100 years ago Almost 60,000 British soldiers were killed, wounded or taken prisoner on day 1

No chute and ride the burning bird to the ground..

a reply to: seagull

If you don't feel like sharing, that's fine. But a response like that, I have to ask...
What happened to your father?

a reply to: 3n19m470

No problem sharing.

My late father was a three war veteran (four, if you count the first half of the Cold War)--WWII (Pacific Theatre), Korea, and early in our involvement in Vietnam.

I lost count of the number of nightmares I witnessed, and God alone knows how many I didn't know about...

Off the island of Saipan he got to watch civilians jumping off of cliffs because they'd been brainwashed to believe they'd be killed. He got to watch parents toss their children off, then follow. Needless to say, that leaves a mark that doesn't heal--even after almost three quarters of a century.

He was twenty-one, maybe twenty-two, when he saw that, and other things on that slog across the Pacific.

During the Korean War he got to watch kids fly off in B-29's in the morning, and wait in vein for them to come back later that day. Or help wash the blood out of others, so they could be repaired. If that isn't the stuff of nightmares, I don't really want to know what is.

During Vietnam, he got to watch the atrocities of a civil war up close and personal. He was there when it was still the Viet Minh, not the Viet Kong.

I woke up many times late at night to the sounds of my mom trying to call him back from whatever Hell it was that was visiting him.

Not just my Dad. Others, too, I've known who have nightmares much like that...my best friend when I was in the commercial fishing industry was a survivor of the Cambodian Killing Fields--I learned the story of that quite by accident one night. His entire family murdered for the sole crime of being educated.

So when I come across remarks like the one I replied to, I get perturbed. I probably shouldn't, in fact there's no probably about it--I shouldn't.

The Somme was the birth of industrialized slaughter. There's nothing glorious about it. My grandfather fought in some of those trenches later in the War To End All Wars. I can't begin to imagine what his nightmares must have been like...

Celebrate? No. Not ever. Honor? Yes, with all my heart. Not just my various family and friends who lost parts of themselves in various places all over the globe.

And all we've learned since then are better ways to kill. Progress.

a reply to: Asktheanimals

People who critize Chamberlain appeasement forgot WW1.

The point of appeasement was to correct the mistakes of the treaty of versailles.

UK really was trying to avoid another blood bath and only went to war as Germany gave it no choice.

originally posted by: stonerwilliam
a reply to: MrSpad

Child soldiers are nothing new yet people react in horror today when they hear about this in Africa today yet just over a 100 years ago it was common for a teenager of 12-upwards to go to the boer war and in ww1 some 14 year olds were fighting in the trenches after lying about their ages with so many women dying at child birth leaving nobody to watch over them .

So they followed dad to the front to be a hero

The diffrence though is the child soliders in tne west are volunteers who had to lie and quite often if found out are sent home.


In Africa these kids as young as 6 or 7 are conscripted through kidnappeding.

a reply to: crazyewok

Blaming Germany would be missing the bigger picture
The Rothschilds manipulated all sides to further enrich themselves -

thedaysofnoah.wordpress.com...

1934: Swiss banking secrecy laws are reformed and it becomes an offence resulting in imprisonment for any bank employee to violate bank secrecy. This is all in preparation for the Rothschild engineered Second World War in which as usual they will fund both sides. Edmond de Rothschild dies.

1936: With regard to the increase in anti-Semitism in Germany, Samuel Landman (at the time, secretary to the World Zionist Organisation), in his 1936 book, Great Britain, The Jews, and Palestine states the following of the United States entry into World War 1, “The fact that it was Jewish help that brought USA into the War on the side of the Allies has rankled ever since in German­ especially Nazi ­ minds, and has contributed in no small measure to the prominence which anti-Semitism occupies in the Nazi programme.”

1938: On 7th November, a Jew, Herschel Grynszpan, assassinated Ernst vom Rath, a minor official at the German Embassy in Paris. As a result of this German hostility towards Jews in Germany started to turn violent. The Rothschilds Austrian banking house in Vienna, S. M. von Rothschild und Söhne, closes following the Nazi occupation of Austria.

1939: I.G. Farben the leading producer of chemicals in the world and largest German producer of steel dramatically increases its production. This increased production is almost exclusively used to arm Germany for the Second World War. This company was controlled by the Rothschilds and would go on to use Jews and other disaffected peoples as slave labour in the concentration camps. I.G. Farben also created the lethal Zyklon B gas that was used to exterminate the Jews. On 1 September, the Second world war starts when Germany invades Poland. This was because the German leadership were a (psuedo) Christian leadership, who understood that Soviet Russia was led by Rothschild funded Communists, and they feared that as the Soviet Union grew in strength, these Jewish Communists would invade and wipe all the Christians off the map.

I can't imagine being in that hellhole of a war, I really can't.

My gran's dad was wounded 4 times and sent back in the line. He got home safe though.
One of my great granddad's brothers was a professional soldier who joined up in 1905 and he died in 1914 at Aisnes. I sometimes think he may have been lucky not to have had to suffer the hell that war became.


When I was really young, about 6 or 7 one of my uncles took me to the pub with him and he was chatting to an old guy he knew and the bloke had a really whispery, scratchy voice and had to keep using one of those little inhaler things that people have for asthma.

I asked my uncle what was up with him and he said that he'd been gassed in the war.
It never left me, the image of that old boy struggling for breath 60 odd years after the war.

WW1 was horrible, no doubt.

The damage to the fighters was devastating, shell shock and broken bodies.

A great % of the dead probably could have been saved with better field care.

Here is to healings!

Here is a favorite artist and video of mine, that fits.

originally posted by: TheConstruKctionofLight
a reply to: Cobaltic1978

Their sacrifice for democracy will always be remembered.

It's where the term "cannon fodder" evolved from

They were all heroes because they followed orders blindly
Here's some light reading
www.historyhome.co.uk...

Technically the term "Cannon Fodder" was first used by a Frenchman to describe the French infantrymen in the Napoleanoic wars.

I appreciate what you say about the war being for the elites, but who knows what our fate would have been if these brave boys and men never laid their lives down for the cause.

Politicians start wars for power and money, its the people who pay the price, and when the war is over they give you a piece of metal and say how well you did, but they never pay your rent or buy your groceries or help you find a job. They have no intrest in your broken body and mind or how the joy of life has died. They have got there money and power its all they care about

a reply to: SprocketUK

My grandfather was gassed. They were laid out in a line on stretchers, those thought likely to live at one end, those likely to die at the other. When the doctor eventually reached him he looked down, hands in pockets, and said, "If he's still alive tomorrow we'll move him down the line". My grandfather always said it was his anger at the doctors attitude that kept him alive that night. The doctor may even have done it deliberately. Give them something to fight.

When he died in his nineties it was his lungs that gave out. He'd never recovered from the gas.

He wouldn't tell us much about the trenches. One thing he did tell us, hotly contested by the pilots here, is that they used to throw stones at the spotter aircraft that flew low over the trenches. He said bullets just made neat holes in the fabric but stones would rip it. According to some ATS members that didn't happen because it isn't in any of their books. They weren't there, he was.

One of his sayings was, "If you keep your feet dry you'll be alright".

originally posted by: Kester

One of his sayings was, "If you keep your feet dry you'll be alright".

I would venture that saying comes from seeing the horrors of trench foot first hand. Trench foot was huge problem.
There were 20,000 case of trench foot in 1914 in the British Army.
For those that may not know your feet basically rot off from constant immersion in water for days on end.
Even to this day keeping your feet dry is drilled into your head while in the Army.

In 2008 I had moved to London. I was only there a few days when November 11th came around.
I watched in amazement when at 11:00 AM everything and everyone around me came to a dead standstill.
I mean the people in the bank and on the street stopped what they were doing and stood in silence for 1 minute.
That one minute of silence was in remembrance of the signing of the armistice on November 11, 11:00 AM 1918.

a reply to: Kester

I think that's the way of it when people have been in really horrific situations, they bottle it up.
My own grandad was the same about Burma. He only ever told me either funny stories or bizarre ones, it was only at his funeral that a Burma Star guy got up and described how he had been lost on his own in the jungle for 6 months and walked back to India.

I really wish I'd heard that story firsthand, but probably best I didn't.

a reply to: crazyewok

UK really was trying to avoid another blood bath and only went to war as Germany gave it no choice.

Hard really to understand appeasement if you don't realize that a generation, in its entirety virtually, was bled white by places like the Somme, and Verdun.

Americans were horrified by the losses during WWI, as a direct result we got isolationism. In France and Great Britain, who suffered far more? You got appeasement. In Germany, and I guess to a lesser extent, Italy you got the near cousins of fascism and nazism.

Even in Asia, Japan went full on militeristic because of events coming out of WWI. They felt, with some justification, ignored/humiliated by their treatment at the hands of both Britain and the US.

How lucky we all are to have not been involved in that hell of a War.. Or some of us not involed in any hell of any War.
I was in the UK Infantry from a few days after my 16th birthday until 23, I was most lucky..

Two tears to my eyes tonight, one for the many many thousands of young and older who gave their lives for us to be free.

Please look at this video within this BBC page what a touching way to remind us..

www.bbc.co.uk...

Oh and the second tears for Wales into the Euro Semi finals. Magnificent.. Peace..

a reply to: stonerwilliam

Problem was British commander, Sir Douglas Haig, who was a cavalryman. Haig had a romantic, some would say delusional
idea of war. He envisioned using his infantry to bash a hole in the German lines where you would then unleash his
cavalry. To this end kept several divisions of cavalry idle behind the front waiting for opportunity to turn them loose.

Germans had after being checked in 1914 had seized the high ground and set up defenses. The German had burrowed caves
tunnels and dugouts on the reverse slopes of the soft chalk ridges above the Somme

British artillery was totally ineffective at neutralizing the German defenses - once the shelling stopped Germans came
out and setup their machine guns to shoot down the slow moving waves of British troops.

a reply to: firerescue

That is a oversimplification.

Its a misunderstanding that the Somme was one battlefield on one day.

It was more a campaign that lasted a number of months.

Most the causalitys on the first day were centered round the Albert–Bapaume road .

But elsewere the british and french did take alot of ground.


haigs strategy was sound. His tactics however left a lot to be desired in certain placeses . Plus it would be unfair to blame it all on him. The generals under him should have realised the artillery bombarded failed on that first day.

a reply to: seagull

I have heard that screams in the night from men re-living the horrors of war in the small hours when i was a young boy , A tad to young to understand at the time why old men woke at night crying and screaming , My grandfather in one room and old pop in the other and i seem to remember it on more than a few occasions .

It was interesting to listen to men who knew they were not long of this earth and i was real eager to hear their story of what the war was like through their eyes on a personal level , and being brought up with older people who had been there , seen it, done it i was lucky to have a lot of open books around me and war fascinated the hell out of me for some reason .

Boy did i love running errands for all the old soldiers around me of all nationalities and i was a kid full of questions even at a young age , 6 of them 1 ww1 and 7 ww2 Russian , Polish ,German , Me going for Sunday papers involved a half hour Q&A session with those folk .

I raised a cup of tea at 7.30 am this morning in a washed out tin can in thanks to one old man for telling me no holds barred what hell war is .

a reply to: firerescue

Both Haig and Churchill with their great plans of war cost 10s of thousands of lives in France and Gallipoli in Turkey , It is a wonder we ever won anything with the way we lurched from one slaughter to the next in WW1