The Somme

Críticas

On the first day of the Somme the British suffered 57,470 casualties, 19,240 fatal. No two words sum up the futility of war as succinctly¿. Hart's advice is that instead of blaming ¿ General Haig as usual, we should take other factors - recent European history, the state of the British empire, sweeping changes in weaponry - into account and above all keep an open mind. This is fact fleshed out with eyewitness accounts, and Tim Pigott-Smith's firm but fair reading perfectly captures the mood. (Sue Arnold The Guardian)

Reseña del editor

On 1 July 1916, Dauglas Haig's army launched the 'Big Push' that was supposed finally to bring the end to the stalemate on the Western Front. What happened next was a human catastrophe: scrambling over the top into the face of the German machine guns and artillery fire, almost 20,000 British and Commonwealth soldiers were killed that day alone, and twice as many wounded - the greatest loss in a single day ever sustained by the British Army. The battle did not stop there, however. It dragged on for another 4 months, leaving the battlefield strewn with literally hundreds of thousands of bodies.

The Somme has remained a byword for the futility of war ever since. In this major new history, Peter Hart describes how the battle looked from the point of view of those who fought it. Using never-before-seen eyewitness testimonies, he shows us this epic conflict from all angles. We see what it was like for those who stayed behind in the trenches - the padres, the artillerymen, the doctors. We also see what the battle looked like from the air, as the RFC battled to keep control of the skies above the battlefield.

Read by Tim Pigott-Smith