THE ORIGINAL BATTLE OF VERDUN STALEMATE: 8/8: 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
⏱️ 6 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 Eye in the World. I'm John Batser. Nick Lloyd is here. His |
| 0:08.5 | new book is The West and Front. History of the Great War, 1914 to 1918. His |
| 0:13.2 | June of 1917. A cavalryman in high, shiny boots with a stiff collar, drab |
| 0:19.9 | olive, arrives in Paris to celebration, cheering from the from the rooftops. His |
| 0:26.5 | name is Pershing. A couple of months before he was riding horses in Mexico and was in |
| 0:32.6 | Texas in the heat of the Texas summer. And because he spoke French and because |
| 0:38.2 | his commander died of a heart attack right before Wilson called him up. President |
| 0:43.8 | Wilson beckoned him to say, I'm sending you the head of the American Expeditionary |
| 0:48.2 | Force. Because in April of 1917, Wilson and the Congress declared war on |
| 0:54.8 | Germany and Austria and and Pershing arrives without an army. There were only |
| 1:00.5 | 113,000 men in the army when Pershing was riding around in Mexico, seeking |
| 1:04.4 | Pancho via. He's without an army, but he's going to bring an army with him. And |
| 1:09.4 | what they want is a malgamation. Let's term on this because a malgamation will |
| 1:15.1 | not work. Pershing's ideas we're going to fight alone. Nick, a hundred years |
| 1:20.0 | later, is Pershing right or is foe right? Should they have all been put together? |
| 1:24.3 | No, I think I think pushing is right. I think, you know, the malgamation when |
| 1:31.7 | America enters the war in April, 1970 and the French said, look, you know, you |
| 1:36.6 | don't really know how to fight. You don't have the equipment. Why don't you just |
| 1:40.4 | give us your manpower? Because that's your strongest asset. And we will train |
| 1:43.6 | them. They'll work in our divisions. And this will be a way that we can |
| 1:47.2 | essentially reenergize and we can win. And understand that would be the |
| 1:51.0 | Americans say, well, no, you know, you know, you perhaps don't have the best |
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