Dan Hill

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2,255 appearances 12 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 14 Sep

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

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

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

8 o'clock in the morning on the 1st of July, 1960, when it's really realised in many parts of the front that things are going to go terribly, terribly wrong on that day.

Now, that's not to say that everything goes wrong, and as we cover this North-South divide, hopefully that will become clear.

In fact, even in the North, there are efforts made to try and mitigate some of the worst problems, some of the biggest trouble spots.

And a lot of that comes down to mining.

British Army, when it surveys the Somme front before the attack, realises quite quickly that certain areas are even so well reinforced, they're likely to sustain and survive even the heaviest of attacks.

pre-battle bombardment and so massive mines are dug, something like 12 in that sector are dug under key German strong points to be blown up shortly before the attack, neutralise them and then allow the advancing troops to move forward with much less fire to contend with.

Again, all bright ideas, tunnelling out, moving forward, sapping forward, closing down the distance of no man's land, all of these things are relatively good ideas.

But the fundamental mismatch, as far as I see it at least, Spence, is one of overestimating what the artillery can achieve and underestimating the strength of German defences.

Well, I think you've hit the nail on the head there.

Do we need an actual attack here or do we need a feint attack?

And I think given the scale of what's to come, the complexity of everything that's already going on, possibly an argument that Third Army want to get in on the action and don't want to sit by and just be observers to this.

This, after all, is going to be the great victorious push and perhaps Third Army want to get their name on that particular battle on it.

But the result is an attack

to try and pinch out what we sometimes call the Gomkor Salient, which is a bit of line that kind of juts out around the village of Gomkor, as you rightly said, attacked by the 46th North Midland Division to the north and the 56th First First Londons to the south, both of whom are territorial force divisions, and they are going to

Make an attack after, as you say, all element of surprise has been lost.

The German garrison in the area has been well and truly alive to the idea that there's some action going on on their front.

And unfortunately, we're going to see the same problem here that we see elsewhere in that it's really the lack of surprise, which is inevitable in 1916, by the way.

There is really no other way of doing that.

followed by troops going over the top, getting caught up short of barbed wire.

One of the two divisions does slightly better, but without that kind of supporting element, it's really heavy machine guns and German counter-battery and artillery fire, which is going to really heavily, heavily damage those two attacking divisions.

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