The Long Road to the Somme: Planning the Big Push

The Somme: 7.29 a.m., Saturday, 1st July 1916. Young men of 15 British and six French divisions wait to go ‘over the top’.

Within a few hours, over 57,000 British and Empire troops were casualties. Just four British divisions achieved all or most of their objectives. At the same time, losing less than 2,000 men, the French captured the entire German front line.

Using French and British sources, The Long Road to the Somme: Volume II – Planning the Big Push – describes the genesis and planning of the Somme offensive. It recounts the strained relationship between the Allies as the titanic Battle of Verdun impacted on the scale of the attack.

It examines the different approaches of each army to the problem of overcoming the stubborn German defences. And it shows how the British failure to adapt to modern trench warfare cost so many young men their lives on a sunny day in the mid-summer of 1916.

Volume I – Episodes (link to page for Vol. I under Just out tab) – moves from 1870 to December 1915, from Sedan to Loos, examining French and British developments in politics and society, education and training, and strategies and tactics. It looks at how the public were conditioned to accept war as inevitable – and at the prescient men who, unlike most military commanders, accurately forecast the way in which The Great War would be fought.