PBS America TV Guide — Saturday, 18 July 2026

Rome created the largest empire in the ancient world - its armies, organisation and building innovation created a vast territory linked by roads. Many of these cities lie in ruins today, others are buried and many others are forgotten. As this documentary reveals, they include Leptis Magna, Volubilis, Tipasa and Timgad in North Africa and Baalbek, Jerash, Palmyra and Apamea in the Middle East

Examination of the Allied campaign in Italy during early 1944. Unable to break through Nazi lines, troops were stalled in the mountains below Rome during the long winter months and into the spring. Elsewhere too, the invasion was going badly, as the landing at Anzio ended in failure with thousands of soldiers exposed to enemy fire and penned in by German forces

Inhabitants of four American towns in Alabama, California, Connecticut and Minnesota recall the events of D-Day, in which more than 150,000 men landed on French soil to take part in the bloodiest conflict in US history since the Civil War

The Allies make slow progress through Europe during the summer of 1944, finding themselves bogged down in the Normandy countryside. In the Pacific, American forces on the island of Saipan fight their costliest battle to date, but the mood is buoyed by the eventual Nazi retreat and the liberation of Paris on August 25, ending four years of occupation

The plan to end the war in Europe by winter 1944 founders as Allied forces massed on the German border find themselves perilously short of fuel, leading commanders to take a risky gamble and parachute thousands of additional troops behind enemy lines. In the Pacific, General MacArthur heads one of the most brutal campaigns of the conflict while taking the island of Peleliu