Philip Gibbs (1) (1877–1962)

Good book and a very interesting view of the battle of the somme

For those interested in reading it.
1. It is censored. This was written while the war was going on and thanks to British law at the time if what a correspondent wrote could be interpreted as helpful to the enemy it could very easily be punished by death. Even with that said he does still get to write a bit about the horrors of war, it's just not nearly as poignant or as shocking as in "now it can be told."

2. if you choose to read the Kindle version be aware it's written by a computer and not a person. From what I can tell the program in question is creating a digital copy from this scan of the book. https://archive.org/details/battlesofsomme00gibbuoft There are times when this book gets a bit hard to read because of the dark scans and sometimes the page underneath bleeding through. As such the program ends up with a series of odd typos. Lots of odd typos.
If such typos are apt to drive you nuts I suggest just reading the scan above. If not its still good to read it with the scan as a supplement. There are moments (like when the program met the map insert) that it just decides to start speaking in tongues and it's good to cross reference what the devil is going on.


As far as the actual book itself goes. As mentioned it does provide new views into this battle. My favorite is the description of the tanks. It's described as a monster, ichthyosaurs, giant bullfrog and Dragon with indigestion (my personal favorite by the way).
The exploits of a tank by the name of creme de menthe were also fun to read about. http://landships.activeboard.com/t56306047/tank-mki-c5-creme-de-menthe/… (meer)