Douglas Haig remained Commander-in-Chief of the British Armies in France until the end of the war but his reputation was blasted by the death toll on the Somme and took a further beating in 1917, afte...
The collapse of morale in the French Army arose not because of the German attack at Verdun but because the French generals, specifically Nivelle, also adopted the doctrine of attrition, and fought wit...
Peace negotiations began, or were at least initiated, almost as soon as the war began, but by 1915 they had led nowhere. The nations of Europe were not yet sick of killing and at the end of 1915 there...
This army contained 16 divisions, three per corps, but with a fourth division in VIII Corps. Each division could muster around 15,000 men, so the total, with corps troops and the Army reserve, came to...
The Somme began as an offensive; it ended as a battle of attrition.
Nothing the Western Front can offer, however, matches the intensity of the five days of fighting inside Fort Vaux.
In all but killing terms, the battle ended in the last days of September and the main reason it ended was mud.
Total casualties on the Somme, killed, wounded and missing, come to some 1,300,000 men, British, French and German. The British share in this total includes the losses incurred by the Empire and Commo...
The British Army was learning how to fight the 'all-arms' battle by this stage of the war; no longer would the brunt be left to the infantry.
Now and again, the history of war throws up a battle that transcends reason. The soldiers fight because they cannot stop fighting, because too much has been committed to give up now. Too much blood ha...
During the Great War all armies lost men in quantity in the attack; the Germans at First and Second Ypres, the French in Champagne, on Vimy Ridge, in Artois and on the Chemin des Dames. Everywhere it...
And so the war was fought with new weapons and old ideas and the result was a slaughter exceeding that of any previous war. In just four years, about 9,300,000 soldiers died on the battlefields of the...
To supply Fourth Army's basic needs it was estimated that 31 trains must reach the front every day, bringing the day-to-day supplies as well as massive amounts of ammunition, food, water and trench st...
The secret of any advance through a well-defended and carefully prepared position in the Great War depended almost entirely on artillery. In spite of the popular image created by TV documentaries and...
Morale is a fragile thing. Its creation and maintenance are among the most important duties that can fall to a commander and neither Joffre nor Nivelle devoted as much thought to this issue as it dese...
If the French Government had deliberately intended to inflict further torment and loss on their long-suffering soldiers they could hardly have done better than appoint General Nivelle to the post of C...
The British infantry assault on the German positions north of the Somme began at 0730 hrs on 1 July 1916. A force of some 120,000 British soldiers of Fourth and Third Armies assaulted the German line...
Von Falkenhayn's plan for Verdun, however flawed in execution, was at least possible; he did not intend to gain ground, penetrate the enemy defences or take Verdun. He simply wanted to kill soldiers,...
The orders given to the troops were not the result of stupidity or ignorance but attempts to cope with the hard and oft-repeated fact that there was no way of communicating with those troops once they...
The generals were now two years into this war and it should have been - and indeed was - glaringly apparent that the methods being employed to attack the enemy lines, be they British, French or German...