Dan Hill

speaker

2,255 appearances 12 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 5d ago

Dan Hill’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 12 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 5.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

WW1: Not So Quiet On The Western Front! · Episode 135: The Somme’s Northern Disaster · 6 Jul 2026 podcast

Now, I think, Spence, before we go into that, and of course talk about the lads who are going to be doing the attacking, I think we need to kind of break down our own little sense of scale here.

Because of that 25-mile front, about two-thirds of it is going to be British held, and that's going to be our focus for the series.

But also within that, we probably need to chop that up as well, because there are really two sides, two sides to a particular coin on the 1st of July 1916.

roughly broken down by the northern part and the southern part.

Conveniently for us, and for anyone watching this as well as listening, there is a dead straight road that runs straight through the heart of the battlefield, and that can serve as a dividing line between the north and the south.

It's an old Roman road, and it runs from the town of Albert, which is British-held on one side, and it runs roughly northeast towards the town of Bapolm, which is in the German-held sector, and it's about eight or nine miles distant.

Now, the overall objective is going to be to try and capture that town, chew up German supplies and logistics, draw away more troops from Verdun, continue the fight, but also possibly make a breakthrough along the lines, see how the battle goes in that regard.

And our focus, Spencer, is going to be in the northern sector.

This is going to be where we're looking, but we also need to look at the troops who are going to be in that sector because we get a bit of a mix here, don't we?

Yeah, there's a really good point you've made there.

And I think we've previously touched on this on a much lower, more tactical level before, the idea of, you know, as simple as following a company across a set of trenches.

And if you get everybody to sprint at top speed across those trenches, they're going to arrive at different times.

Your fastest guy is going to get there first.

Some guys are going to get there significantly slower.

You're not going to have a unified arrival at a trench at a given time, which actually is exactly what you need.

Now, you can multiply that out across brigades, divisions, even corps,

So eventually you've got, I think on the 1st of July, something in the region of 120,000 guys going across on their first morning.

What you don't want to be is the first bloke in those trenches.

That's a really unhealthy position to be in.

In fact, you really want to try and get everybody to hit the line at a given time.

Showing 2021–2040 of 2,255 · page 102 of 113