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Heroism and Horror in the First World War
by Sir Martin Gilbert
At 7:30 am on July 1, 1916, the first Allied soldiers climbed out of their trenches along the Somme River in France and charged out into no-man’s-land toward the barbed wire and machine guns at the German front lines. By the end of this first day of the Allied attack, the British army alone would lose 20,000 men. In just 138 days, 310,000 men died.
"His superbly written, absorbing recreations of innumerable small life-and-death struggles makes the book a fitting commemoration of the tragedy." - PW
"A noteworthy historian offers what should be the definitive account." - Library Journal
This information about The Somme was first featured
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Sir Martin John Gilbert, CBE, PC, is Winston Churchill's official biographer, and a leading historian of the modern world. He was born October 25, 1936 in London, England, and died February 3, 2015.
Martin Gilbert is the author of eighty-eight books, among them the single-volume Churchill: A Life, his twin histories First World War and Second World War, a comprehensive History of Israel, and his three-volume work, A History of the Twentieth Century. (also published in a single, condensed volume). He is an Honorary Fellow of Merton College, Oxford, and a Distinguished Fellow of Hillsdale College, Michigan.
His book The Holocaust: The Jewish Tragedy (published in the United States as The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe During the Second World War) is a classic work on the subject.
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