THE TRAGEDY BEGINS: 4/8: Nick Lloyd, The Western Front: A History of the Great War, 1914-1918
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 13 October 2024
⏱️ 8 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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| 0:27.0 | That's Better Help H-E-L-P.com. This is the new book is the Western Front, the first of three volumes of the history of the Great War, 1914 to |
| 0:45.1 | 1918. The British themselves are a mystery because they put a toe in at the beginning of the conflict. |
| 0:56.0 | And then what follows is a series of decisions that are both political and military about how to fight and what the aims are. It's striking how it's similar |
| 1:06.4 | to the putting a toe in in 1939 as well. Nick, we need to start with Asquith because he was the Prime Minister at the time. |
| 1:17.0 | And Asquith's Minister of War was Kichner, and Kishner's commander of what will become the British Expeditionary Force that goes to help the French after their attack is John French. |
| 1:31.0 | Those three men don't strike me as comfortable in the room together. Is that correct, Nick? |
| 1:37.8 | That is correct. They are quite, they're individuals with very different temperaments and they are thrown together, you know, |
| 1:45.0 | Asquith is when the war breaks out, |
| 1:48.0 | nobody understands or has any idea of how terrible it's going to be. |
| 1:52.0 | So, you know, Aswith is at the time of the war breaks out, he's obsessed with a sort of female confidant, Venetia Stanley that he's, you know, he's very interested in, so he's writing letters to Venetia in the in the wall cabinet so his |
| 2:06.1 | his focus is somewhere else in many ways. Kitchener is a professional soldier you know one of the great heroes of the empire, Kitchener of Khark too. |
| 2:16.2 | And he is very wary of the British getting involved. |
| 2:19.0 | They think they've got to do something to keep the French going, but how much they're going to do and the sort of strictly limited |
| 2:26.1 | deployment of the British is always a major political military strategic issue because obviously the British, ideally the British want a small |
| 2:36.0 | expeditionary force that they can afford because the British don't have a big army that will do enough to encourage the French |
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