My grandfather once described the Battle of the Somme (he was there) as "a bit of a dust up."
Wow. That is the biggest understatement I've ever read. That was the single bloodiest battle of WWI.
Learned a good bit about that battle in my battlefield archaeology class. You'd have thought that the British would know a calvary charge on machinegun nests were very ill advised.
No. That's wrong, the Busilov offensive (in Russia) was the bloodiest battle of ww1.
That famous cavalry charge was actually successful, though unnecessary. And, of course, the battle was a victory for the British and an overwhelming win for the French on the right-flank. Interestingly, it was the first major military victory for my country, Australia.
Learned a good bit about that battle in my battlefield archaeology class. You'd have thought that the British would know a calvary charge on machinegun nests were very ill advised.
The majority of the British did think it was a stupid idea, unfortunately, people such as Winston Churchill were trying to micromanage the war to the extent that the General commanding the British army had to put this in as Chruchill thought it would win. After the Somme, General French was replaced by General Haig who tried, desperately, to modernise the army by getting regiments to use section attacks (instead of whole regiments or even divisions being committed to attacks) and a lot of other ideas such as having troops move towards the enemy using cover and giving covering fire. Unfortunately, he was overruled by Churchill and Lloyd George who decided that, against all evidence to the contrary, they knew better.
That's just bullshit. Haig planned the attack at the Somme, and he's been blamed for poorly planning it ever since. The British new armies gradually developed small-unit tactics within the context of the usual corps-level assault, though the large-scale attack remained the norm. The French and Germans, of course, had been using small-unit tactics for the whole war, but the British were regarded as too newbie to do it. The real advances of the war were in the artillery.