Pistol that helped trigger WW1 on show in London

A man passes the museum of the 1914 Sarajevo assassination on January 12, 2003, on the spot where student radical Gavrilo Princip assassinated Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, sparking World War One.

LONDON (Reuters) - A pistol carried by the group who assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914, helping to spark World War One, is among the exhibits at a London show that recalls the Great War through 90 personal stories.

"In Memoriam: Remembering the Great War" at London's Imperial War Museum, which opens on September 30 and runs for nearly a year, is designed to remind people about the global conflict that is often overshadowed by World War Two.

It also coincides with the 90th anniversary of the Armistice, on November 11, 1918, which ended a conflict that claimed the lives of more than 21 million people.

"The events of the Second World War have overshadowed World War One in some of its aspects," said museum historian Terry Charman.

"We've concentrated on 90 stories of the great and the good, like King George V and Winston Churchill ... but we've also included a large number of people who had extraordinary stories to tell," he told Reuters.

Among them is World War One's answer to "The Great Escape," the World War Two prison breakout from the Stalag Luft III camp immortalised by the Hollywood movie starring Steve McQueen.

In July 1918, 29 prisoners escaped from the Holzminden camp near Hanover through a tunnel which collapsed, blocking the rest of the 60 officers planning to flee. Ten officers eventually made it to safety.

"We also have on display a part of the Zeppelin (airship) shot down over Britain on the night of September 2 and 3, 1916," Charman said.

"The Blitz overshadowed the fact that Germans bombarded London and other towns in Britain with Zeppelins and later by aircraft.

"The number of people killed was comparatively small, but it was the first time civilians felt threatened in their own homes."

On display is a pistol and bomb carried by a group of conspirators including Gavrilo Princip, a young Bosnian Serb radical, when they shot dead Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, triggering World War One.

Charman said that it was not clear whether the pistol, on loan from a museum in Vienna, was the actual weapon which killed Ferdinand.

(Reporting by Mike Collett-White, editing by Paul Casciato)