The Battle of the Somme: Key Factual Material

The Somme was one of the key battles of the war. The date of the war actually started on July 1st 1916. British preliminary forces bombarded seven days earlier with a British 9.2 gun on the June 24th 1916. The bombardment went on for a week prior to the attack itself, with a total of 1500 guns firing more then 1 million rounds. They were hoping the surprise bombardment would destroy the German's barbed wire in front of the trenches. …

…a while for it to happen and also that the Germans didn't really expect it. The key word for this would be Attrition which means wearing the enemy down through the use of ever greater numbers of men and material. In this case weapons like grenades and machine guns. The two sides were to busy trying to claim victory that neither side knew what the long term affects for their actions. By Waseem Shahid 10MB