Download or read book The Battle of the Somme written by Alan Axelrod and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2016-10-03 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: offensive to be waged against Germany even as France poured incredible numbers of men into the slaughterhouse that was the desperate defense of Verdun. élan vital” of the French people, a quality, he argued, that set the Gallic race apart from the rest of the world. French losses were just under 200,000. The Germans lost at least 650,000. Just as the French refused to give up ground at Verdun, the Germans held on stubbornly at the Somme—so stubbornly that General Ludendorff actually complained that his men “fought too doggedly, clinging too resolutely to the mere holding of ground, with the result that the losses were heavy.” The only thing “conclusive” about the Somme was the ineluctable fact of death. No battle ever fought in any conflict provided a stronger incentive for all sides to reach a negotiated peace—the “peace without victory” that Woodrow Wilson, still standing on the sidelines, urged the combatants to agree upon. Instead, the Kaiser, appalled both by Verdun and the Somme, relieved Falkenhayn and replaced him with Hindenburg and Ludendorff, who had achieved great success on the Eastern Front. The new commanders created two new defensive lines, both well behind the Somme front. On the one hand, it was a retreat. On the other, it was a commitment to draw the French and British farther east and invite them to sacrifice more of their soldiery. The modest advance the British made was but the prelude to additional slaughter.

Download or read book Ghosts on the Somme written by Alastair H. Fraser and published by Pen and Sword. This book was released on 2009-04-19 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Battle of the Somme is one of the most famous, and earliest, films of war ever made. The film records the most disastrous day in the history of the British army—1 July 1916—and it had a huge impact when it was shown in Britain during the war. Since then images from it have been repeated so often in books and documentaries that it has profoundly influenced our view of the battle and of the Great War itself. Yet this book is the first in-depth study of this historic film, and it is the first to relate it to the surviving battleground of the Somme.The authors explore the film and its history in fascinating detail. They investigate how much of it was faked and consider how much credit for it should go to Geoffrey Malins and how much to John MacDowell. And they use modern photographs of the locations to give us a telling insight into the landscape of the battle and into the way in which this pioneering film was created.Their analysis of scenes in the film tells us so much about the way the British army operated in June and July 1916—how the troops were dressed and equipped, how they were armed and how their weapons were used. In some cases it is even possible to discover what they were saying. This painstaking exercise in historical reconstruction will be compelling reading for everyone who is interested in the Great War and the Battle of the Somme.

Download or read book The First Day on the Somme written by Martin Middlebrook and published by Pen and Sword. This book was released on 2006-05-25 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A history of the British Army’s experience at the Battle of the Somme in France during World War I. After an immense but useless bombardment, at 7:30 AM on July 1, 1916, the British Army went over the top and attacked the German trenches. It was the first day of the battle of the Somme, and on that day, the British suffered nearly 60,000 casualties, two for every yard of their front. With more than fifty times the daily losses at El Alamein and fifteen times the British casualties on D-day, July 1, 1916, was the blackest day in the history of the British Army. But, more than that, as Lloyd George recognized, it was a watershed in the history of the First World War. The Army that attacked on that day was the volunteer Army that had answered Kitchener’s call. It had gone into action confident of a decisive victory. But by sunset on the first day on the Somme, no one could any longer think of a war that might be won. Martin Middlebrook’s research has covered not just official and regimental histories and tours of the battlefields, but interviews with hundreds of survivors, both British and German. As to the action itself, he conveys the overall strategic view and the terrifying reality that it was for front-line soldiers. Praise for The First Day on the Somme “The soldiers receive the best service a historian can provide: their story is told in their own words.” —The Guardian (UK)

Download or read book Somme written by Hugh Sebag-Montefiore and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2016-07-01 with total page 650 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rescuing from history the heroes on the front line whose bravery has been overlooked, and giving voice to their bereaved relatives at home, Hugh Sebag-Montefiore reveals the Battle of the Somme in all its glory and misery, helping us to realize that there are many meaningful ways to define a battle when seen through the eyes of those who lived it.

Download or read book The Somme written by Peter Barton and published by Constable. This book was released on 2011-02-24 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Peter Barton's landmark volume presents over 50 original panoramas of the battlegrounds of the Somme. They show what no other photographs can: the view from the trench parapet, and a great deal more. This revised edition also includes stunning new details of the use and misuse of an extraordinary network of 'Russian Saps' installed during the two months prior to battle. These tunnels beneath no man's land often brought the British - unseen - to within 10 metres of the German trenches, yet over-secrecy and poor communication led to most being left unexploited. In the sectors where they were employed, success was dramatic. Plus a host of previously unpublished personal testimony, and a fresh look at several unseen and forgotten aspects of the battle such as the Royal Engineers' Push Pipes, Bored Mines and huge Livens Flame Projectors. Here is the Somme as you have never seen it before. Praise for The Battlefields of the First World War: 'An extraordinary set of panoramic photographs that reveal the battlefields of the Western Front as never before.' The Times 'Astonishing ... made my heart sigh.' Independent 'Without doubt the best publication on the Great War in many years ... a superb piece of work.' Western Front Association

Download or read book Forgotten Voices of the Somme written by Joshua Levine and published by Random House. This book was released on 2008-12-02 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 1916. The Somme. With over a million casualties, it was the most brutal battle of World War I. It is a clash that even now, over 90 years later, remains seared into the national consciousness, conjuring up images of muddy trenches and young lives tragically wasted. Its first day, July 1st 1916 - on which the British suffered 57,470 casualties, including 19,240 dead - is the bloodiest day in the history of the British armed forces to date. On the German side, an officer famously described it as 'the muddy grave of the German field army'. By the end of the battle, the British had learned many lessons in modern warfare while the Germans had suffered irreplaceable losses, ultimately laying the foundations for the Allies' final victory on the Western Front. Drawing on a wealth of material from the vast Imperial War Museum Sound Archive, Forgotten Voices of the Somme presents an intimate, poignant, sometimes even bleakly funny insight into life on the front line: from the day-to-day struggle of extraordinary circumstances to the white heat of battle and the constant threat of injury or death. Featuring contributions from soldiers of both sides and of differing backgrounds, ranks and roles, many of them previously unpublished, this is the definitive oral history of this unique and terrible conflict.

Download or read book The Missing of the Somme written by Geoff Dyer and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-08-09 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Missing of the Somme is part travelogue, part meditation on remembrance—and completely, unabashedly, unlike any other book about the First World War. Through visits to battlefields and memorials, Geoff Dyer examines the way that photographs and film, poetry and prose determined—sometimes in advance of the events described—the way we would think about and remember the war. With his characteristic originality and insight, Dyer untangles and reconstructs the network of myth and memory that illuminates our understanding of, and relationship to, the Great War.

Download or read book The Great War written by Joe Sacco and published by W. W. Norton. This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From "the heir to R. Crumb and Art Spiegelman" (Economist) comes a monumental, wordless depiction of the most infamous day of World War I.

Download or read book Somme written by Lyn MacDonald and published by Viking. This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 1916 was one of the great turning-points in British history as the youthful hopes of a generation were crushed in a desperate struggle to survive. Although on paper, the Battle of the Somme was meticulously planned, 150,000 were killed in the punishing shellfire, the endless ordeal of attack and counter-attack; and twice that number were left maimed or wounded. Here, Lyn Macdonald lets the men who were there give their own testimony.

Download or read book The 1916 Battle of the Somme written by Peter Liddle and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Not restricted to the view of the front-line infantryman, this text also describes the experiences of the gunner, sapper, airman, medical officer, and nursing sister. The author explains how the Somme became scorched into the nation's heritage and into its historical consciousness, but with a distortion produced by a literary legacy as regrettable as it is understandable.

Download or read book The Somme written by Richard van Emden and published by Pen and Sword. This book was released on 2016-03-31 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The epic and brutal WWI battle is vividly recounted through the words and photos of the soldiers who lived through it. One of the most famous battles of the Great War, the offensive on the Somme took place in 1916, from July and November. It was there that Kitcheners famous Pals Battalions were first sent into action en masse. It was a battlefield where many of the dreams and aspirations of a nation, hopeful of victory, were agonizingly dashed. Because of its legendary status, the Battle of the Somme has been the subject of many books. Yet this volume is the first of its kind, in which the soldiers’ own stories and photographs are used to illustrate both the campaign's extraordinary comradeship and its carnage.

Download or read book The Somme written by Robin Prior and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2016-01-01 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Despite superior air and artillery power, British soldiers died in catastrophic numbers at the Battle of Somme in 1916. What went wrong, and who was responsible? This book meticulously reconstructs the battle, assigns responsibility to military and political leaders, and changes forever the way we understand this encounter and the history of the Western Front"--Publisher description.

Download or read book Somme 1916 written by Paul Kendall and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2016-06-28 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What really happened on the first day of the Somme? Much controversy has surrounded the Somme offensive relating to its justification and its impact upon the course of the war. General Sir Douglas Haig's policies have been the subject of considerable debate about whether the heavy losses sustained were worth the small gains that were achieved which appeared to have little strategic value. That was certainly the case on many sectors on 1 July 1916, where British soldiers were unable to cross No Man's Land and failed to reach, or penetrate into, the German trenches. In other sectors, however, breaches were made in the German lines culminating in the capture that day of Leipzig Redoubt, Mametz and Montauban. This book aims to highlight the failures and successes on that day and for the first time evaluate those factors that caused some divisions to succeed in capturing their objectives whilst others failed. An important new study, this book is certain to answer these questions as well as challenging the many myths and misconceptions surrounding the battle that have been propagated for the last 100 years. Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Arcade imprint, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in history--books about World War II, the Third Reich, Hitler and his henchmen, the JFK assassination, conspiracies, the American Civil War, the American Revolution, gladiators, Vikings, ancient Rome, medieval times, the old West, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

Download or read book 1918 written by Barrie Pitt and published by Pen and Sword. This book was released on 2014-03-10 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This vividly detailed history examines the battles and politics in the final year of WWI—includes trench diagrams, photographs, and maps of battles. Three years into the Great War, Europe found itself in a stalemate on the Western Front. The Russian Front had collapsed and the United States had abandoned neutrality, joining the Allied cause. These developments set the stage for the climactic events of 1918, the year that would finally see an end to the war. In 1918: The Last Act, acclaimed military historian Barrie Pitt “analyses with great lucidity the broad outlines of German and Allied Strategy” (The Sunday Telegraph). With an expert eye, Pitt looks into the policies of the warring powers, the men who led them, and the resulting battles along the Western Front. From the German onslaught of March 21, 1918, to the struggles in Champagne and the Second Battle of the Marne, to the turning point in August and the final, hard-won victory, 1918 The Last Act traces “the blunders at the top and the filth and stench and misery of the trenches” in order to deliver “a compelling narrative” of World War I (Daily Mail).

Download or read book The First World War written by John Keegan and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2012-11-21 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The First World War created the modern world. A conflict of unprecedented ferocity, it abruptly ended the relative peace and prosperity of the Victorian era, unleashing such demons of the twentieth century as mechanized warfare and mass death. It also helped to usher in the ideas that have shaped our times--modernism in the arts, new approaches to psychology and medicine, radical thoughts about economics and society--and in so doing shattered the faith in rationalism and liberalism that had prevailed in Europe since the Enlightenment. With The First World War, John Keegan, one of our most eminent military historians, fulfills a lifelong ambition to write the definitive account of the Great War for our generation. Probing the mystery of how a civilization at the height of its achievement could have propelled itself into such a ruinous conflict, Keegan takes us behind the scenes of the negotiations among Europe's crowned heads (all of them related to one another by blood) and ministers, and their doomed efforts to defuse the crisis. He reveals how, by an astonishing failure of diplomacy and communication, a bilateral dispute grew to engulf an entire continent. But the heart of Keegan's superb narrative is, of course, his analysis of the military conflict. With unequalled authority and insight, he recreates the nightmarish engagements whose names have become legend--Verdun, the Somme and Gallipoli among them--and sheds new light on the strategies and tactics employed, particularly the contributions of geography and technology. No less central to Keegan's account is the human aspect. He acquaints us with the thoughts of the intriguing personalities who oversaw the tragically unnecessary catastrophe--from heads of state like Russia's hapless tsar, Nicholas II, to renowned warmakers such as Haig, Hindenburg and Joffre. But Keegan reserves his most affecting personal sympathy for those whose individual efforts history has not recorded--"the anonymous millions, indistinguishably drab, undifferentially deprived of any scrap of the glories that by tradition made the life of the man-at-arms tolerable." By the end of the war, three great empires--the Austro-Hungarian, the Russian and the Ottoman--had collapsed. But as Keegan shows, the devastation ex-tended over the entirety of Europe, and still profoundly informs the politics and culture of the continent today. His brilliant, panoramic account of this vast and terrible conflict is destined to take its place among the classics of world history. With 24 pages of photographs, 2 endpaper maps, and 15 maps in text

Download or read book Three Armies on the Somme written by William Philpott and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2010-10-05 with total page 657 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For decades, the Battle of the Somme has exemplified the horrors and futility of trench warfare. Yet in Three Armies on the Somme, William Philpott makes a convincing argument that the battle ultimately gave the British and French forces on the Western Front the knowledge and experience to bring World War I to a victorious end. It was the most brutal fight in a war that scarred generations. Infantrymen lined up opposite massed artillery and machine guns. Chlorine gas filled the air. The dead and dying littered the shattered earth of no man’s land. Survivors were rattled with shell-shock. We remember the shedding of so much young blood and condemn the generals who sent their men to their deaths. Ever since, the Somme has been seen as a waste: even as the war continued, respected leaders—Winston Churchill and David Lloyd George among them—judged the battle a pointless one. While previous histories have documented the missteps of British command, no account has fully recognized the fact that allied generals were witnessing the spontaneous evolution of warfare even as they sent their troops “over the top.” With his keen insight and vast knowledge of military strategy, Philpott shows that twentieth-century war as we know it simply didn’t exist before the Battle of the Somme: new technologies like the armored tank made their battlefield debut, while developments in communications lagged behind commanders’ needs. Attrition emerged as the only means of defeating industrialized belligerents that were mobilizing all their resources for war. At the Somme, the allied armies acquired the necessary lessons of modern warfare, without which they could never have prevailed. An exciting, indispensable work of military history that challenges our received ideas about the Battle of the Somme, and about the very nature of war.

Download or read book Elegy written by Andrew Roberts and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2015-09-10 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On 1 July 1916, after a five-day bombardment, 11 British and 5 French divisions launched their long-awaited 'Big Push' on German positions on high ground above the Rivers Ancre and Somme on the Western Front. Some ground was gained, but at a terrible cost. In killing-grounds whose names are indelibly imprinted on 20th-century memory, German machine-guns – manned by troops who had sat out the storm of shellfire in deep dugouts – inflicted terrible losses on the British infantry. The British Fourth Army lost 57,470 casualties, the French Sixth Army suffered 1,590 casualties and the German 2nd Army 10,000. And this was but the prelude to 141 days of slaughter that would witness the deaths of between 750,000 and 1 million troops. Andrew Roberts evokes the pity and the horror of the blackest day in the history of the British army – a summer's day-turned-hell-on-earth by modern military technology – in the words of casualties, survivors, and the bereaved.