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

[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, ....