Beneath the farmland of Northern Belgium lie graveyards, the final resting place of the fallen of the First World War. At Ypres, our team excavate the past, a shovelful at a time, to preserve the memories of the shattered lives that ended here. They discover evidence of the first trenches of The Great War—mere scrapes of earth that would evolve into complex lines of trenches that if placed in a single line would encircle the Earth. In the process they unearth the partial remains of three German soldiers from the 213 Reserve Regiment, who fought and died here. Retracing on foot and by train the very steps these soldiers took in the Autumn of 1914, members of the team uncover a massacre of civilians in a small Belgian town.
Serre in Northern France was an infamous German stronghold in the Great War. Thousands died here, many of them buried where they fell. Three soldiers are discovered. One is British but a lack of material evidence prevents identification. The other two are German, discovered with tantalizing clues as to their identity. One soldier took into battle a touching souvenir of home, a pictorial shoe polish lid. He also broke a cardinal rule of war by scratching his name on his i.d. tag. The partial name and the keepsake allow a positive identification. The other was found with a matted lump of paper. Using real world “CSI” techniques, a lost document is restored and gives up a name and a place. In the end, enlisted man and officer- brothers only in death—are reburied together in a military cemetery, sharing a single stone.
Tunnels and craters in the heart of a French coalfield hide horrors from the First World War. More than 50,000 British soldiers were killed or wounded here in a hellish battle that moved underground. Our team of archaeologists, historians, and forensic experts is here to excavate the lip of a gigantic crater that was created by a massive underground explosion. They discover a mass grave and, within the burial site, clues to one of the fallen soldiers, a German from Bavaria. A simple uniform button, a regiment number on an epaulette, and a postcard inside a music book, lead to the identity of this soldier: a gifted violinist named Leopold Rotharmel turned warrior in the German unit that would later be called the Storm Troopers.
Our team of archaeologists, forensic experts and historians travel to the front lines of the Battle of the Somme, a sector known as Beaumont Hamel, looking for the truth of what happened that day. They uncover medical supplies lead to the location of what may have been a front line medical post - a hub of chaos on that fateful day. And it is here that the team makes a stunning discovery: it’s only a single button. But it’s a button that could only been worn by one soldier on the morning that marked the commencement of the Battle of the Somme: the Regimental Medical Officer. This find sets the team off on a journey to uncover the life of one Dr. William Bunting Wamsley, a Methodist doctor from Northern England who also spent time working in China at Methodist missions.
In Northern Belgium lies the site of the infamous battle of Passchendaele, fought in 1917, a place where man and beast drowned in a churning sea of mud. As the team unearth the remains of a complex trench system, they discover one of the first modern wristwatches– a technological innovation that was born of war. Forensic investigation reveals letters are etched onto its strap - a discovery that launches a journey to identify its owner, a soldier, one of the Fallen. The search leads to John Humphrey England, a Second Lieutenant under the Welsh regiment, who died in the mud of Passchendaele July 31 1917. But this quest has a twist in the tail.
An excavation yields evidence of WW1 mortar bombs. Its position reveals it is a ‘trench mortar pit’, key to the Allied taking of “Hill 70”, a strategic position in Northern France in the summer of 1917. The Trench Detectives begin a search for the tight-knit band of brothers who fought there, revealing the name of a Canadian soldier who lead the group into battle. As the Trench Detectives close in on how he came to be there, they uncover the moving, Dickensian story of a “Barnardo Boy”. The soldier was the eldest of three English orphans rescued from the crushing slums of a Northern steel town in Britain and shipped to Canada where the children were sent their separate ways. None were told where the others were but all were bound by a strong desire to reunite.
In the First World War, men on horseback with swords fight against an emerging modern weapon, the machine gun. In Northern France, on the site of a cavalry charge into the face of relentless machine gun fire, the Trench Detectives discover evidence of a desperate act of bravery that stopped the German advance in the Spring of 1918, but decimated the ranks of a Canadian cavalry unit. It was the last great cavalry charge of the First World War, and it was made by Canadian soldiers. As the poignant relationship between these men and their horses is explored, a French farmer reveals a mystery that lead the team to a car dealer in Rocky Mountain House, Alberta whose ancestor died on that fateful day and whose last resting place was, until now, unknown to him.
A mystery is uncovered in a once beautiful Belgian village that played a critical role in the final days of the First World War. A section of trench is unearthed that is not referenced on any military map from the era. And within the trench is a collection of finds: a British Officer’s pair of leather gloves pulled off in a hurry and left inside out; a white silk scarf; a used ampoule of iodine; and an unusual ‘binder’ of canvas and bamboo. The binder is revealed to be a rare Allied Signaller’s kit for sending coded messages back to his gun battery. The trench is identified as a secret forward observation post. Our Trench Detectives’ mission is to find out what befell the Signaller who was stationed there. When they do, they stumble across one of the great lost stories of the War: the biggest explosion ever to rock London, England.
The ‘landship’ was a fearsome modern weapon that stunned Germany in the Great War. The British creation of The Tank was the fulfillment of a dream. Manufactured in secrecy in England, the tanks rolled out to battle on the Western Front. In peaceful French woods, close to the site of the first effective tank battle, the Trench Detectives discover the shattered remnants of a tank. It had been destroyed in November 1917 at the Battle of Cambrai. The team traces its identity—it’s a tank known by the serial number “F6”. What emerges is the life story of a metal beast from its birth to its death in battle, alongside the story of the man who commanded her.
In 1916, Canadian soldiers suffer more than 24,000 casualties during the Somme Campaign. and were tasked with assaulting the fiercely defended German position known as “Regina Trench”. The Trench Detectives excavate, uncovering a treasure trove of artifacts, including a German mess tin with a name scratched repeatedly on its sides.The team identifies its owner. Remarkably, before the war he was a miner and a grave digger—famous in his family for a morbid fear of being buried alive and an obsession with putting his name on all his personal belongings.
In a war when so many dead were lost or simply dumped into shallow graves, the Trench Detectives come across a body buried with care on a battlefield where tens of thousands of soldiers died in 1915. As forensic scientists struggle to decipher the engravings on the soldier’s corroded ID tag, another team of experts tease apart a leather pouch the man was carrying. In it are three rings: A pair of matching rings each inscribed with a surname and a date and a third ring that bears the Iron Cross …..keepsakes with meaning for this fallen soldier. An intensive investigation with many twists and turns finally yields the identity of the Fallen, bringing the trench detectives face to face with his descendants.
This is a story of hunters and the hunted. During the Great War, German officers weary from the Eastern Front sought R&R in a picturesque hunting lodge on an ancient French estate where they could turn their guns on wildlife. The estate was owned by a French nobleman and his hunting lodge became a silent witness to the war, constantly occupied and passed from French to British and Commonwealth to German forces before being reclaimed by nature. A diary is discovered - a day-to-day account of the aristocratic owner’s life as a German hostage. And among the rubble of the lodge the Trench Detectives excavate a large stone block on which a German occupier had carved his name, an inscription that survived to lead back to identify the man who left it.
September 1915 saw the first massive Allied attack on the German positions at Loos, Belgium. The battle also marked the largest deployment of Scottish troops in nearly 200 years and was the first taste of action for men of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. In a moving excavation, the Trench Detectives recover the body of one of those Scottish soldiers, his shoulder badge identifying him as a Highlander. A leather pouch, at first believed to be his Sporran, holds the key to this man’s identity. Lab analysis reveals it as a kit of specialized equipment issued to specific men to perform a specific task. If his identity can be tracked down, this soldier can finally be laid to rest.
