Hyper-kinetic presenter Tony Robinson and a team of experts travel to Mametz, a famous battlefield in World War I, in search of a secret tunnel and a massive flamethrower lost for almost a century.
The Livens Flame Projector, strictly the Livens Large Gallery Flame Projector, was used on the first day of the Battle of the Somme in 1916 and only once after that in 1917. Nothing of it exists today though Robinson is determined to find remnants of it on the Somme battlefield near Mametz.
With historian Peter Barton and archeologist Tony Pollard, the bustling Robinson is determined to recover what's left and with the help of the British Royal Engineers build a working replica. The Projector took just 25 weeks to produce from the planning stage to actual deployment. It was almost 10m long, over a metre wide and required a crew of seven trained men.
War diaries kept by officers at the time indicate that on June 28, 1916, about 200 British troops from the Royal Engineers gathered in great secrecy near Mametz. They worked underground in secret tunnels out of sight of German lines.
The weapon was powered by air pressure. Once it reached a certain level, the head (monitor) of the weapon was pushed out of the ground. A mixture of kerosene and diesel was ignited and shot towards the German lines.
How effective the weapon was is not known but war historians speculate that where it was used, it was spectacularly effective.
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