battle of the sommes first only tank battle

Liddell Hart survived nearly everything the Germans and industrialized warfare could throw at him, and it informed his thinking as he began to write tactical manuals for the troops he was charged with training for the remainder of the war. Wounded thrice in that attack, Liddell Hart managed to continue on in the trenches until July 19th when he was finally sent back to England after being gassed. Liddell Hart’s unit was virtually wiped out before nightfall. Already wounded once in 1915 by an artillery shell, Liddell Hart returned to action in time to join his unit’s Foch-style attack on day one of the Battle of the Somme. Somewhere in the British lines on that same day, a young officer in the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry regiment named Basil Henry Liddell Hart may have had other ideas. He would do the same again on this day at the Somme, and once again it would fail. It had failed at the Third Battle of Artois in 1915, but that failure did not earn him a demotion. He stated in his book T he Principles of War: “The decisive attack is the keystone of the battle, and all the other combats must only be considered and organized in the measure in which they facilitate and assure the development of the decisive attack characterized by mass, by surprise and by speed.” His chosen tactic worked at the Marne in 1914, stopping the German offensive and earning him a promotion. He had taught these ideas to a generation of French officers, who were now employing it and dying at Verdun in just the way the German leadership had hoped. Foch was the leading thinker behind the French Army’s doctrine that focused singularly on the direct offensive. If there was any doubt in Foch’s mind, there does not seem to be any for those looking at the Somme from the remove of a century.

The entire idea behind the Somme offensive was to take pressure off the French forces at Verdun, while success or failure at the Somme was almost an afterthought. German troops to the southeast, at Verdun, were advancing further into French territory and the French Army was hurling itself at their lines, trying to force a German retreat.

Battle of the sommes first only tank battle