First day on the Somme

[unixronin]

This, too, is a day late.  Britain's Daily Mail carries an article about the first day of the Somme offensive, ninety years ago yesterday, when the whistles blew and seven hundred and fifty thousand men went "over the top" into No Man's Land.  Nineteen thousand of them died on the first day, of fifty eight thousand British casualties on that day; one Canadian regiment was reduced to a third of its strength in the first half-hour of the offensive.  More than seventy two thousand of the dead of the Somme have no known graves, and are commemorated on a single monument at Thiepval.

When the abortive assault was over, four months later, the British Expeditionary Force had suffered four hundred and twenty thousand casualties, the French two hundred thousand, the Germans an estimated five hundred thousand ... all for an advance that at no point along the front exceeded twelve kilometers.

Comments

[johnkzin.livejournal.com]

My great grandfather (well, first step-father's grandfather), Mo, was there. He was awarded the Croix de Guerre. IIRC, it had to do with a mustard gas attack where his group was, and he somehow saved the rest of his unit from it.

I didn't find this out until after he had died in the mid-80's. Mo was one of those modest, cheerful, and welcoming types. It wasn't until around the time of his death that I even knew he had been in the war at all. I had just finished my first year of Navy ROTC, he was showing me a bunch of his pictures from back then. I think he was trying to connect with me on the level of military history. I saw his medal, but didn't know what it was, nor the story behind it (by then, it was hard to follow Mo's conversations, not for lack of lucidity, but his voice was too much of a whisper). After he died, my dad mention that Mo had been awarded the Croix de Guerre for what had happened at the Somme, and that's when I realized Mo had been trying to tell me about it.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I think one thing a lot of vets from the World War generations had in common was they didn't go out of their way to brag about what they'd done. It was just a job that needed to be done. They did the job, and they came home and went on with their lives.

I have a box with several medals my Harris grandfather earned during the Second World War. I still don't know what he did to earn them, and I'll never know now unless I go search through British Army records. All I know is that he was at El Alamein.

[ilcylic.livejournal.com]

You have a grandfather named Harris? I had a great-grandfather (mother's mother's father) that was a Harris. :)

-Ogre

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Had. He died about three years ago.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Actually, cymrullewes has just pointed out to me that I'm badly misremembering who died when. It seems my relatives of that generation have been dropping like flies in the last ten years or so. It gets hard to keep track. Grandpa Harris who fought at El Alamein, Nan Harris, Uncle Mike Kotsol who stormed up Omaha Beach, Aunt Laura his wife, ....

[ithildae.livejournal.com]

It is from the likes of that, that C.S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien drew their inspiration. Men haunted by what had happened, and what they had done. I don't mean to minimize what happened, but some truly great literature came of it.

My Grandpa fought in WWI, he never talked about it. His eventual father in law was a surgeon in the same war, I don't think they met. It is not that they ignored it, it was more like an interruption of their lives, not important to life, but something that needed to be done, and then put away.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I don't mean to minimize what happened, but some truly great literature came of it.

Any sufficiently momentous event, good or bad, has a way of inspiring such things.

"Half a league half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred:
'Forward, the Light Brigade!
Charge for the guns' he said:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred...." (http://www.nationalcenter.org/ChargeoftheLightBrigade.html)

[ithildae.livejournal.com]

I actually have that one memorized. It happened in grade school.