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 I think for this series, which let's take a guess now whilst we start it, maybe four, maybe five, maybe eight episodes.

I'm going to go for around six.

is probably one of those that hopefully we can once we get our teeth into you know may well expand out in directions we hadn't originally foreseen but it's certainly one that's important and has earned its place in any military history podcast particularly one related to the first world war but i suppose the question is where do we start and i guess we have to go back really to late 1915 in order to understand exactly how the song comes about and why it finds its place in this story

Yeah, and it's actually a relatively logical choice if you think about it.

And I think the main thing that dictates that is the fact that it's the join between the French armies, the very impressive French armies in late 1915, alongside the British army who's expanding at a very quick rate and also taking on more territory really throughout 1915 into early 1916.

They're expanding the line and we're starting to see

a really sizable British army in the field for the first time here.

And in order to kind of concentrate that effort in one location, it makes sense that you do the point where those two forces join.

So the French can put real pressure to bear in the area around the Somme River and the British slightly north of the Somme and heading up towards Arras can exert their pressure

closer to their own supply lines and in areas of ground which is slightly more favourable in that area and hopefully as you say a crack will appear.

Now all of this is logical and by 1915 the idea of the kind of general offensive that's come about and the big push of 1916 most people are on board in fact it's very clear that the Germans have taken a defensive posture except and this is a big but they don't read the script and something changes in a big way in early 1916.

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.

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