Dan Hill

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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 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.

So despite the fact in the northern sector alone we've got regular army troops in the shape of 4th Division, we've got experienced regular army troops in the shape of 29th Division, we've got territorial troops in the North Midlands and two London Divisions, and we've got a number of new army troops.

All of those are going to react in different ways, they've got different capabilities, different abilities to fight.

What you effectively are saying on the 1st of July is we have to move at the pace and to the abilities of our least effective divisions.

So you go as fast as your slowest guy.

That's really what the line is here.

That way you can at least guarantee that, okay, you might not be able to do anything particularly impressive.

You might not be able to undertake very sophisticated maneuvers, but everybody's going at the same time.

You're going to hit the enemy position in a concerted line.

That could be useful.

provided you can nullify the enemy defences beforehand.

And this is the big question of the Somme, because Spence, the idea that they come up with and really put in potentially all of their eggs in one basket is the British Army High Command says, artillery is going to do that job for us.

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