Gordon Dump Cemetery

Ovillers British Cemetery, Somme, World War 1, Iron Harvest

Lochnagar Crater - Attack on La Boisselle

Blighty Valley Cemetery, Authuille Wood.

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La Boisselle, France

This video shows the area to the west of the village of la Boisselle, France.

On 1st July 1916, the British Front line ran parallel to the modern D20 across Mash Valley. As the soldiers went over the top they advanced up hill towards the German machine guns: and were cut to ribbons. No soldier in this sector advanced more then about 80m.

Want to travel to this location but do not know how to find it? Battlefields By GPS ( has self-drive tours of the Somme with full GPS packages for Garmin sat nav devices.

Please take a look at Video History Today , the first web site to offer unique collections of re-usable original video clips designed for teachers and students.

Warlencourt British Cemetery

Warlencourt, the Butte de Warlencourt and Eaucourt-L'Abbaye were the scene of very fierce fighting in 1916. Eaucourt was taken by the 47th (London) Division early in October. The Butte (a Roman mound of excavated chalk, about 17 metres high, once covered with pines) was attacked by that and other divisions, but it was not relinquished by the Germans until the following 26 February, when they withdrew to the Hindenburg Line. The 51st (Highland) Division fought a delaying action here on 25 March 1918 during the great German advance, and the 42nd (East Lancashire) Division recaptured the ground on 25 August 1918. The cemetery was made late in 1919 when graves were brought in from small cemeteries and the battlefields of Warlencourt and Le Sars. The largest burial ground moved into this cemetery was:- HEXHAM ROAD CEMETERY, LE SARS, on the West side of the Abbey grounds. (Hexham Road was the name given to the road leading from Warlencourt to Eaucourt. Le Sars was captured by the 23rd Division on 7 October 1916, and again by the Third Army on 25 August 1918.) This cemetery was used from November 1916 to October 1917, and contained the graves of 17 soldiers from the United Kingdom and 13 from Australia. The cemetery now contains 3,505 Commonwealth burials and commemorations of the Great War. 1,823 of the burials are unidentified but there are special memorials to 55 casualties known or believed to be buried among them. Other special memorials commemorate 15 casualties buried in Hexham Road Cemetery, whose graves were destroyed by shell fire. The cemetery was designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens.

La Boisselle and Lochnagar Crater, Somme

3D laser scans carried out in June and October 2012 of the Glory Hole and the Lochnagar Crater at La Boisselle in Northern France. Thanks to the La Boisselle Study Group ( for the invitation to undertake the survey.

Survey carried out by Multi-Limn and Frankham Consultancy Group using Leica C10 and ScanStation 2 Laser scanners, and animated using Pointools.

Le cratère de la Boisselle

Le Lieutenant Cécil Arthur Lewis était aux commandes d'un avion au dessus du front quand le 1er Juillet 1916 à 7h28, la terre entière sembla se soulever en un éclair de lumière dans le ciel.
Il y eut un bruit assourdissant, couvrant les bruits de l'artillerie, projetant son appareil dans tous les sens comme un bout de papier dans une bourrasque.
La colonne de terre s'éleva à plus 1200 m et sembla comme suspendue dans les airs avant de retomber tel un cône de poussière et de débris de plus en plus large.

Lochnagar Crater - Sausage Valley

WWI Largest Explosion Before Atomic Bomb-Lochnagar Crater

Today on The Scriptorium, join my Bond tour travelers as they race for chocolate around the Lochnagar Crater detonated July 1, 1916, opening day of the Battle of the Somme, and bloodiest day in British military history.

“At 7.28am a maroon was launched and whistles blown for 30 seconds reflecting the first few minutes of a battle that would leave 19,240 British and Commonwealth soldiers dead by the end of that first day.

“One hundred years earlier, a mine packed with 60,000lbs of explosives painstakingly laid beneath the German trenches was detonated. The plume of debris rose to 4,000 ft and two minutes later men hurled themselves ‘over the top’ to the shrill sound of whistles and attacked what they expected to be destroyed German trenches.” (Centenarynews.com)

Join me on the next Bond tour bondbooks.net

Lochnagar Crater - La Grande Mine - Ovillers-la-Boisselle - 12 july 2017 - MVI 2860

Le Trou de mine de La Boisselle appelé encore La Grande Mine et en anglais, Lochnagar Crater est un lieu de mémoire de la Bataille de la Somme, pendant la Grande Guerre situé sur le territoire de la commune d'Ovillers-la-Boisselle à 600 m au sud-est du village de La Boisselle sur le Circuit du Souvenir. Aujourd'hui, il a un diamètre d'au moins 90 mètresNote 1, et fait 22 m de profondeur. Il résulte de l'explosion d'une mine créée par les Royal Engineer tunnelling companies. Le trou a été formé par près de 30 tonnes d'explosif.

The Lochnagar mine was an underground explosive charge, secretly planted by the British during the First World War, ready for 1 July 1916, the first day on the Somme. The mine was dug by the Tunnelling Companies of the Royal Engineers under a German field fortification known as Schwabenhöhe (Swabian Height) in the front line, south of the village of La Boisselle in the Somme département. The British named the mine after Lochnagar Street, the British trench from which the gallery was driven. The charge at Lochnagar was one of 19 mines that were placed beneath the German lines on the British section of the Somme front, to assist the infantry advance at the start of the battle. The Lochnagar mine was sprung at 7:28 a.m. on 1 July 1916 and left a crater 98 ft (30 m) deep and 330 ft (100 m) wide, which was captured and held by British troops. The attack on either flank was defeated by German small-arms and artillery fire, except on the extreme right flank and just south of La Boisselle, north of the Lochnagar Crater. The crater has been preserved as a memorial and a religious service is held each 1 July.

Ovillers La Boisselle 11 novembre 2016

Commémoration du 11 novembre au Lochnagar Crater
Video Drone by Aurélien BERNARD

Commonwealth War Graves Commision Thiepval Memorial

Landing the microlight at La Boisselle, Somme.

The Somme La Boisselle

Diorama depicting the attack of the 34th Division,1st July 1916

Somme 2016 reis door de slagvelden van 14-18

Bezoek aan o.a de Franse, Engelse en Duitse kerkhoven rond Rancourt, Cimetiere des Charentais, het Museum Historial de la Grande Guerre in Përonne, Cappy (laatste veblijfplaats van de rode Baron), de Belvédère van Frise, Flaucourt, Engels kerkhof Assevillers, Het verwoeste dorpje Fay, Bois de Wallieux in Soyécourt, Chaulnes, Chilly, Duise observatiebunker van La Chavatte, Fouquescourt, Lihons, Duitse kerkhof Vermandovillers, Le petit train de la haute Somme in Froissy, Museum Somme 1916 in Albert, Ovillers-la-Boisselle , Lochnagar krater, Duitse begraafplaats van Fricourt, Welsh Red Dragon monument Mametz, Delville Wood, Butte de Warlencourt , Windmill van Pozières, Mouquet Farm, Thiepval, Ulster Memorial Tower en Newfoundland War Memorial Park

Lochnagar Crater - German machine gun view of advancing troops

Delville Wood

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First day on the Somme | Wikipedia audio article

This is an audio version of the Wikipedia Article:



00:03:59 1 Background
00:04:08 1.1 Strategic developments
00:08:58 1.2 Tactical developments
00:16:42 2 Prelude
00:16:52 2.1 Anglo-French offensive preparations
00:17:03 2.1.1 Aircraft
00:19:29 2.1.2 Artillery
00:21:46 2.1.3 Cavalry
00:23:32 2.1.4 Infantry
00:26:34 2.1.5 Supply
00:29:10 2.1.6 Intelligence
00:31:31 2.1.7 Mining
00:33:34 2.2 Plan of attack
00:39:41 2.3 German defensive preparations
00:45:58 3 Battle
00:46:07 3.1 French Sixth Army
00:46:17 3.1.1 XXXV Corps
00:49:51 3.1.2 I Colonial Corps
00:51:34 3.1.3 XX Corps
00:54:29 3.2 British Fourth Army
00:54:39 3.2.1 XIII Corps
00:56:45 3.2.2 XV Corps
00:56:54 3.2.2.1 Mametz
00:59:33 3.2.2.2 Fricourt
01:02:31 3.2.3 III Corps
01:02:40 3.2.3.1 La Boisselle
01:05:01 3.2.3.2 Ovillers
01:07:23 3.2.4 X Corps
01:07:32 3.2.4.1 Leipzig salient and Thiepval
01:09:52 3.2.4.2 Schwaben and Stuff redoubts
01:12:20 3.2.5 VIII Corps
01:12:58 3.2.5.1 Beaumont-Hamel
01:15:34 3.2.5.2 Serre
01:18:52 3.3 British Third Army
01:22:48 3.4 Air operations
01:35:28 3.5 German 2nd Army
01:42:02 4 Aftermath
01:42:12 4.1 Analysis
01:50:16 4.2 Casualties
01:54:28 4.3 Subsequent operations
01:57:52 5 Commemoration
01:58:40 6 Victoria Cross
02:00:11 7 Notes



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SUMMARY
=======
The first day on the Somme, 1 July 1916, was the opening day of the Battle of Albert (1–13 July), the name given by the British to the first two weeks of the Battle of the Somme. Nine corps of the French Sixth Army and the British Fourth and Third armies, attacked the German 2nd Army (General Fritz von Below) from Foucaucourt south of the Somme northwards across the Ancre to Serre and at Gommecourt, 2 mi (3.2 km) beyond, in the Third Army area. The objective of the attack was to capture the German first and second positions from Serre south to the Albert–Bapaume road and the first position from the road south to Foucaucourt.
The German defence south of the road mostly collapsed and the French had complete success on both banks of the Somme, as did the British from Maricourt on the army boundary, where XIII Corps took Montauban and reached all its objectives and XV Corps captured Mametz and isolated Fricourt. The III Corps attack on both sides of the Albert–Bapaume road was a disaster, making only a short advance south of La Boisselle, where the 34th Division had the largest number of casualties of any Allied division on 1 July. Further north, the X Corps attack captured the Leipzig Redoubt, failed opposite Thiepval and had a great but temporary success on the left flank, where the German front line was overrun by the 36th Ulster Division, which then captured Schwaben and Stuff redoubts.
German counter-attacks during the afternoon recaptured most of the lost ground north of the Albert–Bapaume road and more British attacks against Thiepval were costly failures. On the north bank of the Ancre, the attack of VIII Corps was a disaster, with large numbers of British troops being shot down in no man's land. The VII Corps diversion at Gommecourt was also costly, with only a partial and temporary advance south of the village. The German defeats from Foucaucourt to the Albert–Bapaume road left the German defence on the south bank incapable of resisting another attack and a substantial German retreat began, from the Flaucourt plateau to the west bank of the Somme close to Péronne, while north of the Somme, Fricourt was abandoned overnight.
Several truces were observed to recover wounded from no man's land on the British front, where the Fourth Army had lost 57,470 casualties, of whom 19,240 men were killed. The French had 1,590 casualties and the German 2nd Army lost 10,000–12,000 men. Orders were issued to the Anglo-French armies to continue the offensive on 2 July and a German counte ...