The Battle of the Somme

The year 1916 was the year of the Battle of the Somme. As the year opened, the two great opposing armies remained deadlocked in a line of trenches which stretched 966 kilometres from the Belgian coast through France to the frontiers of Switzerland. Here, men faced each other over the strewn, decaying wastes of No Man's Land, and confronted the realities of dirt, disease and death. Although the great advantage of trench warfare lay with the defence, …

…the Somme. Following their campaign in Flanders, the Canadians joined in the Somme offensive in August 1916. In the months that followed, they saw repeated action and confirmed their reputation as hard-hitting shock troops, but in doing so, they suffered more than 24,000 casualties. The Somme campaign finally ended in November 1919. Bogged down in mud, the Allied Forces could claim only to have taken ten kilometres of ground from the German defenders. The terrible cost was 600,000 casualties.