UKRAINE BECOMES THE WESTERN FRONT: 6/8: Nick Lloyd, The Western Front: A History of the Great War, 1914-1918
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
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🗓️ 14 August 2023
⏱️ 7 minutes
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UKRAINE BECOMES THE WESTERN FRONT: 6/8: 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 | This is CBSI in the World, I'm John Bachelorette Nick Lloyd, the author of the new book The Western Front, |
| 0:07.9 | the story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918, and French Warfare. We go now to September 1915. |
| 0:17.1 | The Second Ball of Champagne, the French go on the offensive, and what I learn from you, Nick, |
| 0:23.6 | in your explanation of these events. The casualty rates are very high here. September 25 to October |
| 0:31.4 | 6, 1915, is that both sides falconine commanding the Germans and Jaffa commanding the French. Both |
| 0:42.6 | sides have an ability to understand that you cannot break through. That every time you think you're |
| 0:49.2 | making a breakthrough to range behind the enemy in turn this corner, there'll be a second and |
| 0:53.8 | third and a fallback defense because it's not siege. It is not siege a combat. What does that |
| 1:01.3 | mean to them when they say this is an siege mentality? I think it's a realization that |
| 1:11.2 | they can't break through in the way that they imagined that they would. I think all of the |
| 1:16.1 | commanders on all of the sides are trying to work out how you can fight, how you can win, |
| 1:23.1 | and most of them see trench warfare as essentially a kind of anomaly, a strange situation that will be |
| 1:29.8 | that will only be temporary and what you need to do is you need to mask combat power in certain |
| 1:34.7 | key sectors and essentially drive it home as hard as you can to break that front line, that front |
| 1:40.9 | series of trenches and then push reinforcements in and through and then that will essentially shatter |
| 1:49.2 | trench warfare and then maneuver, movement will re-occur and then once movement re-occurs you can have |
| 1:57.4 | a decisive battle. The early part of the war they try and do this and ultimately throughout |
| 2:06.1 | 1915 the Allies try to do this and they can gain certain, they can have local breakthroughs, |
| 2:11.5 | they can gain little bits of ground here and there but they're not able to do that grand shattering |
| 2:15.8 | breakthrough and the September October 1915 battle is where they put everything in, they put |
| 2:21.6 | everything they've learned, they've mass forces in champagne and again they can gain a mile or two |
| 2:28.3 | but they just can't break the trench deadlock in the way that they had hoped and after that I think |
... |
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