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 · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 11 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 5.
Appearances
WW1: Not So Quiet On The Western Front! · Episode 135: The Somme’s Northern Disaster · 6 Jul 2026
podcast
the main part of their front line, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John Copses, attacking over a slight but gentle rise into three heavily defended, unsighted German trenches with plenty of wire in front of it and determined defenders with heavy machine guns behind.
who have not been neutralized prior to the attack.
We're talking brand new troops, first time in action, unable to do any of these very complex maneuvers that we see in some areas further to the south.
It's just not a possibility.
You just can't ask troops to do anything too complex in their first time over the top.
And as a result, we're going to see absolute tragedy.
It's, in general, the same pattern repeated north to south across the division's frontage.
Troops going over the top, often being hit as they're leaving their trenches or even in some cases as they're forming up because the element of surprise has so completely gone in this sector that a lot of guys are getting hit before they even go over the top.
So very heavy counter-barrage goes down.
troops advance and within 50 or even 100 yards start to encounter uncut barbed wire typically what's found at this point is that german barbed wire has been hit some cases by shrapnel shells which don't tend to cut the the wire very well in other cases high explosive rounds which tend to throw the wire up in the air rearrange it into some other pattern other than what it was and then throw it back down on the ground which still forms a pretty impenetrable barrier so even where there are gaps
They're clear bottlenecks, and troops tend to gravitate towards them.
Machine gun fire, quite typically low, around knee height, whips into these poor lads that are going over the top.
And the casualties to 31st Division, and even 4th Division slightly further to the south, the regular Army Division attacking the quadrilateral, are going to be astronomical.
This is the area where the POWs, who have taken so much of the British public's attention in the year before the war, are ultimately going to have their very first, and in some ways, I think, Spence, their last battle.
Yeah, it is.
And, you know, I don't want to sound like we're repeating too much here, but the story does repeat.
Even when you have experienced troops, because just slightly further to the south, the 4th Div, who themselves are experienced, we've got the 29th Division of Gallipoli fame.
These are the guys that come ashore at Lancashire Landing.
We've only been covering fairly recently.
They've arrived down in Marseille in about March of 1916, being reinserted into the line in the Western Front.
Showing 1901–1920 of 2,064 · page 96 of 104
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