To mark the 107th anniversary of the first day of the Battle of the Somme, I am delighted to announce that The Battle of the Somme: A Layman's Guide is now available for pre-order exclusively on Amazon sites worldwide for a special pre-order price of just 99p / 99c for the Kindle version!
I have experimented with a few ideas/angles while writing this Layman's Guide that will set it apart from others in the series. Instead of being a straightforward narrative from yours truly, I have interwoven hundreds of quotes from the men that were there to give the story a bit more intimacy and immediacy - I want the reader to visualise themselves going 'over the top' or living in the trenches among the men, or back at HQ making the decisions with the generals and staff officers.
I have also included a number of mini-biographies of men that were rewarded for their bravery throughout the battle. Some of these chaps were high ranking officers, some were ordinary privates. Some died, some survived to tell the tale. But they all deserve to have their story told and re-told so we do not forget about the individual sacrifices that were made on that particular part of France between July and November 1916.
And that's another thing about this book. It does not just look at the first day. Infamous as it is, the story of the battle is so much more than just one day, therefore I have covered everything up to mid-November when even Haig had to concede to the winter weather.
Finally, as I read and researched the topic for the book, it dawned on me just how few books that have been written by famous historians include much, if any, detail regarding the German side of things. So I have tried to put that right a bit by including as much insight as I could from the German point of view. Including such things as their strategy on the Somme, how they set themselves up, how it affected the men and the senior officers. It takes two (or more) to have a fight, and their part of the story is just as important as the British/Allied part. It needs to recognised a bit more than it has been, and I hope I went some way to doing that.
There will also a load of maps to help the reader try to understand the name places, the direction of attack and just get more of a feel for the battlefield when reading a list of French place names!
So, if you want to understand the Battle of the Somme from both sides in an entertaining way - pre-order The Battle of the Somme: A Layman's Guide now!
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