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...
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...
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...
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 British generals have been widely castigated for their actions in this war and their prodigality with lives; it is hard to find evidence that the French or German generals were any better.
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...
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...
Haig and Robertson were two of the most inarticulate officers in the British Army. Haig could write lucid notes and detailed instructions but was unable to express himself clearly at meetings or discu...
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...
As for Verdun, while the estimates vary, the most widely accepted figure is 377,231 French and 337,000 German - a total of more than 700,000 men.
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...
The credit for developing the basic idea into what became the first tank must go to Winston Churchill,
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...
No tactical or strategic gain was made on the Somme front that was worth the cost in lives. Even had the British and French achieved their breakthrough on the Somme, the Germans had plenty of room to...