The French, and especially the French generals, would not accept the British as equal partners in the war. The fact that without the help of Britain and her Empire they would already have lost the war...
At Neuve Chapelle in March 1915, the British lost almost 13,000 men in three days; at Loos in September, 59,000 men in six weeks, but most of them fell in the first two days; neither attack gained mor...
As Sir Douglas Haig's despatch makes clear, the series of engagements collectively known to history as the Battle of the Somme did not begin as a battle of attrition. The Somme battle was designed fro...
Sometime in October 1916, Haig abandoned the notion of a breakthrough on the Somme and joined his peers in France and Germany in committing his soldiers to a battle of attrition.
On the day the Somme battle opened, the French share of the offensive had shrunk to 14 divisions compared to 16 British divisions; this fact disposes of one of the lesser British myths, that the Frenc...
Even today, 85 years after the battle, an average year of scavenging on the Somme battlefield provides the disposal squads of the French Army with 90 tons of dangerous ordnance.
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...
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...
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 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...
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...
The general feeling among the Entente nations at the end of 1916 seemed to be that unless Europe returned to the status quo ante, the terrible loss of life in the previous three years had been for not...
The fate of Sir John French, who had failed in the previous September at Loos - but had not lost anything like so many men in the process - cannot have passed unnoticed by General Haig in the autumn o...
One can only wonder if the generals were serious ... or mad. In all but slaughter, the Battle of the Somme was over by early October, and to continue past that point was madness indeed, but this side...
It is an axiom of warfare that a good officer never reinforces failure. To do so simply throws away more lives and a good general will avoid doing that. A commander's task, even in moments of defeat,...
In some curious way the battle at Verdun had become a paradigm for the entire war. Verdun now exerted its own dynamic and needed no reason to continue. By the middle of 1916 it was, or should have bee...
As Alistair Horne points out, this was not simply a battle between two armies but the ancient conflict of Teuton and Gaul, two ethnic groups letting one thousand years of envy and hatred out in one lo...
What Joffre wanted on the Somme was not a tactical battle. As he saw it, the attempt at a breakthrough had failed and now, as so often before, the task of breaking the enemy line would get even harder...
The decision on when to break off an attack, like the decision to launch it, is one requiring careful calculation and fine judgement. That said, Haig's judgement in fighting on into the early winter o...
The late Barbara Tuchman, an American historian and the author of some fine books on the Great War, has written that while the human race has made great progress in many fields of endeavour - science,...