ABOUT THIS EPISODE
Barbed wire never fired a shot. It didn't need to.
This episode traces how a cheap farm fencing technology became one of the deadliest features of the First World War, from the first Somme bombardment that couldn't cut it, to Vimy's careful planning around it, to the tanks that finally crushed it in 1918.
Along the way: Piper James Cleland Richardson's Victoria Cross, a doomed wire-cutting officer named Garton, and five archival veteran voices describing, in their own words, what it meant to build it, cross it, and sometimes die in it.
English
Canada
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