Hi everyone,
I’ll, first, talk about the battle of Somme in general. This battle started the first of July 1916 and was started by the British to draw the German soldier from Verdun as we can see in Condon chapter 7(Condon Ch7-1vudier). The offensive started really badly for the British troops losing nearly half of the men of the first attack. This was a hard attack because with the invention of new deadly weapons the defenders now held a huge advantage over the enemy since artillery are hard to move. But around the end of the offensive the British took a small territory over the Germans but without real breakthrough. The only purpose of this attack was to shift the attention of Germany from Verdun to Somme. It succeeded in a way because the French were victorious in Verdun.
Secondly, in this battle, the use of machine guns was really effective against the British troops resulting in thousands of death which really help the German army. Furthermore, it is at Somme that the first tanks were use by Britain, but those tanks didn’t really helped because they could only move at the speed of 5km/h and they had mechanism problems. Therefore, those new technologies had a great impact in the battle of Somme with the artillery and the new machine guns except the tanks. Those, even if they weren’t of any good in WW1, were improve a lot and then were use has one of the main component of the German army in WW2.