THE ORIGINAL BATTLE OF VERDUN STALEMATE: 3/8: Nick Lloyd, The Western Front: A History of the Great War, 1914-1918
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 17 September 2023
⏱️ 14 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 VERDUN
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is CBS I In The World, I'm John Bachelorette Nick Law, a reader and military and imperial |
| 0:06.4 | history King's College. His magnificent new storytelling is the history of the Great |
| 0:11.6 | War 14 to 18, 1914 to 1918 on the Western Front, Belgium and France. You think of this |
| 0:19.5 | as trench warfare. That was not the intention. However, it was the result of the opening |
| 0:25.4 | stages of the war and the French determined a deal of what was to happen in their defensive |
| 0:31.6 | Paris. We begin with the commander of the French forces as the war opens. His name is |
| 0:38.6 | Jaffa. He is a man whom Nick describes as he does not panic. He did not panic. What do |
| 0:46.3 | we need to know about Jaffa? How his vision of the war took place, Nick. |
| 0:51.4 | He is one of the great heroes of the Western Front, one of the great heroes of the French |
| 0:56.7 | Army. He is memorably described in Barbara Tuckman's Guns of August that you may have read. |
| 1:02.6 | He is a figure that in some ways is quite unimpressive. He is an engineer. He is not taught |
| 1:11.9 | at the Staff College or he is not produced works of great military merit. But he has a kind |
| 1:18.0 | of earthiness and a connection to the army that I think is really important in 1914, |
| 1:22.4 | as well as under the shock of war, Bethman. Sorry, not Bethman, but Helmuth von Molte, |
| 1:28.5 | German commander, collapses, essentially. Just can't take the pressure. Jaffa can. He |
| 1:34.1 | is able to do what he can to defeat the Schleef und Plan and the German invasion and |
| 1:38.4 | counterattack at the Marn River in September 1914 and Jaffa's ability to essentially |
| 1:44.4 | absorb punishment but to keep an eye. Through all the chaos of war, he just understands |
| 1:50.5 | what is going on and is able to react quickly. And I think that's what marks him out for |
| 1:54.9 | greatness, certainly in 1914. It's his ability not to lose his head, not to become too discouraged, |
| 2:01.9 | to keep playing the game, keep moving his units, pride about flank the enemy, and ultimately |
| 2:08.4 | that ability to just have that sort of gravitas is really important. Again, Jaffa is not |
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