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First Day On The Somme
Paperback Edition: 1
'For some reason nothing seemed to happen to us at first; we strolled along as though walking in a park. Then, suddenly, we were in the midst of a storm of machine-gun bullets and I saw men beginning to twirl round and fall in all
kinds of curious ways'
...
more
The first day on the Somme was the blackest day of slaughter in the history of the British Army.
Martin Middlebrook's The First Day on the Somme is a compelling and intensely moving account of the blackest day in the history of the British army. On 1 July, 1916, a continuous line of British soldiers climbed out from the trenches of the Somme into No Man's Land and began to walk slowly towards dug-in German troops armed with machine-guns and defended by thick barbed wire. By the end of that day, as old tactics were met by the reality of modern warfare, there had been more than 60,000 British casualties - a third of them fatalities.
This book draws on official sources from the time, and on the words of hundreds of survivors: normal men, many of them volunteers, who found themselves thrown into a scene of unparalleled tragedy and horror, killed as much by the folly of their commanders as by the bullets of their enemies.
Pages : 384
Publisher : Penguin Books
Publication date : 2016-05
Subjects: Non-fiction, Humanities, History, First World War