The Somme: The Darkest Hour on the Western Front

Time

“Peter Hart's study not only is heartrending and definitive but also makes sense of this senseless disaster.”

The New York Times Book Review

“Hart superbly depicts these months of brutal combat in all their complexity.”

The Atlantic Monthly

From Hart's book I was able to learn and grasp (and even picture) the historic importance of the "creeping" or perhaps better say "staggered" barrage. Hart succeeds in showing how the gunners got steadily better (as did the guns). If you have tears to shed, you will prepare to do so when you read of the "Pals" battalions that were formed out of men from single localities and neighborhoods.— Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens - The Atlantic Monthly

“From Hart's book I was able to learn and grasp (and even picture) the historic importance of the "creeping" or perhaps better say "staggered" barrage. Hart succeeds in showing how the gunners got steadily better (as did the guns). If you have tears to shed, you will prepare to do so when you read of the "Pals" battalions that were formed out of men from single localities and neighborhoods.”

Time Magazine

“Peter Hart's study not only is heartrending and definitive but also makes sense of this senseless disaster.”

The Atlantic Monthly

“From Hart's book I was able to learn and grasp (and even picture) the historic importance of the "creeping" or perhaps better say "staggered" barrage. Hart succeeds in showing how the gunners got steadily better (as did the guns). If you have tears to shed, you will prepare to do so when you read of the "Pals" battalions that were formed out of men from single localities and neighborhoods.”

Robert Bateman

The book brings to life the men who fought at the Somme in an accurate and precisely detailed history of one of the most gut-wrenchingly obscene desecrations of humanity our species ever perpetrated upon itself…As director and oral historian of the British Imperial War Museum in London, Hart is uniquely positioned to do justice to the British participants in the battle. A talented historian, he succeeds in that most important element of history, storytelling.
—The Washington Post

Max Boot

Hart superbly depicts these months of brutal combat in all their complexity.
—The New York Times

Publishers Weekly

Hart is the current master of an approach to military history developed by Martin Middlebrook and Lyn Macdonald. Direct quotations from participants establish "the face of battle," then combined with a narrative/analytical backdrop contextualizing the personal experiences. As oral historian of Britain's Imperial War Museum, Hart has unrivaled access to relevant sources. This book, published in Britain in 2005, is a masterful synthesis of the human and the operational aspects of a campaign that increasingly defines the British experience in the Great War. Hart vividly presents the runup to the "Big Push" expected to end the war; the disaster of July 1, 1916, when the British army suffered nearly 60,000 casualties; and the numbing months of attrition as British troops bled against the German defenses. Hart describes the horror as reflecting not the stupidity of individual generals and politicians but the determination of nations to resolve their differences by a war fought to the finish. The British army learned how to fight battles like the Somme, built around fire power. But its learning curve was slippery with blood. Hart honors the men who paid the price. Photos, maps. (Jan. 7)

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Library Journal

From the oral historian at the Imperial War Museum, London, this is an exceptional account of the Somme offensive. Hart (Bloody April) has mined the museum's Somme veteran interviews to evoke the horrors of combat on the western front, skillfully blending these personal accounts with strategic considerations of a battle that slaughtered nearly a million French, German, and British soldiers. On July 1, 1916, British Field Marshal Douglas Haig hurled 400,000 ill-prepared troops into a German meat grinder that devoured 15,270 soldiers before the sun set. For the next four months, Haig continued to pound against the German trench line. Repeatedly, British assault troops were pinned down by German machinegun fire, hammered by artillery barrages, and pounced upon by German counterattacks. While the British tried such tactical innovations as the creeping artillery barrage, aerial observation, tanks, and underground mines, they have been justifiably condemned for continually launching doomed frontal assaults. Hart maintains that Haig had little choice. His French allies insisted that the British become more involved in western front operations and relieve pressure on the Verdun front, where the French were suffering horrendous losses. Although the British offensive did provide some relief for the hard-pressed French, the butcher's bill was staggering: 419,634 British casualties and the war was to go on for nearly two more bloody years. Libraries with Martin Gilbert's popular account of that fateful campaign may bypass this more in-depth book, but any library maintaining a solid World War I collection should have this masterful work as well. Military history at its best.
—JimDoyle

Kirkus Reviews

Comprehensive study of the battle of 1916 that would kill and wound a million combatants. Since the 1960s, writes Hart, director and oral historian of London's Imperial War Museum, the Battle of the Somme has solidified in the popular imagination as a byword for senseless trench warfare commanded by generals who thought nothing of sacrificing soldiers by the battalion. There is truth in that view, but a "more sympathetic perspective" allows that the British commanders, particularly Sir Douglas Haig, believed that war by attrition was the only way they could wear down the huge German army on the Western Front. That soldiers were arrayed in trenches thousands of miles long was an outgrowth, Hart observes, of the British government's abandonment of a strategy that many imperial servants would have preferred, namely to keep to the high seas and prey on German shipping and German colonies, avoiding at any cost a continental land war. Couple that with Haig's view that any decision was better than no decision and any action better than inaction, as well as his recognition that defeating Germany was a matter of steadily improving the Allied position, and carnage was bound to ensue. It certainly did. On the first day of the battle, Haig's forces suffered 54,470 casualties, "the worst disaster ever to have befallen the British Army in its entire history." The battle saw numerous innovations, including the first-albeit ineffective-use of tanks and a regime of walking artillery fire that left the fields of France full of metal that is still grinding plows today. Remarked a British soldier of one particularly savage corner of the fighting, "I wonder what the people at home who say, ‘We will fight toour last drop of blood!' would think if they were taken up that trench. For 500 yards it is paved with English dead." Yet the war would continue for almost two more years, with millions of dead to follow. An eye-opening study, in keeping with the best of John Keegan, S.L.A. Marshall and B.H. Liddell Hart.