Ninety years ago today, the allied Armies on the Western front launched a combined offensive against the entrenched Imperial German Army. Soldiers from more than 20 nations took part in the 1916 Summer Offensive, but to the soldiers of the United Kingdom it will always be known as The Battle of the Somme.
On July 1st, 1916 one hundred thousand men climbed from their trenches along a twenty mile front and walked through No Man's Land towards the waiting Germans. Each man carried thirty to seventy pounds of equipment and had orders to advance slowly to avoid losing contact with flanking units. German artillery, machine guns, rifles and grenades bled them white with every step.
On the first day of the assault U.K. forces suffered more than 20,000 killed and 40,000 wounded. By the end of the battle, four months later, the Allied forces had suffered more than 600,000 casualties. Her Majesty's forces had been decimated for a gain of only six miles over part of the front.
Well over a million casualties were suffered by both sides during the four months of battle. More than the entire population of Detroit Michigan or San Jose California.
The Battle of the Somme defined a generation...a mostly missing generation.
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