UKRAINE BECOMES THE WESTERN FRONT: 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
🗓️ 14 August 2023
⏱️ 7 minutes
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UKRAINE BECOMES THE WESTERN FRONT: 4/8: Nick Lloyd, The Western Front: A History of the Great War, 1914-1918
https://www.amazon.com/Western-Front-History-Great-1914-1918/dp/B09NS2DT8X
A panoramic history of the savage combat on the Western Front between 1914 and 1918 that came to define modern warfare.
The Western Front evokes images of mud-spattered men in waterlogged trenches, shielded from artillery blasts and machine-gun fire by a few feet of dirt. This iconic setting was the most critical arena of the Great War, a 400-mile combat zone stretching from Belgium to Switzerland where more than three million Allied and German soldiers struggled during four years of almost continuous combat. It has persisted in our collective memory as a tragic waste of human life and a symbol of the horrors of industrialized warfare.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm John Batcher with Nick Law. His new book is The Western Front, The First of Three |
| 0:11.0 | Volumes of the history of the Great War, 1914 to 1918. The British themselves are a mystery |
| 0:21.2 | because they put a toe in at the beginning of the conflict. And then what follows is a |
| 0:28.0 | series of decisions that are both political and military about how to fight and what the aims are. |
| 0:34.1 | It's striking how it's similar to the putting a toe in in 1939 as well. Nick, we need to start with |
| 0:42.4 | ask with because he was the prime minister at the time. An ask with minister of war was Kitchener. |
| 0:50.1 | And Kitchener's commander of what will become the British expeditionary force that goes to |
| 0:57.4 | help the French after their attack is John French. Those three men don't strike me as comfortable |
| 1:03.9 | in the room together. Is that correct, Nick? That is correct. They are quite individuals with |
| 1:10.8 | very different temperaments and they are thrown together. Ask with is when the war breaks out, |
| 1:17.9 | nobody understands or has any idea how terrible it's going to be. So ask with is at the time |
| 1:25.0 | of the war breaks out, he's obsessed with sort of female confidant Venetia Stanley that he's |
| 1:30.5 | you know he's very interested in so he's writing letters to Venetia in the in the war cabinet. |
| 1:35.3 | So his focus is somewhere else in many ways. Kitchener is a professional soldier, one of the |
| 1:42.5 | great heroes of the empire Kitchener of CO2. And you know he is very wary of the British getting involved. |
| 1:48.8 | I think they've got to do something to keep the French going but how much they're going to do |
| 1:54.1 | and the sort of strictly limited deployment of the British is always always a major political |
| 2:01.8 | military strategic issue because obviously the British ideally the British want a small |
| 2:05.9 | expeditionary force that they can afford because the British don't have a big army that will do |
| 2:10.6 | enough to encourage the French but without really you know exposing the British to massive |
| 2:16.2 | engagements that we see with the French and the Germans. But of course for the for the French |
| 2:21.0 | they have to get as many brits over there as they can because their appetite can never be |
... |
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