50.0°N 2.7°E Western Front Battle of the Somme
Briefing
On 1 July 1916 the British Army suffered 57,470 casualties — the bloodiest day in its history — in the opening hours of the Somme offensive. The battle ground on until November for a few miles of mud, costing over a million casualties on all sides and becoming the enduring symbol of the war's industrial slaughter. It also saw the first use of the tank.
Books Covering This Event (11)
Historical Fiction
A young German soldier and his classmates are destroyed, body and soul, by the trenches of the Western Front.
A novel of love and war that follows an Englishman from a pre-war affair into the tunnels and trenches of the Somme.
Memoir
A German stormtroop officer's diary-based account of four years in the trenches, from 1915 to 1918.
A poet's quietly devastating memoir of two years in the line at the Somme and Ypres.
Robert Graves's bitter, blackly comic memoir of his upbringing and his service as an infantry officer on the Western Front.
The lightly fictionalised memoir of an officer's journey from eager patriotism through the Somme to open protest against the war.
Vera Brittain's memoir of nursing the wounded while the war killed her fiancé, her brother, and her closest friends.
Popular History
A single-volume military history of the entire war by the most influential military historian of the 20th century.
A global history of the war that ranges far beyond the Western Front to Africa, the Middle East, and the seas.
An intimate history of the war told through the diaries and letters of twenty ordinary people on every front.
A history of the war in Britain told through both those who fought it and those who refused to.