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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 46bac2e | the credit for developing the basic idea into what became the first tank must go to Winston Churchill, | Robin Neillands | ||
| 909ac10 | Now and again, the history of war throws up a battle that transcends reason. The soldiers fight because they cannot stop fighting, because too much has been committed to give up now. Too much blood has been shed, so much courage and will has been committed, that to admit defeat would be unthinkable. | Robin Neillands | ||
| 9a39e55 | as Alistair Horne points out, this was not simply a battle between two armies but the ancient conflict of Teuton and Gaul, two ethnic groups letting one thousand years of envy and hatred out in one long pent-up explosion of violence | Robin Neillands | ||
| 5d7b552 | The British generals have been widely castigated for their actions in this war and their prodigality with lives; it is hard to find evidence that the French or German generals were any better. | Robin Neillands | ||
| d2d4f2c | When evidence reached Joffre's ears that the men were complaining, that untenable positions were being given up or that attacks were not being pressed home with their former elan, his answer was not to question Nivelle or his own methods, but to call for courts martial and firing squads. | Robin Neillands | ||
| 1447699 | In the second week of June, two second-lieutenants were shot by firing squads drawn from their own companies, for allegedly failing to press home their attacks. Orders also went out that battalions abandoning positions or retiring during an attack were to be fired on by their own machine-guns or bombarded by French artillery. Some of these orders were actually obeyed but the resentment they caused far outweighed the influence they had on th.. | Robin Neillands | ||
| 2d7ffb0 | The defence of Verdun and the French Republic was a splendid cause but that alone was not enough; it needed to be a two-way commitment - and what did the Republic care for them, the infantry soldiers of France, alone and dying in their shell holes, sent in again and again in attacks that withered away under the shelling and machine-gun fire, achieving nothing? By mid-June the murmurs heard among the troops in May were growing louder. | Robin Neillands | ||
| a66609b | Morale is a fragile thing. Its creation and maintenance are among the most important duties that can fall to a commander and neither Joffre nor Nivelle devoted as much thought to this issue as it deserved. Morale is maintained by a wide range of means: by discipline and training, by good leadership, by organization, by caring for the wounded, by regular reliefs, | Robin Neillands | ||
| 09a0e19 | In all but killing terms, the battle ended in the last days of September and the main reason it ended was mud. | Robin Neillands | ||
| eebf382 | The veterans of the Somme have gone now but while they lived they talked incessantly of the mud of the Somme, mud which permeated everything, clogged rifles, flowed like lava into dugouts and trenches, sucked off boots, drowned wounded men and horses and made movement either impossible or a tremendous physical effort. To fight on the Somme was bad enough; to also fight the mud of the Somme was simply too much. | Robin Neillands | ||
| 01c972e | the aim of the Somme battle was no longer an attempt at a breakthrough to Bapaume but an attempt to write down the strength of the German field army and kill German soldiers - in other words, attrition. | Robin Neillands | ||
| deb2e49 | One can only wonder if the generals were serious ... or mad. In all but slaughter, the Battle of the Somme was over by early October, and to continue past that point was madness indeed, but this side of Haig's character, his stubbornness combined with a seemingly incurable optimism, is one that even his supporters find difficult to defend: | Robin Neillands | ||
| f3fc901 | The decision on when to break off an attack, like the decision to launch it, is one requiring careful calculation and fine judgement. That said, Haig's judgement in fighting on into the early winter of 1916, when he could have stopped after Flers, is a clear error. | Robin Neillands | ||
| 55954a3 | The collapse of morale in the French Army arose not because of the German attack at Verdun but because the French generals, specifically Nivelle, also adopted the doctrine of attrition, and fought with cran and elan, instead of intelligence. | Robin Neillands | ||
| 823f5cf | sometime in October 1916, Haig abandoned the notion of a breakthrough on the Somme and joined his peers in France and Germany in committing his soldiers to a battle of attrition. | Robin Neillands | ||
| 2c937de | The fate of Sir John French, who had failed in the previous September at Loos - but had not lost anything like so many men in the process - cannot have passed unnoticed by General Haig in the autumn of 1916. | Robin Neillands | ||
| c20c771 | In all his battles, Haig never seems to have appreciated that there came a time when he had obtained or achieved all he could hope for and that to press on would either throw away his success to date or result in terrible losses. | Robin Neillands | ||
| 125b325 | No tactical or strategic gain was made on the Somme front that was worth the cost in lives. Even had the British and French achieved their breakthrough on the Somme, the Germans had plenty of room to manoeuvre and, unlike the French at Verdun, no national interest in staying where they were. During the winter of 1916-17 the Germans simply withdrew to the Hindenburg Line, east of the Somme battlefield, and it all had to be done again. | Robin Neillands | ||
| f1542bc | Total casualties on the Somme, killed, wounded and missing, come to some 1,300,000 men, British, French and German. The British share in this total includes the losses incurred by the Empire and Commonwealth troops, from Australia, Canada, India, South Africa and New Zealand, and amounts to some 400,000 men. The French lost 200,000 men on the Somme, to add to the more serious losses of Verdun. German losses on the Somme came to more than 60.. | Robin Neillands | ||
| fa42445 | As for Verdun, while the estimates vary, the most widely accepted figure is 377,231 French and 337,000 German - a total of more than 700,000 men. | Robin Neillands | ||
| 6987206 | Chauvet Cave: The Discovery of the World's Oldest Paintings, Jean-Marie Chauvet | Victoria Finlay | ||
| 96b68ce | German casualty returns did not include the less seriously wounded who were treated in their corps area. All British wounded were included in the casualty returns, even if they were treated in a regimental aid post (RAP) or at dressing stations and then returned to duty. | Robin Neillands | ||
| c883887 | The regular lesson of the Western Front, one the generals seemed unable to learn, was that - using the currently conventional methods - most attacks simply did not come off, whoever carried them out | Robin Neillands | ||
| 9dded39 | In some curious way the battle at Verdun had become a paradigm for the entire war. Verdun now exerted its own dynamic and needed no reason to continue. By the middle of 1916 it was, or should have been, clear to all that there was no reason in it; reason had ceased to play any part in this struggle. | Robin Neillands | ||
| e4b0b9f | The British Army was learning how to fight the 'all-arms' battle by this stage of the war; no longer would the brunt be left to the infantry. | Robin Neillands | ||
| 66ec963 | In all the odium the British generals have attracted, it should be noticed that it was the British, not the French or the Germans, who created the tank and brought it into action and in so doing changed the face of war. | Robin Neillands | ||
| 12b9cb2 | The battle at Verdun can best be imagined as some monstrous ball game, in which two teams of giants push a boulder to and fro across impossible terrain. For months the Germans had pushed the French south, towards Verdun; now the French were pushing the Germans back to the north, towards their start-line positions of 21 February. The entry fee in this contest for a worthless piece of terrain was a great number of lives. | Robin Neillands | ||
| e93d00a | If the French Government had deliberately intended to inflict further torment and loss on their long-suffering soldiers they could hardly have done better than appoint General Nivelle to the post of Commander-in-Chief. | Robin Neillands | ||
| 9e256cf | Alexander the Great would have found it difficult to succeed in forcing a breach in the German line in 1914-1915, and the defeats Haig's armies suffered in 1916 and 1917 - those notorious disasters on the Somme and at Passchendaele - should not obscure the fact that it was Haig who commanded the British armies that spearheaded the Allied victory in 1918 and showed the other armies how this war should be fought; even General Foch admitted th.. | Robin Neillands | ||
| 6e14f7c | Douglas Haig remained Commander-in-Chief of the British Armies in France until the end of the war but his reputation was blasted by the death toll on the Somme and took a further beating in 1917, after the losses of Passchendaele. Only now, more than 80 years after the Great War ended, has Haig's reputation begun to recover. This seems only fair, for many of the attacks on his character and reputation seem misguided. Haig was neither callou.. | Robin Neillands | ||
| 19cc3ae | The Somme began as an offensive; it ended as a battle of attrition. | Robin Neillands | ||
| d8165dc | At Neuve Chapelle in March 1915, the British lost almost 13,000 men in three days; at Loos in September, 59,000 men in six weeks, but most of them fell in the first two days; neither attack gained more than a few hundred yards of useless, shell-pitted, corpse-strewn ground. | Robin Neillands | ||
| e604d85 | This view - that Germany was not responsible for the outbreak of war - was maintained for the next two decades, during the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich, and was only finally refuted by the extensive researches made into the Wilhelmine archives at Potsdam by Professor Fritz Fischer, research which proved beyond any reasonable doubt that Germany had been planning a major European war for years and saw the Sarajevo incident, and the sub.. | Robin Neillands | ||
| 6399bba | The general feeling among the Entente nations at the end of 1916 seemed to be that unless Europe returned to the status quo ante, the terrible loss of life in the previous three years had been for nothing. | Robin Neillands | ||
| dc155a2 | During the Great War all armies lost men in quantity in the attack; the Germans at First and Second Ypres, the French in Champagne, on Vimy Ridge, in Artois and on the Chemin des Dames. Everywhere it was the same story: a failure to develop a breach in the enemy defences was common to all armies and, by the end of 1915, French and German losses far exceeded those of the British Empire. | Robin Neillands | ||
| f790ae5 | No one seemed able to accept that the war had been a terrible mistake and that ending it, on any reasonable terms, which must include the German evacuation of France and Belgium, was far less costly than letting it continue. | Robin Neillands | ||
| 44b1cc5 | People were like onions, made of lots of layers. The deeper you went, the rawer the layer. | L.J. Shen | ||
| e4196a7 | There was, however, a deeper failure, a failure to realize that the current conventional tactics were not working. The focus was on solving the shortages of men and guns and of increasing the weight of attacks - which only increased the scale of loss. | Robin Neillands | ||
| 795a293 | Despite arguments between Easterners, who wanted an offensive anywhere but France, and Westerners, who believed that an offensive anywhere else was a waste of effort, it was generally accepted that the Germans could only be decisively defeated on the Western Front, not least because that was where most of them were. | Robin Neillands | ||
| bffe081 | We know how we will die--with cousins in double murder suicides, in wars that are mere theory to you, convalescing in hospitals, slowly choked out by angina and cholesterol. We are the walking lowest rung, and all that stands between us and beast, between us and the local zoo, is respect, the respect you take as natural as sugar and shit. We know what we are, that we walk like we are not long for this world, that this world has never longed.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| c08d0c6 | The late Barbara Tuchman, an American historian and the author of some fine books on the Great War, has written that while the human race has made great progress in many fields of endeavour - science, medicine, the arts - since the siege of Troy to the present day, it has made no discernible progress whatsoever in the field of government. She adds that nations will frequently adopt policies which are not only dangerous to their national wel.. | Robin Neillands | ||
| 01b49b2 | There were two views on how to conduct a frontal assault and they reveal the basic tactical argument of the Great War. Should the attacker go for 'bite and hold', seizing a small portion of the enemy line and hanging on to it, then bringing up the guns and the infantry before taking another bite, or should he concentrate on going for a full scale 'breakthrough'? | Robin Neillands | ||
| 22d155a | And so the war was fought with new weapons and old ideas and the result was a slaughter exceeding that of any previous war. In just four years, about 9,300,000 soldiers died on the battlefields of the Great War; 3,600,000 from the nations comprising the Central Powers and 5,700,000 from the nations of the Entente. | Robin Neillands | ||
| b4b117d | The generals, British, French and German, were unable to achieve a breakthrough because the defences were always too strong and the facilities available to reduce them were not fully developed, either technically or tactically. | Robin Neillands |