THE TRAGEDY BEGINS: 5/8: 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
⏱️ 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.
1917 ITALIAN FRONT
Transcript
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| 0:26.0 | That's better help help dot com. This is a |
| 0:38.0 | CBS I on the world. Here's John Bachelor. |
| 0:40.0 | The author Nick Loy, who is a reader of military and imperial history at King's College in London. |
| 0:47.0 | His new book is The Western Front. A History of the Great War, Volume 1. |
| 0:52.0 | There are two more to follow. This one is about the |
| 0:54.3 | battlefront that we think of as Trunche Warfare, the Great War at the time, called World War |
| 0:59.3 | One now, 1914 to 1918. It begins with the German attack and we've discussed these |
| 1:06.3 | personalities. Now you can see the tension that they lived through in real time. |
| 1:11.9 | There was a plan called the Schleifen Plan to take Paris and it was |
| 1:18.0 | depending upon the right wing of the German army. The right wing, the left wing, the German army. The right way. |
| 1:23.5 | The left wing, the Germans have armies enough to deploy from Alsace Lorraine to Verdun |
| 1:31.8 | into the Marne Valley, the Marne River Valley all the way to Paris, |
| 1:37.0 | where they're going to punch through and swing around Paris and end the war. |
| 1:42.0 | And then, Nick, we go to the crisis at the Marne as you explicate. |
| 1:47.0 | And I want to focus very carefully here, Molta's decision to ask Klukk, commanding the right wing of the army, the first army. |
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