7/8: Verdun Donbass Front: 1/8: The Beginnings of the Hundred Years War: 7/8: Nick Lloyd, The Western Front: A History of the Great War, 1914-1918
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 23 January 2023
⏱️ 15 minutes
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7/8: Verdun Donbass Front: 1/8: The Beginnings of the Hundred Years War: 7/8: Nick Lloyd, The Western Front: A History of the Great War, 1914-1918
https://www.amazon.com/Western-Front-History-Great-1914-1918/dp/B09NS2DT8X
A panoramic history of the savage combat on the Western Front between 1914 and 1918 that came to define modern warfare.
The Western Front evokes images of mud-spattered men in waterlogged trenches, shielded from artillery blasts and machine-gun fire by a few feet of dirt. This iconic setting was the most critical arena of the Great War, a 400-mile combat zone stretching from Belgium to Switzerland where more than three million Allied and German soldiers struggled during four years of almost continuous combat. It has persisted in our collective memory as a tragic waste of human life and a symbol of the horrors of industrialized warfare.
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| 0:56.9 | What I learned from Nick's presentation is their twin first for Dung. It launches in early |
| 1:05.9 | 1916. It's a fortress, a series of fortresses way out to the right very far from Paris. |
| 1:12.9 | Why Nick? Why did they launch? Why did Falconheim launch on Verdun? What did he imagine he |
| 1:20.9 | would accomplish and in accomplishing it? How would it end the war? His vision. |
| 1:27.9 | Yeah, I mean, you get 1916. There's that terrible, terrible year. These two battles, as you |
| 1:32.9 | mentioned. This year is almost the image of the Western Front that we have. When we think |
| 1:36.9 | of the Western Front, it's usually 1916 or 1917. Verdun and the Sarm are those two horrific |
| 1:41.9 | battles that have come to epitomize that horror. Verdun is interesting because it's a |
| 1:47.9 | reject. Falconheim has spent 1915, essentially winning the war in the east and conquering |
| 1:53.9 | Serbia, destroying parts of the Russian army. Then he returns to the west in 1916 and decides |
| 1:59.9 | to attack the French. The whole idea, he's not that explicit about it at the time. Sometimes |
| 2:06.9 | he throws a bit of sand in people's eyes. The whole idea is we can't really break through. |
| 2:11.9 | That's not really what I need to do. What I need to do is kill Frenchmen. I need to ratchet |
| 2:17.9 | the slaughter up so high that they will give up. It's a very ruthless perception. It's quite |
| 2:24.9 | different to all the battles where certainly in the early stages of the war, Allied commanders |
| 2:29.9 | want to break through. They want to gain ground. King Germans is kind of secondary. For Falconheim, |
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