GOV/MIL 100th Anniversary of Battle of the Somme

Housecarl

On TB every waking moment
For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-36674451

Battle of the Somme: Royals at Somme centenary commemoration

8 minutes ago
From the section UK

Thousands of people, including members of the Royal Family, are at a ceremony in France to mark the centenary of the start of the Battle of the Somme.

The Prince of Wales and Duchess of Cornwall, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and Prince Harry are at the Thiepval Memorial for the event.

It follows a nationwide two-minute silence that marked the moment on 1 July 1916 when the battle began.

More than a million men were killed and wounded on all sides in the WW1 battle.

The Battle of the Somme, one of World War One's bloodiest, was fought in northern France and lasted five months, with the British suffering almost 60,000 casualties on the first day alone.

At a vigil in France on Thursday, the Duke of Cambridge paid tribute to the fallen soldiers, saying "we lost the flower of a generation".
◾Latest updates: Battle of the Somme Centenary
◾The Somme: The battle that France forgot
◾‘Most powerful place on Western Front’
◾In pictures: Battle of the Somme
◾Somme centenary images

The British and French armies fought the Germans in a brutal battle of attrition on a 15-mile front.

Commemorations are being held in the UK and France to mark the centenary of the start of the Battle of the Somme.

At an early-morning ceremony at the Lochnagar crater, which was created by an explosion at the start of the battle in La Boiselle, France, a rocket was fired to simulate the artillery fire.

This was followed by whistles to symbolise those that were blown 100 years ago as men scrambled from the trenches.

Ahead of the two-minute silence in the UK, the King's Troop Royal Horse Artillery fired guns from Parliament Square for 100 seconds to mark the 100 years since the battle began.

The nation then fell silent to mark the moment on 1 July 1916 when the battle began and the start of the bloodiest day in British military history.

Across the country and at the vigil sites at Westminster Abbey, Edinburgh Castle, the Somme Heritage Centre in County Down, the Welsh National War Memorial in Cardiff, as well as in France, the silence was observed.


In France

By Robert Hall, BBC News correspondent

Across the rolling Somme landscape, the whistles shrilled again; a century ago they sent tens of thousands out of their trenches, and across No Man's Land.

Today they were sounded on the lip of the Lochnagar crater, 300ft wide and 70 deep, the result of a British attempt to breach German defences.

Sixty thousand pounds of explosive sent debris 4,000ft into the air; no-one knows how many were killed.

At the cross of remembrance, a carpet of wreaths was laid, by representatives from Britain, France and Germany, along with families and local children.

In the base of the crater, beside a giant poppy, a lone bugler sounded the last post as clouds of poppies fluttered down on the breeze.


Later, leaders from Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland will attend a service at the Ulster Tower, a memorial to the men of the 36th (Ulster) Division in Thiepval, at 13:30 BST.

At the preserved trenches at Newfoundland Park Memorial in Beaumont-Hamel, France, there will be a ceremony to mark the Canadians' part in the battle at 15:30 BST.

And the 100th anniversary will be marked by Germany in Fricourt, France, where 40,000 Germans are buried.

In Manchester, there will be a national service of commemoration at the cathedral from 15:00 BST and a concert at 19:30.

At the Westminster Abbey service on Thursday, the Queen was joined by the Duke of Edinburgh as she laid flowers at the Grave of the Unknown Warrior.

The tomb holds an unidentified British soldier killed on a European battlefield, brought back and buried in the abbey to honour the unknown dead of the war.

The Bishop of London, the Right Reverend Dr Richard Chartres, said the legacy should be that people worked towards reconciliation to ensure children never endured what the soldiers of World War One faced.

Society must strive to reach an accord and reject "those who would stir up hatred and division," he said.

Prime Minister David Cameron, who also spoke at the service, his wife Samantha, and Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn were among other figures at the service.

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and Prince Harry paid their respects in France, attending a vigil at the Thiepval Memorial on Thursday evening, located close to the battlefields of the Somme, near Amiens in the north of the country.

Prince William spoke of European governments "including our own" who failed to "prevent the catastrophe of world war".

"We lost the flower of a generation; and in the years to come it sometimes seemed that with them a sense of vital optimism had disappeared forever from British life," he said.

"It was in many ways the saddest day in the long story of our nation."

Prince Harry also spoke at the event, reading the poem Before Action, by Lieutenant WN Hodgson of the 9th Battalion the Devonshire Regiment, who wrote it before he was killed in action on 1 July 1916.

Before the vigil, the three royals climbed to the top of the huge, newly renovated monument designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens to view the battlefield.

The memorial bears the names of more than 70,000 British and South African soldiers who have no known grave.

Welsh First Minister Carwyn Jones joined personnel from the Army, Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force for the start of a vigil at Llandaff Cathedral in Cardiff.

"Those who fought bravely for our futures should never be forgotten," he said.

In Scotland, an overnight vigil was held at the National War Memorial.

A whistle, which was sounded to lead men over the top, was blown by Scots soldier Alan Hamilton at 07:30 BST to mark, to the minute, 100 years since the battle began. The whistle belonged to his great uncle.

_90175518_thiepval_bbc.jpg

http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/624/cpsprodpb/13E95/production/_90175518_thiepval_bbc.jpg

And in Northern Ireland, a vigil was held at the Somme Museum near Newtownards, County Down. A guard of honour, including serving soldiers, was present throughout the night.

The Prince of Wales and Duchess of Cornwall will also attend ceremonies for Northern Irish and Canadian victims of the battle at the nearby Ulster Tower and Beaumont-Hamel Newfoundland Memorial, respectively.

The Duchess of Cornwall will lay a wreath at the grave of her great-uncle, Captain Harry Cubitt, who was killed on the Somme in September 1916 while serving with the Coldstream Guards.

He was the eldest, and the first, of three brothers to die serving on the Western Front.

The Battle of the Somme
◾Began on 1 July 1916 and was fought along a 15-mile front near the River Somme in northern France
◾19,240 British soldiers died on the first day - the bloodiest day in the history of the British army
◾The British captured just three square miles of territory on the first day
◾At the end of hostilities, five months later, the British had advanced just seven miles and failed to break the German defence
◾In total, there were more than a million dead and wounded on all sides, including 420,000 British, about 200,000 from France and an estimated 465,000 from Germany

Find out more:
◾How the Battle of the Somme unfolded
◾Why was the first day such a disaster?
◾Timeline: World War One 1914-18
◾Has history misjudged the generals of WW1?
◾How did so many soldiers survive the trenches?
◾WW1 centenary - full coverage


The Battle of the Somme was intended to achieve a decisive victory for the British and French against Germany's forces.

The British army was forced to play a larger than intended role after the German attack on the French at Verdun in February 1916.

World War One finally ended in November 1918.


More on this story:

Image gallery In Pictures: Somme centenary
6 minutes ago

Video Marking the moment the Battle of the Somme began
2 hours ago

Battle of the Somme: Families make 'emotional' journey for 100th anniversary
30 June 2016

In pictures: Battle of the Somme
2 hours ago

The Somme: The battle that France forgot
29 June 2016
 

mzkitty

I give up.
The Queen laid a wreath at the Grave of the Unknown Warrior
 

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Housecarl

On TB every waking moment
For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-...-the-somme-europe-gathers-to-honor-the-fallen

International

A Century After The Battle Of The Somme, Europe Gathers To Honor The Fallen

July 1, 2016·4:17 PM ET
Comments 22

Overnight in London, an honor guard stood vigil at the grave of the Unknown Warrior.

On Friday morning, across Great Britain, citizens observed a moment of silence.

And midday Friday, at a quiet field in northern France, British and French leaders paused amid a political crisis for a brief period of solidarity.

They gathered together at the site of the Battle of the Somme, 100 years after the bloodiest day in British military history, to honor the dead.


Detail from Plate 11 of Joe Sacco's The Great War: July 1, 1916: The First Day of the Battle of the Somme. On July 1st, at precisely 7:30 a.m., the attack commences.

Author Interviews

A Panorama Of Devastation: Drawing Of WWI Battle Spans 24 Feet

That costly World War I battle in France stretched on for months, but it's the horror of the first day that looms largest in European memory.

Journalist and cartoonist Joe Sacco, who illustrated a massive panorama of the first day of the battle, spoke to NPR in 2013. Here's what we wrote then:



"The battle began on 7:30 a.m., July 1, 1916, on the river Somme in France. There had already been a series of bombardments; British generals unloaded a week's worth of artillery, thinking it would decimate the Germans and allow British troops to move in easily.

"But while the bombardment was so loud that it could be heard in London, it hadn't been very effective; many of the shells were duds, and others just hadn't done the job. Then the barrage lifted, and the troops started to move.

" 'When all that noise quieted down, the Germans realized, OK, the shelling has stopped; let's get out of our dugouts and man our machine gun posts,' Sacco says. 'The British were marching towards them in a line, and the Germans just started firing on these troops.' "

It was a test of new battle tactics, and it was a devastating failure. More than 19,000 British soldiers were killed in the first day alone — the deadliest day in the history of the British military. Nearly 40,000 more were injured.

For some communities, the shock was particularly profound. Newfoundland, for instance — then a dominion of Great Britain — sent its own regiment to fight in the war, as historian Maureen Power told NPR's Weekend Edition a few days ago.

They went to the Somme, and nearly the entire regiment was wiped out in that single day.

"It stayed in our psyche after the war. We ended up basically going bankrupt and having to give up our own country," Power says. "We lost the best of the best in the young men that would have led Newfoundland into maintaining its own country, not having to join Canada [in 1949]."

In Britain, too, many towns saw the best of their best felled in one day. So-called pals battalions featured young men who knew one another — a plan concocted to increase the number of civilians volunteering for service.

When friends served together, they died together, too. The result was that some communities felt a disproportionate blow when the death notices started to arrive.

In honor of the anniversary of the Somme, British poet and nurse Molly Case has written a poem about the loss of pals battalions for the Royal British Legion.

The battle stretched on for months, as summer turned to fall.

Conditions were horrible. Difficulties with the supply chain meant soldiers were frequently hungry and thirsty. Rats terrorized the trenches.

Rain turned the battlefield into a nightmarish landscape of mud and corpses.

American-born poet Mary Borden, who ran a military hospital at the Battle of the Somme and earned medals for her bravery on the front lines, later wrote about that grim landscape, in "At the Somme: The Song of the Mud." One stanza reads:



"This is the hymn of mud-the obscene, the filthy, the putrid,
The vast liquid grave of our armies. It has drowned our men.
Its monstrous distended belly reeks with the undigested dead.
Our men have gone into it, sinking slowly, and struggling and slowly disappearing.
Our fine men, our brave, strong, young men;
Our glowing red, shouting, brawny men.
Slowly, inch by inch, they have gone down into it,
Into its darkness, its thickness, its silence.
Slowly, irresistibly, it drew them down, sucked them down,
And they were drowned in thick, bitter, heaving mud.
Now it hides them, Oh, so many of them!
Under its smooth glistening surface it is hiding them blandly.
There is not a trace of them.
There is no mark where they went down.
The mute enormous mouth of the mud has closed over them."

As summer turned to fall, the soldiers grew increasingly exhausted. The rain eventually turned to snow.

Britain introduced the tank for the first time, in September. It boosted morale, the BBC writes, but had little other impact on the course of the battle.

The BBC has a thorough timeline of events at the Somme — a grim litany of losses in a war of attrition. The battle didn't end until November.

By then, more than a million men had been wounded or killed.

And territorial gains?

The front moved less than 10 miles. By one calculation, the Allies paid 1,000 lives for every 100 yards they gained.


Autumn leaves gather in front of the graves of unknown soldiers.

History

A Ghostly French Field Where Veterans Day Was Born

On Veterans Day a few years ago, NPR's Eleanor Beardsley visited the fields in France where the Battle of the Somme was fought.

"Today most of the battlefields have been plowed into fertile farmland. This time of year, French farmers are harvesting their sugar beets. In what is known as an 'iron harvest,' farmers continue to find grenades and other ordnance from World War I in their fields," she wrote.

"In a few areas the battlefields have been preserved. The once-deep trenches now appear like rows of bumpy, grass-covered stitches running across the land. Most of the towns, too, have been rebuilt, but visitors can buy picture postcards in the shops that show their utter destruction nearly a century ago."

It was a sobering trip, she wrote:



"A visit to a place like the Somme makes clear what all-encompassing warfare is about for those whose homes and farmland become the battlefields. World War I engulfed whole societies, ended a way of life and decimated an entire generation of young men.

"The landscape of the Somme is dotted with military cemeteries, and this is perhaps the most haunting part of the visit. The Franco-British monument to the missing at Thiepval is sad and beautiful. Its massive brick and marble structure rises incongruously out of the peaceful farmland and forest. Around the monument are rows of tombstones bearing the inscription, 'A Soldier Of The Great War — Known Unto God.'

"As I read the names of some of the 73,000 soldiers who were never found, inscribed on the sides of the monument, I was filled with such sadness at the futility of their loss.

"Only 21 years of peace separated the end of World War I from the beginning of World War II. These young men believed they were fighting valiantly for their nations in 'The War to End All Wars.' When, in fact, theirs was a prelude to an even deadlier conflict."

British Prime Minister David Cameron drew a line between World War I history and current affairs in Europe when he spoke to Parliament on Wednesday, The Associated Press reports.

"In many ways, there is a link between the current events we're discussing and what happened 100 years ago. It's the importance of keeping peace and security and stability on our continent," Cameron said. "We're going to be standing together and remembering the sacrifices all those years ago."

On Friday, at Waterloo Station in London, silent actors dressed as World War I-era troops passed out cards with the name, age and rank of the slain soldiers they represented, Reuters reports.

At London's Parliament Square, a gun salute was followed by two minutes of silence.

And at Thiepval in France, Cameron joined French President Francois Hollande and members of the royal family for a service of remembrance.

It wasn't just a time to think of Britain's dead, Cameron said, but of the lives lost on all sides.

"It is an opportunity to think about the impact of the devastation felt by communities across all of the nations involved, which left mothers without sons, wives without husbands and children without fathers," he said.
 

ainitfunny

Saved, to glorify God.
If you bother to even read history, it doesn't take too many years for even the historical accounts of ideas, events, whole wars and battles in which brave young men by the MILLIONS fought and gave their lives to defend are capriciously EDITED OUT of the history books by "who cares?" Editors so that future generations are left completely ignorant of their sacrifice and slaughter and of their famiies who suffered and endured their loss or maiming.

Perhaps that is why so many ignorant youth nowadays are unappreciative of the blood price paid for their rights and freedoms they enjoy and/or cannot understand or really submit to the REAL meaning of the words "DUTY" or "obedience" once Duty and Obedience represent ANY kind of infringement of one's own personal comfort, preference, interests, will, self-determination, personal control or authority. They each think they are "special" and think they themselves exempt from such an unpleasant and perilous "TRIAL BY FIRE"!
They are now only facsimiles of responsible adults lacking everything it took to win previous wars. (The very tiny minority of American men who are Veterans are naturally EXCLUDED from that assessment.)
 
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Stormy

Veteran Member
If you bother to even read history, it doesn't take long for even the historical accounts of ideas, events, wars and battles in which brave young men by the MILLIONS fought and gave their lives to defend are capriciously EDITED OUT by "who cares?" Editors so that future generations are completely ignorant of their sacrifice and slaughter and their famiies who suffered and endured their loss or maiming.

Perhaps that is why so many ignorant youth nowadays are unappreciative of the rights and freedoms they enjoy and/or cannot understand or really submit to the REAL meaning of the words "DUTY" or "obedience" once they represent ANY kind of infringement of one's own preference, interests, will, self-determination, personal control or authority. They each think they are "special" and think they themselves exempt from such an unpleasant and perilous "TRIAL BY FIRE"!
They are now only facsimiles of responsible adults lacking everything it took to win previous wars. (The very tiny minority of American men who are Veterans are naturally EXCLUDED from that assessment.)

Thank you! This should be on the front page of every newspaper published in the United States this 4th of July. Of course the snowflakes don't read newspapers, so it should be posted on Facebook to be read before they could go to their page.

I know, dream on. Well they will see soon enough when they are drafted for the upcoming war. God Help Us.

I am grateful to read of the commemorations and ceremonies to honor the lives of those lost in this horrible, horrible battle and war. Indeed, who knows what great things could have been accomplished had many of this generation of men not perished.

My Step-Grandfather was mustard gassed in France during WWI. He was completely bald, had no eyebrows and always looked like he had a bad sunburn. He would not talk about any of it, that is what my Grandmother told me. His family was from Boston.

We need to remember these things as we face a new world war against many enemies.
 

Housecarl

On TB every waking moment
Recall my comment regarding the Maryland Brigade and the Battle of Long Island on the DoD/Transgender thread....Those men fought an action arguably key to the ultimate success of the American Revolution and we don't even know for sure where their battlefield graves in Brooklyn are located.

The level of perpetuated ignorance is maddening.
 

homecanner1

Veteran Member
I don't know which one is the more gutwrenching to read about, The Somme, Verdun, Paschendale...Gallipoli

The dead marshes in LOTR with the green faces of the dead in the brackish water were Tolkien's way to "write those Somme combat memories out of his system"

so glad he lived and gave us his lasting visions

Its very sad, esp. for Canadians with Canada Day Holiday.
 

FarmerJohn

Has No Life - Lives on TB
How J.R.R. Tolkien Found Mordor on the Western Front

By JOSEPH LOCONTEJUNE 30, 2016

IN the summer of 1916, a young Oxford academic embarked for France as a second lieutenant in the British Expeditionary Force. The Great War, as World War I was known, was only half-done, but already its industrial carnage had no parallel in European history.

“Junior officers were being killed off, a dozen a minute,” recalled J. R. R. Tolkien. “Parting from my wife,” he wrote, doubting that he would survive the trenches, “was like a death.”

The 24-year-old Tolkien arrived in time to take part in the Battle of the Somme, a campaign intended to break the stalemate between the Allies and Central Powers. It did not.

The first day of the battle, July 1, produced a frenzy of bloodletting. Unaware that its artillery had failed to obliterate the German dugouts, the British Army rushed to slaughter.

Before nightfall, 19,240 British soldiers — Prime Minister David Lloyd George called them “the choicest and best of our young manhood” — lay dead. That day, 100 years ago, remains the most lethal in Britain’s military history.

Though the debt is largely overlooked, Tolkien’s supreme literary achievement, “The Lord of the Rings,” owes a great deal to his experience at the Somme. Reaching the front shortly after the offensive began, Tolkien served for four months as a battalion signals officer with the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers in the Picardy region of France.

Using telephones, flares, signal lights, pigeons and runners, he maintained communications between the army staff directing the battles from the rear and the officers in the field. According to the British historian Martin Gilbert, who interviewed Tolkien decades later about his combat experience, he came under intense enemy fire. He had heard “the fearful cries of men who had been hit,” Gilbert wrote. “Tolkien and his signalers were always vulnerable.”

Tolkien’s creative mind found an outlet. He began writing the first drafts of his mythology about Middle-earth, as he recalled, “by candle light in bell-tents, even some down in dugouts under shell fire.” In 1917, recuperating from trench fever, Tolkien composed a series of tales involving “gnomes,” dwarves and orcs engaged in a great struggle for his imaginary realm.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/03/o...or-on-the-western-front.html?ref=opinion&_r=0

In the rent earth of the Somme Valley, he laid the foundation of his epic trilogy.

The descriptions of battle scenes in “The Lord of the Rings” seem lifted from the grim memories of the trenches: the relentless artillery bombardment, the whiff of mustard gas, the bodies of dead soldiers discovered in craters of mud. In the Siege of Gondor, hateful orcs are “digging, digging lines of deep trenches in a huge ring,” while others maneuver “great engines for the casting of missiles.”

On the path to Mordor, stronghold of Sauron, the Dark Lord, the air is “filled with a bitter reek that caught their breath and parched their mouths.” Tolkien later acknowledged that the Dead Marshes, with their pools of muck and floating corpses, “owe something to Northern France after the Battle of the Somme.”

In a lecture delivered in 1939, “On Fairy-Stories,” Tolkien explained that his youthful love of mythology had been “quickened to full life by war.” Yet he chose not to write a war memoir, and in this he departed from contemporaries like Robert Graves and Vera Brittain.

In the postwar years, the Somme exemplified the waste and futility of battle, symbolizing disillusionment not only with war, but with the very idea of heroism. As a professor of Anglo-Saxon back at Oxford, Tolkien preferred the moral landscape of Arthur and Beowulf. His aim was to produce a modern version of the medieval quest: an account of both the terrors and virtues of war, clothed in the language of myth.

In “The Lord of the Rings,” we meet Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee, Hobbits of the Shire, on a fateful mission to destroy the last Ring of Power and save Middle-earth from enslavement and destruction. The heroism of Tolkien’s characters depends on their capacity to resist evil and their tenacity in the face of defeat. It was this quality that Tolkien witnessed among his comrades on the Western Front.

“I have always been impressed that we are here, surviving, because of the indomitable courage of quite small people against impossible odds,” he explained. The Hobbits were “a reflection of the English soldier,” made small of stature to emphasize “the amazing and unexpected heroism of ordinary men ‘at a pinch.’ ”

When the Somme offensive was finally called off in November 1916, a total of about 1.5 million soldiers were dead or wounded. Winston Churchill, who served on the front lines as a lieutenant colonel, criticized the campaign as “a welter of slaughter.” Two of Tolkien’s closest friends, Robert Gilson and Ralph Payton, perished in the battle, and another, Geoffrey Smith, was killed shortly afterward.

Beside the courage of ordinary men, the carnage of war seems also to have opened Tolkien’s eyes to a primal fact about the human condition: the will to power. This is the force animating Sauron, the sorcerer-warlord and great enemy of Middle-earth. “But the only measure that he knows is desire,” explains the wizard Gandalf, “desire for power.” Not even Frodo, the Ring-bearer and chief protagonist, escapes the temptation.

When Tolkien’s trilogy was published, shortly after World War II, many readers assumed that the story of the Ring was a warning about the nuclear age. Tolkien set them straight: “Of course my story is not an allegory of atomic power, but of power (exerted for domination).”

Even this was not the whole story. For Tolkien, there was a spiritual dimension: In the human soul’s struggle against evil, there was a force of grace and goodness stronger than the will to power. Even in a forsaken land, at the threshold of Mordor, Samwise Gamgee apprehends this: “For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: There was light and high beauty forever beyond its reach.”

Good triumphs, yet Tolkien’s epic does not lapse into escapism. His protagonists are nearly overwhelmed by fear and anguish, even their own lust for power. When Frodo returns to the Shire, his quest at an end, he resembles not so much the conquering hero as a shellshocked veteran. Here is a war story, wrapped in fantasy, that delivers painful truths about the human predicament.

Tolkien used the language of myth not to escape the world, but to reveal a mythic and heroic quality in the world as we find it. Perhaps this was the greatest tribute he could pay to the fallen of the Somme.
 

SAPPHIRE

Veteran Member
The pointless mass slaughter is sickening.....nothing gained but my oh my the many lost................TPTB knew what would happen........barbarous weapons and methodology......the last man standing sort of mindset..........disgusting display of mass insanity...IMO
 
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