Episode 135: The Somme’s Northern Disaster
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At 7.30am on the morning of 1st July 1916, whistles blew across the front, stretching more than 20 miles. Tens of thousands of British soldiers climbed from their trenches and began walking towards the German lines. By nightfall, nearly 20,000 of them would be dead. It remains the bloodiest day in British military history. But that catastrophe was not evenly spread across the battlefield. Some sectors were disasters, others achieved limited success. To understand what happened, we need to begin in the North, where the British offensive would suffer its greatest failures.
Welcome to Not So Quiet on the Western Front, the podcast where we lift the lid, bust the myths and explore the incredible history of the First World War. I'm Dan Hill, a military historian and battlefield guide specialising in the history of the war on the Western Front.
And I'm Dr Spencer Jones, author and senior lecturer in war studies at the University of Wolverhampton. Well, hello, Dan. It's a real pleasure to be joining you today. It seems like a long time since you and I have been able to coordinate and actually get together and record an episode without having a guest involved somewhere in between. So it's great to be back with you, and it's great to be returning to a battle that we covered a very, very long time ago. In fact, it was episode four where we looked at the Battle of the Somme, one of our very first episodes, We have revisited it from time to time since, but with the 110th anniversary of the Somme this July, there's never been a better time, I think, to revisit this most controversial of British battles.
Yeah, hi Spence. I was thinking exactly the same thing as you said that. It does feel like a very long time since we've both been on the same podcast together in the kind of old-fashioned way that we're doing it. But I'm looking forward to this and a whole series of episodes that we're going to cover in depth on the Battle of the Somme. I have to admit, we're probably long overdue for this. 110th anniversary is a great opportunity. to kind of redress that balance to a certain extent. I know it's a subject that you're passionate about. It's one that I study quite a lot as well. So I'm looking forward to kind of breaking the story down. 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
We do, and one thing I think that's very important to emphasize right at the beginning is when we're talking about the Somme, though we refer to it as a British battle, it is, of course, a British Empire battle. It would bring in forces from around the Empire, from the Dominions, from India. who will also suffer greatly in many of these engagements. But as well as being a British Empire battle, it's also a coalition battle. It's a battle about alliances, because really the place of the Somme as a place to attack has been chosen not by the British for military reasons. It's been chosen months earlier at the Chantilly Conference, which is the first really big conference between all the Allied powers.
At this stage, of course, Britain, France, Italy... and Russia with some representatives from smaller Allied powers like Serbia, for example, to decide what do the Allies do to try and break down the Germans. 1915 has been a terrible year for the Allied cause, defeated on just about every single front. It's clear that 1916 can't repeat those failures. And the solution that the Allies come up with is not, at a strategic level, a bad one.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–14:48
2
What strategic reason led the Allies to choose the Somme for a 1916 offensive?
14:48–32:52
3
How did Verdun reshape French involvement and turn the Somme into a British-led battle?
32:52–50:55
4
Why was the Somme battlefield terrain and German fortification so difficult to attack?
50:55–1:08:44
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from WW1: Not So Quiet On The Western Front!
Episode 143: The Ancre: The Final Major Battle of the Somme
Episode 142: French Army on the Somme
Episode 141: Thiepval 1916: Storming the Impossible Ridge
Episode 140: Flers-Courcelette: The Somme's Tactical Turning Point?
Episode 139: Pozières: Australia's Bloodiest Battle of the Somme
Episode 138: Somme's Woodland: Mametz, Trônes, Delville & High Wood