I found "The Somme" almost by accident while browsing the Web, and as somebody doing World War I research of his own, I was left with very mixed feelings about it. On one hand, it is a fresh look at the bloody battle that cost over a million lives. On the other, however, in attempting to bring out a new, and often unseen aspect, it glosses over months of fighting and the actual experience.
The show begins with a description of the Somme, some of the men involved on both sides, and the first day of fighting, which is famous for being the most brutal day in British military history. At this point, the documentary tells the history well, and the recreations are brutal and intense, just as they should be. The fatal lack of flexibility of the British command staff that resulted in the loss of British gains in the first day is well highlighted and explored.
Unfortunately, it is after this that "The Somme" starts to run into trouble. The documentary is so dedicated to highlighting the advances made as the British army adapted to the conditions and learned how to fight the Germans that it glosses over the price of these lessons, or how long it took for them to sink in. "The Somme" fast forwards from July 1st to the end of September, ignoring in its account the massive attrition on both sides, the hundreds of thousands of casualties, and the fact that the true horror of the Somme lay not in the first day, but the months after, where the losses were so great that new trenches were being dug through corpses. The creeping barrage and the tank are not quite so impressive when it takes at least 200,000 casualties and months of assaults to get to using them. And, to make matters worse, the documentary doesn't actually cover the end of the battle at all, or give the viewer any sense of where the battle lines actually stood at the end.
If anything, "the Somme" should have been longer, and not so willing to gloss over the attrition phases of the battle. The Battle of the Somme lasted four and a half months, and to use only two assaults in the entire battle to tell its story, particularly when reducing the massive losses to a single mention at the end, hardly does justice to the Somme or the men who died there at all.
The show begins with a description of the Somme, some of the men involved on both sides, and the first day of fighting, which is famous for being the most brutal day in British military history. At this point, the documentary tells the history well, and the recreations are brutal and intense, just as they should be. The fatal lack of flexibility of the British command staff that resulted in the loss of British gains in the first day is well highlighted and explored.
Unfortunately, it is after this that "The Somme" starts to run into trouble. The documentary is so dedicated to highlighting the advances made as the British army adapted to the conditions and learned how to fight the Germans that it glosses over the price of these lessons, or how long it took for them to sink in. "The Somme" fast forwards from July 1st to the end of September, ignoring in its account the massive attrition on both sides, the hundreds of thousands of casualties, and the fact that the true horror of the Somme lay not in the first day, but the months after, where the losses were so great that new trenches were being dug through corpses. The creeping barrage and the tank are not quite so impressive when it takes at least 200,000 casualties and months of assaults to get to using them. And, to make matters worse, the documentary doesn't actually cover the end of the battle at all, or give the viewer any sense of where the battle lines actually stood at the end.
If anything, "the Somme" should have been longer, and not so willing to gloss over the attrition phases of the battle. The Battle of the Somme lasted four and a half months, and to use only two assaults in the entire battle to tell its story, particularly when reducing the massive losses to a single mention at the end, hardly does justice to the Somme or the men who died there at all.