Three Armies on the Somme: The First Battle of the Twentieth Century

Knopf. Fine in Near Fine dust jacket. 2010. First American Edition. Hardcover. 0307265854 . Tight clean book in crisp dust jacket with just a hint of shelflife. Remainder dot to lower edge. ; 6.5 X 1.6 X 9.6 inches; 656 pages; While previous histories have documented the missteps of British command, no account has fully recognized the fact that allied generals were witnessing the spontaneous evolution of warfare even as they sent their troops “over the top. ” With his keen insight and vast knowledge of military strategy, Philpott shows that twentieth-century war as we know it simply didn’t exist before the Battle of the Somme: new technologies like the armored tank made their battlefield debut, while developments in communications lagged behind commanders’ needs. Attrition emerged as the only means of defeating industrialized belligerents that were mobilizing all their resources for war. At the Somme, the allied armies acquired the necessary lessons of modern warfare, without which they could never have prevailed. An exciting, indispensable work of military history that challenges our received ideas about the Battle of the Somme, and about the very nature of war. .