There is, or was for a long time, a popular view in Britain of the First World War. It was of idiotic generals uncaring about the fate of their men herding them off time and again to futile attacks which accomplished nothing but leaving many of them dead. July 1st, 1916, the first day of the battle of the Somme, when the British Army suffered 57,000 casualties for small territorial gain, was the apotheosis of this.

This view of the war has now been largely discredited in serious historical circles. As Gary Sheffield argued in a previous book, [b:Forgotten Victory|1377496|Forgotten Victory - The First World War Myths and Reality|Gary Sheffield|https://d2arxad8u2l0g7.cloudfront.net/books/1356463786s/1377496.jpg|1367429], the British Army went from a small, colonial police force in 1914 to a mass army of 2 million men which played perhaps the major part in winning the war in 1918. This was no small achievement and the men and their commanders responsible deserve to be remembered as more than either boobs or butchers.

This book focuses on the battle of the Somme in that thesis. Rather than a disaster followed by a pointless slogging match, Sheffield makes the convincing case that the Somme was a major staging post on the British Army's journey to a war winning force in 1918. In short, the Somme didn't win the war, but the war would not have been won without the Somme.

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