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...
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...
The defence of Verdun and the French Republic was a splendid cause but that alone was not enough; it needed to be a two-way commitment - and what did the Republic care for them, the infantry soldiers...
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...
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.
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 veterans of the Somme have gone now but while they lived they talked incessantly of the mud of the Somme, mud which permeated everything, clogged rifles, flowed like lava into dugouts and trenches...
There was, however, a deeper failure, a failure to realize that the current conventional tactics were not working. The focus was on solving the shortages of men and guns and of increasing the weight o...
The credit for developing the basic idea into what became the first tank must go to Winston Churchill,
The men of the French Army have never been short of guts. Clad in their brilliant uniforms, carrying swords and wearing white gloves, the officers of this gallant army led their men into the German ma...
There was, of course, another alternative to this endless, pointless killing - peace. Achieving peace depended on a recognition by all the participants that the war was not worth fighting, or that all...
The large numbers attacking in the early hours of 1 July - 64 battalions, mostly in line - was of no advantage, since they simply offered a large target to the enemy guns. As a result, this 'extended...
There were two views on how to conduct a frontal assault and they reveal the basic tactical argument of the Great War. Should the attacker go for 'bite and hold', seizing a small portion of the enemy...
The aim of the Somme battle was no longer an attempt at a breakthrough to Bapaume but an attempt to write down the strength of the German field army and kill German soldiers - in other words, attritio...
This view - that Germany was not responsible for the outbreak of war - was maintained for the next two decades, during the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich, and was only finally refuted by the exte...
Sufficiency of artillery depended not only on the number of guns provided but on the width of the front attacked. The guns-per-yards-of-front ratio was crucial; to expand the latter, it was necessary...
What any analysis of the first day on the Somme comes down to is the familiar lesson - that Western Front defensive positions could not be stormed and taken by any means currently open to the attacker...
When evidence reached Joffre's ears that the men were complaining, that untenable positions were being given up or that attacks were not being pressed home with their former élan, his answer was not t...
The generals, British, French and German, were unable to achieve a breakthrough because the defences were always too strong and the facilities available to reduce them were not fully developed, either...
Haig wanted Fourth Army to achieve a breakthrough of the first and second lines in the first phase; Rawlinson thought that if his men took the German first line in the first phase they would be doing...
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