Somme

Product Description

On 1 July 1916 Douglas Haigs army launched the Big Push that was supposed finally to bring an end to the stalemate on the Western Front. What happened next was a human catastrophe: scrambling over the top into the face of the German machine guns & artillery fire almost 20 000 British & Commonwealth soldiers were killed that day alone & twice as many wounded
- the greatest loss in a single day ever sustained by the British Army. The battle did not stop there however. It dragged on for another 4 months leaving the battlefield strewn with literally hundreds of thousands of bodies. The Somme has remained a byword for the futility of war ever since. In this major new history Peter Hart describes how the battle looked from the point of view of those who fought it. Using never-before-seen eyewitness testimonies he shows us this epic conflict from all angles. We see what it was like to crawl across No Mans Land in the face of the German guns what it was like for those who stayed behind in the trenches
- the padres the artillerymen the doctors. We also see what the battle looked like from the air as the RFC battled to keep control of the skies above the battlefield.