Remembering the Somme

Last weekend was the 90th anniversary of the start of a battle that to this day goes a long way to explain the disconnect often seen between US and British ideas about how to wage a war. The Somme.

Almost 20,000 young British and Empire soldiers - some aged just 15 - died in the opening hours of the battle, the bloodiest day in Britain's military history. During the following four and a half months of trench warfare, the Army suffered an average of almost 3,000 casualties a day.

By November 18, 1916, when the battle ended, the Allies had taken more than 600,000 casualties of whom more than 120,000 died. The German casualty rate was strikingly similar.