UKRAINE BECOMES THE WESTERN FRONT: 7/8: 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
⏱️ 14 minutes
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UKRAINE BECOMES THE WESTERN FRONT: 7/8: 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.
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| 0:00.0 | This is CBS, I'm the World, I'm John Bachelor with Nick Lloyd, the author, Nick Lloyd of the |
| 0:08.9 | new book, The Western Front. Nick is a reader and military and imperial history at King's |
| 0:13.7 | College. And no matter where you read military history, Verdun and Sam will come up. Verdun |
| 0:21.8 | is the Germans on the offensive. Sam is the British and the French on offensive. What |
| 0:28.1 | I learned from Nick's presentation is their twin. First Verdun. It launches in early |
| 0:36.5 | 1916. It's a fortress, a series of fortresses way out to the right very far from Paris. Why |
| 0:44.6 | Nick? Why did they launch? Why did Falconheim launch on Verdun? What did he imagine he would |
| 0:51.6 | accomplish and in accomplishing it? How would it end the war? His vision. Yeah, I mean, you |
| 0:59.1 | get 1916. There's that terrible, terrible year. We've got these two battles as you mentioned. |
| 1:03.5 | And this year is almost the image of the Western Front that we have. When we think of the Western |
| 1:07.9 | Front, it's usually 1916 or 1917. Verdun and the Sam are those two horrific battles that |
| 1:13.0 | have come to epitomize that horror. Verdun is interesting because it's a reject. You know, |
| 1:19.6 | Falconheim has spent 1915, essentially winning the war in the east and conquering |
| 1:24.2 | Serbia, destroying parts of the Russian army. And then he returns to the west in 1916 and decides |
| 1:30.1 | to attack the French. And the whole idea, and he's not that explicit about it at the time. |
| 1:36.8 | Sometimes he's a bit of sand in people's eyes, but the whole idea is we can't really break through. |
| 1:42.2 | We're not. That's not really what I need to do. What I need to do is kill Frenchmen, |
| 1:46.6 | and I need to ratchet the slaughter up so high that they will give up. So it's a very modern, |
| 1:52.7 | it's a very ruthless perception. It's quite different. You know, it's quite different to all the |
| 1:57.0 | battles where certainly in the early stages of the war, allied commanders want to break through. |
| 2:01.3 | They want to gain ground. Killing Germans is kind of secondary. For Falconheim, that's the primary |
| 2:07.3 | goal. And that's why Verdun becomes this sort of concentrated experiment in killing. |
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