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The Somme: The Darkest Hour on the Western Front

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Peter Hart is certainly one of the great WW I historians. Aces Falling and Bloody April, both about the air war, are superb and unforgettable works. The Somme is a massive and detailed history of the months-long battle. As he did in Bloody April and Aces Falling, Hart includes a wealth of personal narrative: letters, diaries, reports, etc. At a guess, perhaps 30% of the book is such narrative. The authors are mostly British, but include Australians and New Zealanders, etc, with some narratives from Germans and a very few French. They range from Generals to lower-ranking officers, NCOs, and ordinary privates (it would seem that the lower ranks were perhaps not as productive in this regard--front-line trenches were not the ideal place for diary-keeping).

Hart provides a balanced outlook--he is kinder to most of the generals than many others have been--and explains why they do not deserve as much condemnation as they received by many after the war. Hart does conclude that the "bite-and-hold" approach worked much more successfully than the "big push" ideas that sought to grab massive amounts of territory. You get maps--lots of detailed maps that show front lines, objectives, and results. Hart works the front part by part--showing what happened in the different sectors--why some attacks were relatively successful while others were not. You also get, which provides a fascinating contrast, narratives from some of the fliers above the battle--their bird's-eye view of the front and the battles. This is certainly a fine addition to your WW I book shelves!

'The Somme'. To many people these few words have come to be bywords for murder, mayhem and pointless slaughter. They conjure up views of Chateau Generals and poor Tommy Atkins living in fetid trenches waiting an untimely death in a hail of machine gun bullets.
At long last we have a book which challenges this often heard view of the battle of the Somme. For nearly 90 years many eminent military historians have helped to colour the views of our nation with the same old bigoted, jaundiced and ill informed view of this great but tragic battle.

In this work Peter Hart looks at the battle in a logical and orderly manner. The book starts by giving the reasons why Douglas Haig was forced into fighting on the chalk downlands of the Somme. Once the political reasons for the battle are covered he moves smoothly to the tumultuous first day. This starts at Gommecourt and steadily moves southwards along the battleline to Maricourt on the banks of the river Somme. All through the text one sees an educated analysis of the opening day's events, which are greatly aided by new facsimiles of the Official Histories maps.

Upon the conclusion of the first day the reader is then taken through the further battles that comprise the Battle of the Somme. All the time there is logical analysis of the Generals actions. In many parts one is made aware of unforgivable errors made by Haig, Rawlinson and others which lead to the death of many thousands of men. But one is also made aware of incidents that will hopefully lay down the myth of Lions led by Donkeys! The analysis of the battles is clear and concise, sticking to known facts. All too often we are served up myth and legend, in what are frankly pseudo histories of this conflict.

Throughout the book Peter Hart makes extensive use of personal accounts from those who we there. He has not been tempted to colour the reader's judgement of the overall battle by the misrepresentation of these most personal reminiscences. They add greatly to the understanding of how individual soldiers felt about their own localised situation within the tumult of the battle.

In conclusion I would recommend this book whole heartedly; this is a classic work that joins the ever increasing list of revisionist histories on the Great War. With the passing of time we are able to make reasoned judgements on the conflict. Peter Hart should be congratulated for producing this fine body of work. I would suggest that those who have accused him of being an apologist for Douglas Haig should question their own historical integrity and stop following the all too easy path of misinformed and some what bigoted comment on this tragic battle.

The one abiding conclusion to be drawn from this book is that War is awful, it is not and never has been glorious to those who are caught up in it. Peter Hart leaves one in no doubt of this fact.

I cannot praise this book enough! Hyperbole is not something that I am given to but for any book on such a well trodden subject as the Somme to be as engaging as this signals a major achievement.

What I believe sets this book apart from many that I have read is the strength of genuine feeling that the author has for the men who experienced the battle. That is not necessarily the impression I get from some authors. You do get a real sense of how deeply moved he was when laying out the first hand accounts of men who underwent such appalling experiences. The book never, though, descends into sentimentality.

It would be a book that I would happily recommend to anyone who'd never read anything about the Somme or to someone who had their own personal library in the spare room. As such, it stands in a clear line from Martin Middlebrook's classic, "The First Day on the Somme", and stands some what higher, in my view, than Lynn McDonald's book, "Somme", good book though that is.

Perhaps the most intense book on war I have ever read, and I've read over a hundred such books. It is almost too detailed, with long descriptions of the German and Allied positions prior to and during the Battle of the Somme. Much of the material for the book comes from diaries and notes of British soldiers, from privates to generals. A few German diaries are also used as sources.

If you want to get an idea of what trench warfare was like, what soldiers were feeling and thinking as they prepared to go "over the top," what it felt like to be in a bombardment by heavy guns and what the aftermath was like, this book is unsurpassed. There are also plenty of maps and diagrams showing the positions of the actual trenches on both sides, what the objectives of the assutls were, and what was achieved.

One comes away from this book with a sense of awe of what these men endured, often without much aid that those fighting in war today expect, and you also get a very good sense of the sort of "fate-ridden" mentality the average soldier in 1916 must have felt. "No man's land" takes on a wholly new meaning.

For my money it was a teriffic read, and there are plenty of haunting images and memories of this 5 month battle that resulted in over a million casualties, and moved the Germans only about 8 miles east.

I regret to disagree with so many positive reviewers, so in fairness I should offer some reasons for doing so. This book is a well-written military history, granted. Also, the author has captured the "large" strategic issues and interlaced his chapters with quotes from the soldiers at the front, which implies that he sympathizes with the plight of the front-line soldiers.

After all this, however, the author's ascription of meaning to the events is empty. He excorciates the literature arising from the war, especially the "war poets." He does not understand why the Somme came to represent the futility of the advanced machine-age war, in which literally hundreds of thousands of shells could be exploded on a 10-mile x 2-mile area. He recites the numbers of casualties without putting this in the context of a nation-empire that had not fought a major war in over a century. He implies that the shell-shocked wounded were of a differnt class than those with physical wounds. The author appreciates Sir General Haig's attention to detail in the planning of the Somme, but he fails to see how stubborn and unimaginative Haig was, or how trapped the Army was in the "sportsmanship" motif of higher English society.

Thus, as the book progressed, chapter after chapter moving along the front, I felt increasingly astounded that the author had missed the overarching importance of the battle: that English society would never be the same, that the meatgrinder of the Somme traumatized a whole generation of English civilians who lost their children, husbands, lovers to the meatgrinder; and that the European civil states lost their empires and their civil contract with their citizens to the flame of the Somme.

When an author loses the significance of that which he narrates--that's sad.

Expediency as a motivator for a general with many troops at his command is seldom a good thing. But that's the spot in which Sir Douglas Haig found himself in the Spring of 1916 when the German Army's February attack on Verdun prompted French General Joffre to insist that Haig 'do something' to relieve the pressure on the fortress cum shrine to the nation's military integrity. Author Hart is not a wordsmith, nor need he be to tell the story of how Haig would have preferred to fight the title battle at another time at another place and with much more seasoned troops. But that was not to be, and the result was not only one of the defining engagements of the war, but the one which, because of the incredible rates of attrition, prompted the catchphrase, "Lions led by donkeys," and it many variations, popularizing the myth that most British generals were unworthy of their men and indifferent to their sacrifices.

Hart does a good job of dispelling these shibboleths while at the same time aiming opprobrium at the innumerable uncoordinated, ill-advised, and collectively costly "raids' interspersed by junior officers between the major actions of the battle. Indeed, Hart is at his best when getting his juices up to excoriate these mindless wastes of men and materiel.

Prospective readers should recognize that this is primarily a military history of the battle mostly told through the accounts of participants now in the collection of the Imperial War Museum. As such, I believe the general history reader might well find it a bit dry and perhaps difficult to follow. With that caveat, it is probably the best account of its kind and makes a valuable contribution to the history of the battle and of the war.

The principal alternative for the general reader is Lyn Macdonald's "The Somme," originally published in 1983. I think it's fair to say that Ms. Macdonald was the first popular historian of WW I to make extensive use of the recollections of actual participants, which she collected herself, and the results are some of the finest books about the war. Her account of the Somme is what might be called a more "socialized" version at the action which does a simply superb, if less technical than Hart's, job of describing the background of the battle, the view from the Home Front, every bit as compelling "eyewitness" testimony, and many details necessarily omitted or glossed over by Hart such as the interaction of the British forces with the native population and the almost indescribable misery suffered by both sides because of the weather, supply issues, etc. An added bonus in her account is the inclusion of many more, and much better, photos and maps.

Finally, for those of you who can't get enough of WW I, I highly recommend another of Ms. Macdonald's books, "The Roses of No Man's Land," which describes the work of medical personnel both during and after the war to try to reduce the unprecedented carnage and address the novel and horrible injuries introduced by trench warfare, massive artillery bombardments, the use of poison gas, etc. After reading it, you may agree with me that the most affecting 'war stories' often are not those that describe great battles, however costly in the abstract, but those rare few that remorselessly illuminate the suffering of the soldiers wounded fighting them. Just as the widespread use of 'IED's' during the Iraq conflict produced a disproportionate number of lower body injuries, so WW I's trench warfare occasioned innumerable injuries to the upper, particularly to the head and face. Ms. Macdonald's description of the injuries and doctors' efforts to treat them before the advent of plastic surgery, which developed as a medical specialty as a result, takes the reader's breath away. An unforgettable read and, one might argue, the most compelling story of the war.

An absolutely amazing take on the Battle of the Somme. Gave in-depth accounts of soldiers from the highest general to the lowliest private in all aspects of the battle. It is the most horrifying account of any battle I have ever read and it took me longer than I expected to get through it because of the enormous emotional strain it puts on the reader. An unbelievable account of a too believable battle.

I was looking for something to enlighten me on a topic I didn't know much about and The Somme by Peter Hart definitely helped me with my goal.

Hart, who is a well-known WWI historian (he actually features in the BBC film Gallipoli) who knows full well what information is important and not important to include. But what this book does well is pair nonfictional facts with first-hand accounts. These first-hand accounts allow you to feel what the soldiers felt in this dark, uncompromising and horrific battle/war. I would like to post some amazing accounts here but you should read the book and see for yourself!

I read this book in the summer and being that the battle begins on July 1, 1916, you can almost feel the conditions these men felt but it only got worse from there and the battle conditions only worsened when the months passed into October and November. The lofty expectations and failures of the generals paired with the courage of men created a perfect storm for this truely epic battle--one which will not be forgotten.

If you're interested in WWI or even history, I recommend this book.

A great deal has been written about the First World War. The 1916 Somme campaign has entered the psyche of all the nations of the former British Empire as a human catastrophe created by the stubbonness and ignorance of a few Commanders who never troubled to see the terrible conditions they sent their troops to die in. The latest review of the terrible period from July to November 1916 is a sober and realistic assessment of the fact and myth behind these beliefs and attitudes.
Peter Hart's book 'The Somme' makes it quite clear that the reality was a much more complex and difficult situation than the myth would have us believe.
There had never before in human history been the situation in which at least three European nation states (Germany,England and France) committed their total industrial strengh to a war. The American Civil War had given an indication of what the result might be. Haig understood that such a war could never be anything but the long and bloody fight to the absolute finish that it was. Critics who claim this sort of bloodbath was avoided in WW 2 because of cleverer tactics forget that the Second European War was won by Russia who inflicted 75% of the casaulties that fatally wounded the Third Reich. And they suffered some 10-15 million casualties in the process!
Hart's book is a balanced account that gives a clearer and very readable perspective on this terrible time. Leavened by a continual stream of personal comment by participants in the events described, it is a rewarding, if saddening read.
It should be compulsory reading in all schools everywhere, because it shows that the entire catastrophe of the First World War was ultimately allowed to occur not only by foolish and shortsighted politicians, but a majority of the ordinary public who subsequently paid the cost of the 'butchers bill'.

Peter Hart has written the most vivid and moving account I've ever read of the Western Front in the Great War. Rich with quotations and perceptive analysis, the book makes one feels like one is there, experiencing the battle firsthand. And what a nightmare that battle was. The author shrinks from nothing, forcing one to confront the terrible reality of that battle and the war. Always humanly sympathetic and sensible, and never overwrought, the author lets the facts speak for themselves. One ends reading this book with a deep sympathy for the men on both sides who had to endure the war. An extremely moving and powerful book, one that I can't recommend enough.