In reality, however, nearly a year prior to D-Day, British Commonwealth and American Allied forces landed on the toe of Italy in 1943 and then, a few days later, at Salerno, in what were the main landings to really push towards Rome.

This article is an edited transcript of Italy and World War 2 with Paul Reed, available on History Hit .

Why did the Allies invade Italy?

The Italian campaign came about after the campaign in North Africa ended in May 1943 with the surrender of the Afrika Korps.

The Allies had discussed at Yalta the need to open a second front in the war to relieve pressure on the eastern front. However, the Allies were not then in a position to make a proper landing in France.

Salerno D-Day plan

Image Credit: Public Domain

The American belief was that the only way to defeat the Nazi regime was to land in France, go to Paris, to capture Paris, to push on to Belgium, to capture Belgium, and then to capture Holland – at which point the Allies would have a route into Nazi Germany.

But that wasn’t possible in the summer of 1943. So the compromise was to try and come in through the back door, an idea that British Prime Minister Winston Churchill believed in. Churchill called Italy the “soft underbelly of the Third Reich”. That’s what Italy was to him and indeed to others as well.

The route through Sicily

There was a plan to attack through Italy on a second front, push up through Italy and into Austria, entering Germany that way. And it sounded easy. But by the end of the campaign, veterans called it the “tough old gut of Europe”.

Although the Allies had decided upon an invasion of Italy from North Africa, it wasn’t possible to do that directly. There wasn’t enough shipping or enough aircraft to cover an assault. Instead, it was going to be a two-step operation.

The Allies would go across the Mediterranean, capture the island of Sicily, and use that as a staging post to go to the Italian mainland.

When did the British and Commonwealth troops invade Sicily?

Troops from Sicily arrive under shell fire during the landing at Salerno, September 1943.

The landings at Sicily took place in July 1943, with British and Commonwealth troops arriving on one side of the island and the Americans landing on the other side. There was some tough fighting on the island of Sicily in the countryside.

The beginnings of a rivalry between Britain’s Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery and US Lieutenant General George S. Patton emerged and some have suggested that they over-focused on that rivalry, consequently allowing German forces to get away across the Strait of Messina.

While the Allies did capture Sicily, it wasn’t the complete success they had hoped for, and the fight for the rest of Italy was yet to come.

This article is an edited transcript of Battle of the Somme with Paul Reed on Dan Snow’s History Hit, first broadcast 29 June 2016.

On the first day of the Battle of the Somme, well over 100,000 men went over the top. We’ll never know the full total of men who went into battle, because not every battalion recorded their strengths when they went into action. But there were 57,000 casualties on 1 July 1916 – a figure that included the killed, wounded and missing. Of this 57,000, 20,000 were either killed in action or died of wounds.

The Lancashire Fusiliers at Beaumont-Hamel on 1 July 1916.

It’s easy to say those numbers, but to put them into some sort of context and truly understand the unprecedented devastation of that day, consider the fact that there were more casualties on the first day of the Battle of the Somme than in the Crimean and Boer Wars combined.

Unprecedented losses

When you take a closer look at the casualty figures, you discover that a very high percentage of those who died were killed in the first 30 minutes of the battle, as the British infantry began to exit their trenches and emerge onto No Man’s Land, straight into the Germans’ withering machine gun fire. Some battalions suffered especially devastating losses.

At Serre, one of the most iconic areas of the battlefield, units like the Accrington, Barnsley, Bradford and Leeds Pals battalions suffered between 80 per cent and 90 per cent casualties. In most cases, the men in these Northern Pals battalions walked no more than 10 or 15 yards from their front-line trench before being cut to pieces by German machine gun fire.

The Newfoundland Regiment was vanquished in a similarly comprehensive fashion. Of the 800 men who went over the top at Beaumont-Hamel, 710 became casualties – mostly between 20 and 30 minutes after exiting their trenches.

The 10th West Yorkshire Battalion at Fricourt fared no better – it suffered more than 700 casualties among the around 800 men who went into battle. Battalion after battalion suffered catastrophic losses of more than 500 men and there were, of course, thousands of tragic individual stories on a day of unparalleled devastation for the British Army.

The story of the Pals battalions

There were enormous losses across the British Army but the tragic plight of the Pals battalions are strongly associated with the devastation of the Somme.

The Pals were composed of volunteers, largely from northern England, who had responded to Kitchener’s call to enlist for king and country. The idea was to bring these men in from their communities and guarantee that they would serve together and not be split up.

The iconic “Lord Kitchener Wants You” recruitment poster.

The benefits of keeping pals from close-knit communities together were obvious – fantastic morale and esprit de corps came naturally. This helped with training and made it easier to maintain a positive collective spirit when the men went overseas. Little thought was given to the negative consequences, however.

If you commit a unit that’s exclusively recruited from a particular location to a battle where there are heavy losses, the whole community will be thrown into mourning.

Which is exactly what happened to so many communities after the first day of the Battle of the Somme. It’s little wonder that there’s always been a poignant connection between the Pals and the Somme.

This article is an edited transcript of Italy and World War 2 with Paul Reed, available on History Hit TV.

The Italian campaign of September 1943 was a complicated operation, focusing around landing at the foot of Italy and advancing up coastal roads towards Rome.

The Germans did not concentrate forces on resisting the landings on the beach. But that was a deceptive move; the German plan was to let the Allies land and move into a beachhead before then hitting them from every direction with counter-attacks.

This plan for Italy was unlike the Germans’ plan to counter the Allies’ D-Day operation the following year. In Normandy, the Germans intended to kill the Allies on the beach, and if you look at the way their defences were set up there then it’s clear that that’s what they were designed to do – stop troops landing and destroy them as they land.

In Italy, the Germans didn’t have the luxury of coastal fortifications and there were very few prepared defences. There was nothing like the sort of infrastructure that you might expect.

While some of the landings were relatively unopposed, however, there was still heavy fighting and the worst casualties were in the south, where a Texan division landed.

The Americans encountered very stiff resistance there and suffered substantial casualties. This escalated to a point where US General Mark Clark, the commander of the operation, began to waver and thought about actually pulling men back.

German withdrawal

Gradually, however, the Allied forces linked up and the Germans were pushed back, and that’s when the German commander, Albert Kesselring, decided to use the Italian countryside and the terrain in order to slow the Allies down.

The Germans set out to build a defensive line and to stop the Allies on the road to Rome.

The fighting on that defensive line, known as the Gustav Line, became synonymous with the bitter fighting at the monastery of Monte Cassino, which was brutal and saw heavy casualties on both sides.

The line was a long section cutting right across Italy. A later excavation of the area turned up fortifications akin to World War One defences, including bunkers, machine gun nests, mortar pits, trench systems, dug-in tank turrets and so on.

All of that was being prepared as the Allies pushed out of the Salerno bridgehead. The Germans blew up every bridge on every river, and used mountain passes, the terrain and rivers to slow the Allies down.

Italy was a campaign of rivers, to the point where the published history of the Royal Engineers in World War Two has a separate volume for bridging during the Italian campaign.

British Royal Engineers cross the Garigliano river on 19 January 1944.

The hard fight

It was a fierce battle in Italy, not just in terms of the German troops the Allies were up against, who were often of a very high calibre in terms of ability and equipment.

The terrain also made fighting incredibly difficult. Nothing like it was ever experienced by British and Commonwealth troops in France.

There was fighting in the mountains, fighting in positions where you couldn’t dig in because it was so rocky, fighting in really extreme cold, and in terrible mud as in World War One – similar to Passchendaele and the Somme, for example.

The veterans also suffered a psychological blow after the campaign, because they felt forgotten. There was this lady, Esther, who came out with the phrase, “D-Day dodgers”.

But many veterans of the campaign wear that phrase as a badge of pride. They all know how tough it was.

This article is an edited transcript of Italy and World War 2 with Paul Reed, available on History Hit TV.

The Italian campaign of September 1943 was the first large-scale invasion of the European mainland involving British and American forces in World War Two. The plan was to land on both sides of the Italian coast, on the toe of Italy as well as at Salerno, and drive towards Rome.

On the eve of the landings at Salerno, Italy was split between forces that were sympathetic to the Allies and forces that remained loyal to the Germans, most of which moved up into the northern part of Italy.

The Germans then effectively took control of Italy as a satellite nation, whereas before it had been an ally, a part of the Axis.

There was thus a curious situation in which the Allies were about to invade a country that was technically about to become their ally as well.

That might even have made some of the men going into Salerno, and indeed some commanders, believe that it was going to be a walkover.

A German Tiger I tank in front of the Altare della Patria in Rome.

Rejecting the airborne approach

Before the Allies’ Italian campaign had begun, there was a plan to drop the 82nd American Airborne near to Rome to try and meet up with partisans and potential forces that might be sympathetic to the Allies.

Fortunately, that plan was never put into operation because it seems likely that local Italian support would have been less than expected, and that the men would have been isolated, surrounded and destroyed.

It was different to D-Day, where significant airborne forces were used to capture key targets.

The Allies chose Salerno for a landing, because it was a perfect bay with level ground. There was no Atlantic Wall in Italy, which made it different to France or Belgium. There, the Wall’s significant coastal defences meant that calculating where to land was extremely difficult.

The choosing of Salerno was about logistics, about the ability to use aircraft from Sicily – which served as a staging post for the invasion – to protect the beachhead and to bomb German targets, and about finding shipping routes that could be defended. Those considerations meant it was impossible to land any nearer to Rome.

Rome was the prize. Salerno was the compromise.

Italy is an elongated country, with a couple of coastal roads on the Mediterranean flank, mountains that are effectively impassable, and a couple of roads on the Adriatic flank.

Eighth Army forces landed on the toe of Italy to advance up the Adriatic front and, on 9 September, Fifth Army troops under General Mark Clark landed at Salerno to advance up the Mediterranean front towards Rome.

The idea was that both those sets of forces would sweep up the German troops in Italy, the “soft underbelly” (as Churchill put it), push them through, take Rome, then up into Austria, and the war would be over by Christmas. Oh, well. Perhaps not Christmas.

This article is an edited transcript of Italy and World War 2 with Paul Reed, available on History Hit TV.

The Italian campaign of September 1943 marked a real turning point in World War Two because Germany could no longer sustain a conflict on two fronts.

As the Allies pushed deeper into Italy, the Germans were forced to pull troops from the eastern front, just to stem the tide of the Allied advance – precisely what Stalin and the Russians had wanted. The Italians were also taken out of the war by the Allied assault.

The Germans were thus beginning to be stretched thin; therefore, when we look at the Allies’ success in Normandy the following year and the following 11 months of the campaign in north-west Europe, we should never see it in isolation.

German weaknesses

Allied troops arrive under shell fire during the landing at Salerno, Italy, in September 1943.

It is important to remember that what was going on in Italy was vital to tying up German forces there who could have been deployed to France or Russia. Events in Russia were equally vital to the Italian campaign and, eventually, to Normandy as well.

Despite the remarkable ability of the German army to put troops everywhere and to fight well, with this combined Allied effort German forces were stretching themselves so much that you could argue that the outcome of the war was almost guaranteed.

Learning lessons

The Allies invaded Italy via Salerno and the toe of the country, arriving by sea. The invasion was not the Allies’ first amphibious combined arms operation – they had also utilised such operations in North Africa and in Sicily, which served as the staging post for the invasion of the Italian mainland.

With each new operation, the Allies made mistakes which they took lessons from. At Sicily, for example, they dropped glider troops too far out and, as a result, gliders crashed in the sea and many men drowned.

If you go to the Cassino Memorial in Italy’s Province of Frosinone today, you will see the names of men from the Border and Staffordshire Regiments who sadly died in the sea when their gliders hit the water rather than land.

Of course, as the memorial demonstrates, the lessons learnt from such mistakes always came with a cost, whether a human cost, a physical cost or a material cost. But lessons were nonetheless always being learnt and the Allies’ capacity for, and skill at, carrying out such operations was subsequently always improving.

By the time it came to invading Italy, the Allies were ready to roll out their first large-scale D-Day-style operation on the European mainland.

Less than a year later, the Allies would launch their invasion of France – codenamed “Operation Overlord” – with the Normandy landings, what remains the largest amphibious invasion in history.

This article is an edited transcript of Battle of the Somme with Paul Reed on Dan Snow’s History Hit, first broadcast 29 June 2016. You can listen to the full episode below or to the full podcast for free on Acast.

The Battle of the Somme, which began on 1 July 1916, was Britain’s big push to break German lines. There had never been a battle of such scale before, both in terms of the sheer manpower involved and, more importantly, the level of artillery that was prepared for the battle.

Britain’s then secretary of state for war, David Lloyd George, had sorted out the munitions factories and there was an unprecedented amount of artillery firepower to drop on the Germans. It really did look like the Somme would be the battle that would end the war. “Bapaume and then Berlin” was the much-used phrase before the battle.

Confidence was high, not least because of the huge volumes of men who were brought into the Somme with years of training behind them.

After all, some of those men enlisted right at the beginning of the war and had been preparing for that day ever since.

The promise of an unprecedented bombardment

The British believed in the power of their artillery to do the job for them. There was a widespread feeling that they could pound the German positions into oblivion with such an unparalleled concentration of artillery.

In the end, the British subjected the enemy to a seven-day bombardment – 1.75 million shells along an 18-mile front.

It was widely assumed that nothing would survive, “not even a rat”.

All that the infantry would be required to do after the artillery did the real damage would be to walk across No Man’s Land and occupy the German positions beyond Bapaume by nightfall. Then, presumably, Berlin by Christmas.

But the battle didn’t pan out quite like that.

Inadequate artillery

The bulk of the artillery shells dropped on German positions were standard field artillery. These were 18-pound shells that could smash up German trenches. They could also be used effectively with shrapnel – little lead balls that could, if used correctly, cut through wire and clear an easier path for the infantry.

But they couldn’t take out German dugouts. Which is why things started to go wrong for the British.

The Somme is chalk downland and very easy to dig into. Having been there since September 1914 the Germans had dug deep. Indeed, some of their dugouts were up to 80 feet beneath the surface. The British shells were never going to impact at that sort of depth.

A 60-Pounder heavy field gun at the Somme.

A sunlit picture of Hell

Zero hour was 7.30 in the morning. Of course, in July, it had been sun up for well over two hours by that time, so it was perfect daylight. Absolutely perfect conditions.

Leading up to the battle there had been heavy rain and muddy fields. But then it changed and 1 July turned out to be the perfect summer’s day. Siegfried Sassoon called it a “sunlit picture of Hell”.

The 7.30am attack nonetheless went ahead in broad daylight, largely because the war was a Franco-British offensive and the French were not trained to attack in the darkness.

Of course, there was also a feeling that it didn’t matter if it was broad daylight, because nobody could have survived the bombardment.

When the British soldiers exited their trenches and the whistles were blown, many of them walked straight into what can only be described as a machine gun oblivion.

This article is an edited transcript of Battle of the Somme with Paul Reed on Dan Snow’s History Hit, first broadcast 29 June 2016.

The first day of the Battle of the Somme, on 1 July 1916, remains the most devastating and bloody in British military history. Here we examine the main reasons why Britain lost so many men that day and how the British Army learnt from its errors.

The British failed to appreciate how deep the German dugouts were

Though the level of intelligence gathering before the Somme was good, the British didn’t have infrared equipment to see deep into the ground. They had no idea how deep the German dugouts were and no reason to doubt their assumption that the Germans, like the British, kept most of their men on the front line. They didn’t.

This was among the key learnings from the Somme – the Germans didn’t keep the bulk of their troops in forward positions, they kept them in the second and third lines, where they had deep dugouts.

A destroyed German dugout. Britain made the mistake of assuming that Germany kept the majority of its troops in forward positions.

They sheltered the majority of their troops there, deep underground, for the course of the seven days of bombardment.

Many of the dugouts were kitted out with electric light, generators, cooking facilities, bunk beds and furniture.

The majority of the German troops were safe down there in their dugouts, even while their trenches were being pounded by shell fire.

The men who garrisoned those trenches survived and there were very few casualties caused by the preliminary bombardment. This meant, of course, that all those German survivors were able to man weapons and mow down advancing British troops in No Man’s Land.

The British failed to use artillery effectively

The British Army’s biggest mistake was to overestimate the damage its artillery would do during the initial seven-day bombardment.

There was an assumption that the artillery assault would have such an impact on the Germans that, in its aftermath, men could simply move out and occupy ground that had already been captured by the bombardment. That was a grave error.

One of the problems with the bombardment was that it didn’t deal with the German wire effectively enough.

A 60-Pounder heavy field gun at the Somme. Britain overestimated the damage its artillery would do during the initial seven-day bombardment.

Shrapnel was used to take out wire by exploding a shell that rained hundreds of lead balls in the air like a big shotgun cartridge. If you fired enough of those shrapnel shells simultaneously, enough balls would come down to take out the wire.

Unfortunately, some of the fuses that the British  were using were not very good. Survivors have recalled arriving at the uncut German wire and encountering an ammunition dump, where unexploded shrapnel shells were just sitting there in the mud having failed to explode.

Such poor wire cutting meant the men often had to try and cut the way through themselves, which under such battlefield conditions was close to impossible.

British planning was too rigid

In situations where men went into battle and it transpired that German machine gun positions had been missed, you would ideally have an artillery liaison officer on hand to call back artillery fire and take out the enemy machine gun post.

Sadly, such flexibility was not possible on the first day of the Somme. No one could call back artillery fire without the expressed permission of a senior officer.

This damaging inflexibility was another key learning from the Somme. As the war went on artillery men were embedded with infantry units as they went into battle, making it possible to react to situations on the ground.

This article is an edited transcript of The Battle of Vimy Ridge with Paul Reed available on History Hit TV.

In many ways the Battle of Arras is the forgotten battle of the middle of World War One. It was effectively an outcome of the Battle of the Somme because, at the end of the Somme, in November 1916, the Germans realised they couldn’t defend that front indefinitely.

They needed to withdraw because, while neither the British nor the French had broken through, they had pretty much destroyed the German defences. The Germans knew they couldn’t hold them forever.

The Hindenburg Line

Germany looked to pastures new, deciding to build a brand-new system of defences, which they called the Siegfriedstellung, otherwise known as the Hindenburg Line.

The Hindenburg Line was a massive system of specifically prepared defences running from Arras, past Cambrai, down to Saint-Quentin and beyond the Somme.

A map of German troop dispositions on the Siegfriedstellung in the Saint-Quentin area, 22 April 1917.

Deep, wide trenches were dug to stop tanks, which were now very much part of the battlefield, as well as dense belts of barbed wire – in some places 40 metres thick – which they thought were pretty much impregnable. This was supplemented with concreted machine gun positions with overlapping fields of fire as well as concrete mortar positions, infantry shelters and tunnels linking those shelters to the trenches.

It took the winter of 1916/17 to build the new defensive line before, in the early part of the year, the Germans were ready to withdraw to it.

The creation of the Hindenburg Line was the precursor to the Battle of Arras, which commenced in April 1917, after the Germans had withdrawn to their new positions. The conflict was essentially the British Army’s first attempt to breach the Hindenburg Line.

British Western Front commander Field Marshal Douglas Haig is known as the “Butcher of the Somme”. Learn more about him on the History Hit podcast.Listen Now.

The first challenge that faced the British troops was the task of digging in and preparing new positions in the open fields that faced the Hindenburg Line.

But, if you look at any history of the Western Front in the Great War, you’ll see that the British never stood still. The German wire was always the British front line and there was a near constant attempt to attack it and push the Germans back.

This offensive instinct led to the Battle of Arras.

Arras becomes the site of an assault on the Hindenburg Line

Britain’s task was to test out this new German defensive belt and hopefully break through it. Having been forced to follow the Germans to their new Hindenburg Line positions, Britain couldn’t just let them sit there, because they were now dominating the battlefield.

More specifically, the British found themselves facing a battlefield that was dominated by Vimy Ridge.

If you look at any World War One battlefield, very often you’ll find a story of the possession and repossession of high ground. High ground is always important because anyone with an elevated position on a relatively flat landscape, as you find in northern France and Flanders, has an advantage.

Along with Notre Dame de Lorette, Vimy Ridge was one of two bits of high ground at Arras. The French had spent much of 1915 trying to take these two positions and succeeded in taking Notre Dame de Lorette in May of that year.

Artillery played an important role in the Battle of Arras.

At the same time, French colonial troops had made an attempt on Vimy, breaking through the German lines and reaching the ridge. But the troops on either side of them had failed and they were pushed back. The French had a second go in September 1915, but were repelled with heavy losses.

The British inherited the situation in 1916 but the sector remained quiet until, in the spring of 1917, the Hindenburg Line connected to the area around Arras and it became the new battlefront.

In many ways it also proved to be the site of a new type of offensive. The Battle of Arras was the first time that the British Army really began to learn from its experiences on the Somme in 1916.

In the spring of 1917 the British began to utilise tunnels and artillery with more strategic acumen than ever before. Engagements like the Battle of Vimy Ridge, which saw all four divisions of the Canadian Corps successfully storm a near-impregnable position, proved to be landmark Allied victories.

This article is an edited transcript of The Battle of Vimy Ridge with Paul Reed, available on History Hit TV.

The Battle of Vimy Ridge, fought between 9 and 12 April 1917 as part of the Battle of Arras in northern France, is widely regarded as a defining moment for Canada.

Vimy Ridge was the first time the entire Canadian Corps, which was composed of at least 75,000 to 80,000 Canadian soldiers across four divisions, fought together. Essentially, the entire Canadian Army that was on the Western Front at that time all went into action together.

The Taking of Vimy Ridge, Easter Monday, 1917 by Richard Jack.

A defining moment for a young nation

With all four divisions in action, the Vimy Ridge saw men from every part of Canada going into battle at the same time. Canada was a young nation that had heavily relied on immigration.

At the beginning of the Great War, 70 per cent of the men who served in the Canadian Army were born in Britain and would have probably identified themselves as British first.

Vimy Ridge was the beginning of a budding Canadian consciousness.

Until then the Canadian Corps had been used in a piecemeal fashion, division after division, and the reputation of the Canadian soldier had steadily grown. At Vimy that reputation was confirmed.

Vimy Ridge was a dominant position that had had proved incredibly hard to capture. The French had suffered somewhere in the region of a quarter of a million casualties trying to take the position in 1915 while the British had never had a go at it – they’d held the line there simply because it wasn’t on their radar at that point.

The Canadian Corps stormed the ridge, utilising the experience the whole army had developed throughout the previous year and in five days it was captured. It was a great victory for the Canadians, but a victory, as with so many World War One battles, that came at a heavy price – more than 10,000 Canadian casualties.

How did the Canadians storm a ridge that had proved so hard to capture?

Victory at Vimy Ridge owed much to preparation. For one thing, unlike previous efforts the Canadian attack utilised tunnels. A growing appreciation of the value of artillery was also key.

Julian Byng, the British officer who commanded the Canadians at Vimy, had learned the lessons of the previous year and knew how important artillery was. He didn’t just have his own Canadian gunners assisting him in the attack on Vimy Ridge, he also had a huge amount of British artillery loaned to him. Something like a million shells were fired.

Julian Byng had learned the lessons of the previous year and understood how important artillery would be.

One of the very first monuments to go up at Vimy was an artillery monument – a big block with a cross on the top and shells around its base. It commemorates the role of artillery at Vimy Ridge because it was such a crucial aspect to the victory.

Nonetheless, on the ground, no matter how effective your artillery is, no matter how good your planning is, if your troops are not up to the task then you’re probably not going to succeed.

This article is an edited transcript of The Battle of Vimy Ridge with Paul Reed, available on History Hit TV.

Artillery was the king and queen of the battlefield in World War One. Most soldiers were killed or wounded by shell fire. Not by bullets, not by bayonets and not by grenades.

Berlin by Christmas

Artillery was still a blunt instrument at the beginning of the Battle of the Somme in July 1916. Britain hoped that, simply by launching millions of shells at the Germans, you could move forward, occupy, smash ground and break through towns behind the German line by nightfall.

The good old phrase “Berlin by Christmas” comes to mind.

But the Somme proved that wasn’t possible – you had to use artillery in a more intelligent manner. Which is exactly what happened at Arras in 1917.

Britain’s use of artillery at the Somme was relatively unsophisticated.

The changing role of artillery at Arras

The Battle of Arras saw artillery being used as part of the overall army battle plan, rather than as a separate weapon.

Infantry attacks were only as good as the artillery that supported them. The artillery had to be more precise, more direct, and it had to enable the infantry to get to its target without being machine-gunned to bits in No Man’s Land.

This meant using aircraft to identify individual German gun positions, trying to take them out and counter battery fire while effectively creating a wall of fire and supersonic steel that advanced at the same speed as your infantry.

It also entailed the continued bombardment of German positions until the infantry arrived at them. Previously, artillery would fire at a German trench for a certain amount of time before moving on to another target.

Then the infantry would go over the top, walk across No Man’s Land and attack the trench. That typically gave the Germans a window of 10 to 15 minutes to come up out of their positions and set up with weapons that could mow down the British as they approached.

The difference at Arras was that artillery fire was scheduled to continue right up to the moment that British troops arrived at the trench they were attacking.

It was a risky tactic, however, because firing thousands of rounds from an artillery piece is not a precise science. Due to the degradation of the barrel, accuracy eventually started to become compromised, so there was a risk of the shells dropping onto attacking troops, causing “friendly-fire” casualties, as we call them now.

At Arras, artillery fire was scheduled to continue right up to the moment British troops arrived at the trench they were attacking.

But it was a risk worth taking. It meant that, when the barrage lifted, the Germans began to come out of their dugouts and positions thinking they had time to set up and mow down the advancing British infantry, but actually the infantry were already there, having avoided being cut down in the open ground of No Man’s Land.

Such advances in the way that artillery was used over the course of World War One changed the battlefield landscape quite literally.