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The Centenary of the Battle of the Somme


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Almost 4 years to the day since I went on a school battlefields trip to Belgium and France. Going to the likes of monuments such as Thiepval and Vimy Ridge and Tyne Cot cemetery really was an immensely sobering experience.

Are you a teacher?

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In futurama there's a joke where zapp brannigan defeats the killbots by knowing they had a set kill limit and sending wave after wave of bodies at the enemy until that limit was reached.

I think that's actually somewhat analogous to the futility of WW1. I think France lost 15% of its population in that war. Pretty much a whole generation of men. Madness.

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The Great War channel has weekly updates of what happened in the war in that week. 

https://www.youtube.com/user/TheGreatWar

 

Last weeks

And this weeks 

Cover the build up to the Somme and the other major events around the war, mostly the Brusilov Offensive. The British Army had gone from being a small professional army built around colonial operations to being a mass participation army many times larger and with vastly more complex logistics tail (logistics is the real art of war, everything else is secondary but it almost never makes the flashy headlines). The Somme was intended to relieve pressure on Verdun and to employ Britain's first mass participation army of the modern era. 

 

The Bio of Hague would also be useful. 

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Are you assuming this because he said it sobered him up?

No, because I thought he was 45 years old. I'm possibly wrong, but....

If he was on a school trip 4 years ago, he's either.

A. A teacher

B. Too young to be a paid up conservative

C. Joey Deacon

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The Somme gets most of the attention from a british point of view, but Verdun was even worse. The casualties involved in attempting to capture a shitey old series of forts were horrific, with estimates of up to and over a million men. I vaguely remember (probably badly) from school history that the Somme offensive was intended to try to relieve some of the pressure on the French at Verdun, so were suffering both horrific losses and the added bonus of large scale mutinies.

The Germans end game at Verdun was to bleed France white,they were content losing men as long as the French lost more.
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Well, not in Orkney but in the sea off Orkney en route to Arkhangelsk in an armoured cruiser that evidently wasn't armoured enough.

I'm obviously being facetious, and I'll admit, I never knew he met his demise that way.

Sorry for making light of a terrible occurrence.

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No, because I thought he was 45 years old. I'm possibly wrong, but....

If he was on a school trip 4 years ago, he's either.

A. A teacher

B. Too young to be a paid up conservative

C. Joey Deacon

Well, I plan on becoming a teacher...

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As horrible as this war was for the West and all the individuals involved, it's sometimes important to recognize certain folks as representatives for all those who died. The Battle of the Somme was especially terrible and the men from Ulster played an especially important role in that battle.

 

I'm not sure if anybody else here listens to the Hardcore History podcast, but the series dealing with WW1 was incredible.

 

The USA came later:

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