THE ORIGINAL BATTLE OF VERDUN STALEMATE: 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
🗓️ 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'm the World, I'm John Bachelor with Nick Lloyd, the author, Nick Lloyd of the |
| 0:08.8 | new book The Western Front. Nick is a reader in military and imperial history at King's College, |
| 0:14.7 | and no matter where you read military history, Verdun and Sam will come up. Verdun is the Germans |
| 0:22.4 | on the offensive. Sam is the British and the French on offensive. What I learned from Nick's |
| 0:29.2 | presentation is their twin, first Verdun. It launches in early 1916. It's a fortress, a |
| 0:39.2 | series of fortresses way out to the right, very far from Paris. Why, Nick, why did they launch, |
| 0:46.6 | why did Falconheim launch on Verdun? What did he imagine he would accomplish and in accomplishing |
| 0:53.7 | it, how would it end the war, his vision? Yeah, I mean, you get 1916, there's that terrible, |
| 1:00.9 | terrible year, these two battles as you mentioned, and this year is almost the image of the Western |
| 1:06.2 | Front that we have. When we think of the Western Front, it's usually 1916 or 1917. Verdun and the |
| 1:11.0 | Sam are those two horrific battles that have come to epitomize that horror. Verdun is interesting |
| 1:17.5 | because it's a reject, you know, Falconheim has spent 1915 essentially winning the war in the East |
| 1:23.6 | and conquering Serbia, destroying parts of the Russian army. And then he returns to the west |
| 1:28.5 | in 1916 and decides to attack the French. And the whole idea, and he's not that explicit about it |
| 1:36.2 | at the time. Sometimes he throws a bit of sand in people's eyes, but the whole idea is we can't |
| 1:41.0 | really break through. That's not really what I need to do. What I need to do is kill Frenchmen, |
| 1:46.4 | I need to ratchet the slaughter up so high that they will give up. So it's a very modern, |
| 1:52.7 | it's a very ruthless perception. It's quite different, you know, it's quite different to all the |
| 1:56.9 | battles where certainly in the early stages of the war, allied commanders want to break through, |
| 2:01.2 | they want to gain ground. Killing Germans is kind of secondary. For Falconheim, that's the primary |
| 2:07.2 | goal. And that's why Verdun becomes this sort of concentrated experiment in killing. |
| 2:14.2 | It's a meatlocker. My goodness. The battles are impossible to separate. It's one constant massacre. |
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