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
1st Battalion Lancashire Fusiliers, perhaps the most famous of those led by Major Meredith Magnac at that time.
These are really experienced troops.
They know their way around.
They've already fought the Ottomans and suffered heavy losses in doing so.
But they're seen really as amongst the elites of the British Army.
And it's thought that if anyone can break into this toughest areas and capture one of these really high value targets, 29th Div can do it.
And they're one of two, really they're the primary division actually that's been given the task of attacking and capturing the village of Bomor Amel on that first morning.
Now, despite the advantages they inevitably have over people like 31st Diff who've never been in action before and are not professional soldiers, they are still going to come under the same problems and meet the same disaster.
In fact, even worse in the case of people like the 1st Lancashire Fusiliers.
The most famous action I think spent of this whole episode has got to come down to a story of the 1st Lancs who are going to be attacking directly into the face of Beaumont Hamel out of an area that we know as the Sunken Lane.
So about half of the battalion, and this gives a little idea of actually the fact that this isn't just mindless over-the-top attacks with no thought to the terrain.
About half of the battalion actually have been snuck into this thing called the Sunken Road or the Sunken Lane, which cuts down the length of No Man's Land by about half.
Pretty good idea.
If your race to the parapet is half as long as it would have been a day before, you've got a much better chance of being successful.
But despite those kind of adaptations that are made on the ground to try and cut down the distance and improve the chances of the lads, sometimes just poor decisions can really play a tremendous decision and give the game away across a big part of the battlefield.
And unfortunately, that happens in the form of the £40,000 Hawthorne Redoubt mine.
which is going to go up on the morning of that 1st of July attack, and...
To go back to this idea, when the British are originally looking across this entire front, they realise the Hawthorne Redoubt, a high prominent bit that today overlooks both Newfoundland Memorial Park to the south and also the valley which leads into Beaumont Amel Village, which the Lancashire Fusiliers will attack in.
It's seen that this is going to be a tough area.
In fact, we know there are heavy concentration of machine guns in concrete appeal boxes up there and maybe even the artillery isn't going to do the job.
Showing 1921–1940 of 2,064 · page 97 of 104
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