told his men to rely on air supply.
40:15When the Jap tries his old trick of getting behind you
40:18and cutting your lines of communication, stay put.
40:21We'll supply you by air and you'll defeat him.
40:24From now on, there'll be no more retreat.
40:35In February 1944, part of the 7th Indian Division
40:38was encircled by the Japanese in western Burma.
40:42Aircraft kept them supplied with food and ammunition.
40:52Gliders were used in the chindit operations behind Japanese lines.
40:55Many of the troops were flown to landing zones deep in the jungle.
40:58They did not always have a happy landing.
41:06When the 14th Army went onto the offensive in 1944
41:09its soldiers were supplied by the same accurate, low-level drops
41:12which had earlier made their defensive battles possible.
41:15Group Captain Derek Grukok saw the campaign
41:18from the pilot's viewpoint.
41:21The dropping zones are difficult to locate
41:24because they are obviously very, very small
41:27and in a very, very fantastic area
41:30which to a large extent looks very much the same.
41:33It's all jungle and it's all green and it's just growing there.
41:36There are some bits down but it's not easy to find.
41:39We had to land on something like 800-yard strips
41:42in a fully laden Dakota
41:45and this was particularly difficult on a strip like the one called Aberdeen
41:48so you had to get the approach just right.
41:51That particular strip was the worst.
41:54I think there were about 20 wrecked Dakotas on the ground
41:57when we finally located it.
42:00The job was made wonderful to me because of the airplane we were flying.
42:03It was absolutely magnificent for the job.
42:06You could stand it on a wingtip, you could fly it around almost like a fighter
42:09and you could land it on a very short space.
42:12It really was a wonderful airplane.
42:15I don't think we could have done the job with any other kind of airplane.
42:21But air supply has its limitations.
42:24In 1954, the French were clinging desperately
42:27to a key position at Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam.
42:34Viet Minh artillery soon made the landing strip unusable
42:37and supplies and reinforcements alike had to be parachuted in.
42:47Helicopters might have helped but the French had too few.
42:55The troops on the ground were ringed tighter and tighter
42:58and when the ground attack support aircraft were called in
43:02the Viet Minh anti-aircraft gunners took a heavy toll.
43:20Surrounded by hills, French pilots called at Dien Bien Phu
43:23the chamber pot.
43:26They inflicted heavy casualties on the Viet Minh
43:29and eventually the position was overrun by sheer weight of numbers.
43:49The French paid a heavy price for their lack of air support.
43:52They lost the cream of their fighting force and with it a colony.
44:00The United States in Vietnam enjoyed a logistic superiority
44:03unmatched in the history of war.
44:06In early 1968, the US Marine Combat Base at Khe San
44:09was kept supplied by air power alone.
44:15Between the 21st of January and the 8th of April
44:18there were over a thousand landings or airdrops on the position
44:21delivering over 12,000 tons of supplies to the garrison.
44:24Jim Hebron, a member of it,
44:27On a daily basis they would bring in
44:30C-123, these cargo aircraft
44:33and they, the lifeline,
44:36fed us beans, bullets and bandages that we needed to survive
44:39during that period of time.
44:42It became quite hectic after a while
44:45because we were shelling the airstrip so heavily
44:48it would block the waters right down the runway
44:51on the planes and hit a number of the planes.
44:54For a short period of time the airstrip was fed off
44:57and we were quite concerned with enough material to fight back with.
45:03Khe San was under constant shell and mortar fire.
45:06Men could take cover in their trenches and bunkers
45:09but planes on the airstrip were sitting targets.
45:18Helicopter gunships swooped low to suppress the Viet Cong fire.
45:25Trench warfare had returned.
45:28But defenders on the surrounding hills faced a crisis.
45:31There was, for one thing,
45:34a marked lack of water.
45:37Everything we had, had to be brought in by helicopter.
45:40Water is heavy.
45:43It was a great risk
45:46to bring in a helicopter load of water.
45:49So the conditions were not very sanitary.
45:53There was no electric power.
45:56There was no way to keep clean
45:59because we only owned the top of the hill.
46:02The North Vietnamese owned the bottom.
46:05That's where the water was.
46:08Some people went without showers for four or five months
46:11and without hot food.
46:14There was no hot food for close to three and a half, four months.
46:17One lived on C-rations and two or three of them a day.
46:21Boring and disgusting they might have been,
46:24but it was these rations,
46:27often dropped straight onto the airstrip in low-level runs,
46:30that kept the defenders of Khe San going.
46:33Helicopters, like the huge two-rotor Chinook,
46:36also played their part
46:39in flying in all the garrison's requirements.
46:45Ammunition for artillery and small arms
46:48was a major preoccupation,
46:51and even replacement firepower was needed.
46:54It was the only way to keep the defenders of Khe San going.
46:57It was the only way to keep the defenders of Khe San going.
47:00Ammunition for small arms was a major preoccupation,
47:03and even replacement field guns were brought in by air.
47:06The guns that they used were 105s,
47:09which are regular artillery pieces,
47:12and all six of them were destroyed, twisted metal hunks,
47:15and we could watch the helicopters
47:18bring in six brand-new ones the next morning.
47:21Vietnam was, above all, the war of the helicopter.
47:24The Americans used them lavishly,
47:27for the transport of ships and for the transport of men and equipment.
47:30North Vietnamese gunners found them elusive targets,
47:33as Colonel Dabney recalls.
47:36The problem the enemy had
47:39was that it took about 25 to 30 seconds
47:42from the time the mortar round was fired until it hit,
47:45and since they didn't know
47:48until the helicopter landed exactly what its position was to be,
47:51we used that 25-second period
47:54in order to load casualties and the dead
47:57or to offload critical supplies.
48:00If we did not get the helicopter off
48:03within 30 seconds or so,
48:06then we probably were going to lose it
48:09and take substantial casualties among the people on it and servicing it.
48:18Air power helped the defenders of Khe San in other ways.
48:21Ground-attack aircraft bombed positions around the base,
48:24sometimes just outside the perimeter.
48:27Giant B-52s struck from high altitude,
48:30unheard and unseen.
48:33The B-52 raids raised morale.
48:36One never even saw the airplane.
48:39One saw the tremendous result of the concussions
48:42and the disarray right in your trench,
48:45and it was recorded in that close.
48:48We had 22,000 troops on the field,
48:51and because of the concentrated air support we had,
48:54we felt very strongly that it saved our ass.
49:01The Second World War British Field Marshal, Lord Wavell,
49:04summed up the importance of logistics.
49:07The more I see of war, the more I realize
49:10how it all depends on administration and transportation.
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