Dan Hill

speaker

2,064 appearances 11 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 7 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 — 11 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

And that's going to be one of the big problems, and particularly when you marry it to the terrain.

Because experience, I should say courage and scale are fantastic.

But without experience, there's just certain things you can't do.

And that's particularly we're going to see that unfold on the 1st of July.

You know, quite so often when I'm out on the battlefields, people say, well, why didn't they launch a night attack?

Why didn't they try these kind of complex manoeuvres?

Well, all of those things with a brand new army, you simply can't do.

It's a recipe for even more disaster than actually we're going to discover on the 1st of July.

And a lot of that comes down to the terrain as well and also the mindset of the guys on the other side of the field because the Germans are the real important factor here, of course.

but also the area that's going to be attacked.

So let's maybe touch on those two things in sequence.

I mean, first of all, the Somme is like a deceptively large battlefield.

We're talking about 25 miles, 40 kilometers end to end.

If you go right up from the northern tip of the British diversionary attack up at Gommacourt, right down to the southern end of the French tip, which is over the other side of the Somme River, that's about...

25 miles, that's a long way.

It's a hell of a lot of line that you've got to cover.

And of course, with those curves and loops and bends, it's significantly longer than that.

Now, also the actual terrain itself, the Somme is not pan-flat like it is up at Fromelles where the British Army have been fighting around Albers Ridge and Neu Chapelle.

It's not those kind of very gentle rises that we see in the Ypres Salient, but it's also not the Vosges Mountains.

It's really a kind of rolling terrain.

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