The First Day on the Somme

On July 1, 1916, a continous line of British soldiers climbed out from the trenches of the Somme into No Man's Land and began to walk towards dug-in German troops armed with machine-guns. By the end of the day there were more than 60,000 British casualties—a third of them fatal. Martin Middlebrook's now-classic account of the blackest day in the history of the British army draws on official sources from the time, and on the words of hundreds of survivors: normal men, many of them volunteers, who found themselves thrown into a scene of unparalleled tragedy and horror.

Martin Middlebrook is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the author of The Battle of Hamburg: The Firestorm Raid, The Berlin Raids, and Convoy: The Greatest U-Boat Battle of the War.