The 1st of July 1916 was the Black Day of the British Army

when more than 57,000 soldiers became casualties in a single day.

We walk the line from Gomorcore and Montabar and consider those terrible losses.

Today is the 1st of July.

On this day in 1916 at 7.30 in the morning,

the men who had prepared for the som offensive,

the big push, went over the top.

It became known as the blackest day in the history of the British Army.

Of the nearly 134,000 men who went into battle that day, 57,000 of them became casualties.

There were more men lost on that day than any other day of the Great War from the British and Commonwealth perspective,

and it was the worst day in terms of casualties in the entire British Army's history.

More men were battle casualties that day than in the entire Boer War, for example.

And today, like many of you, I'll be thinking of those vast open fields that form the

chalk downland of the Somme, thinking of the veterans that I knew who were there, thinking of the

stories of the men who I've researched who took part in that deadly, costly first day of the Somme.

And no doubt many of you will be not just thinking of place, but of people as well, of your

stories, perhaps your ancestors who took part in the 1st of July 1916 on the Somme.

And what we're going to do in this week's podcast is take a little walk

along the entire 18 mile front of the SOM, a virtual walk along those 1st of July battlefields,

starting at Gomacour in the north and ending at Montabar in the south. Now we're not going to cover every aspect of every

part of the line that day. We've had many individual episodes about particular areas of the Somme

connected to the first day of the battle and you can go back through the podcast catalogue to find those episodes and discover

...