THE HUNDRED YEARS WAR, CONTINUING 2024: 6/8: Nick Lloyd, The Western Front: A History of the Great War, 1914-1918
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 4 August 2024
⏱️ 7 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
https://www.amazon.com/Western-Front-History-Great-1914-1918/dp/B09NS2DT8X
In this epic narrative history, the first volume in a groundbreaking trilogy on the Great War, the acclaimed military historian Nick Lloyd captures the horrific fighting on the Western Front beginning with the surprise German invasion of Belgium in August 1914 and taking us to the Armistice of November 1918. Drawing on French, British, German, and American sources, Lloyd weaves a kaleidoscopic chronicle of the Marne, Passchendaele, the Meuse-Argonne, and other critical battles, which reverberated across Europe and the wider war. From the trenches, where men as young as 17 suffered and died, to the headquarters behind the lines where Generals Haig, Joffre, Hindenburg, and Pershing developed their plans for battle, Lloyd gives us a view of the war both intimate and strategic, putting us amid the mud and smoke while at the same time depicting the larger stakes of every encounter. He shows us a dejected Kaiser Wilhelm II―soon to be eclipsed in power by his own generals―lamenting the botched Schlieffen Plan; French soldiers piling atop one another in the trenches of Verdun; British infantryman wandering through the frozen wilderness in the days after the Battle of the Somme; and General Erich Ludendorff pursuing a ruthless policy of total war, leading an eleventh-hour attack on Reims even as his men succumbed to the Spanish Flu.
1916
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is a CBSI and the World. I'm John Bachelor with Nick Lloyd, the author of the new book The Western Front, |
| 0:08.0 | the story of The Great War, 1914 to 1918, and Trench Warfare. |
| 0:14.2 | We go now to September 1915. |
| 0:17.2 | The Second Battle of Champagna. |
| 0:19.4 | The French go on the offensive. |
| 0:22.0 | And what I learned from you, Nick, in your explanation of these events. |
| 0:27.4 | The casualty rates are very high here. September 25th to October 6th, 1915, is that both sides, Falkenhine commanding the Germans |
| 0:40.2 | and Joffra commanding the French. Both sides have an ability to understand that you cannot break through. |
| 0:47.9 | That every time you think you're making a breakthrough to range behind the enemy and |
| 0:51.6 | turn this corner, there'll be a second and third and a fallback |
| 0:55.0 | defense because it's not siege. |
| 0:58.1 | It is not siege of combat. |
| 1:01.0 | What does that mean to them when they say this isn't this is an siege mentality? |
| 1:07.6 | I think it's a realization that they can't break through in the way that they imagine that they would. |
| 1:15.0 | And I think all of the commanders on all of the sides are trying to work out, |
| 1:20.0 | how you can fight, how you can win. And most of them see Trent warfare is essentially a kind of |
| 1:25.7 | anomaly as a strange situation that will be that will be only be temporary and |
| 1:31.3 | what you need to do is you need to mass combat power in certain |
| 1:34.7 | key sectors and essentially drive it home as hard as you can to break that front line, that |
| 1:40.6 | front series of trenches and then push reinforcements. line that |
| 1:45.0 | will front series of trenches and then push reinforcements in and through and then that will essentially |
| 1:48.0 | shatter trench warfare and then maneuver movement will reoccur and then |
... |
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