The Battle of the Somme was a definitive campaign of the First World War. Unprecedented casualties resulted from intense trench warfare and new military technologies. In this lesson, students analyze and compare three different accounts of the battle’s first day -- one from a British journalist who paints a rosy picture of the Allied offensive and two from combatants that provide starkly different portraits of the event.
[Teacher Materials, Student Materials, and Original Documents updated 8/28/18.]
Image: Photo of a British trench during the Battle of the Somme taken by John Warwick Brooke, 1916. From the Wikimedia Commons.
