FIRST DAY OF THE SOMME - Published for the hundredth anniversary of the Battle of the Somme - Britain’s worst-ever military disaster

Published for the hundredth anniversary of the Battle of the Somme on

1 July 2016, a major international and revisionist history from a New Zealand author

FIRST DAY OF THE SOMME

The complete account of Britain’s worst-ever military disaster

By Andrew Macdonald

 It took several million bullets and roughly an hour to destroy General Sir Douglas Haig's grand plans for the First Day of the Somme, 1 July 1916. By day’s end 19,240 British soldiers were dead, crumpled khaki bundles scattered across pasture studded with the scarlet of poppies and smouldering shell holes. A further 35,493 were wounded.

This single sunny day remains Britain's worst-ever military disaster, both numerically and statistically more deadly than the infamous charge of the Light Brigade at Balaklava in 1854. Responsibility lay with hundreds of German machineguns and scores of artillery batteries waiting silently to deal death to the long-anticipated attack.

Now, for the first time in 100 years, New Zealand author and military historian Andrew Macdonald brings both the British and German stories of this singularly bloody day together in his major new international book, First Day of the Somme: The complete account of Britain’s worst-ever military disaster.  

While laying the blame for the butchery squarely on widespread British command failure, he also compellingly shows the outcome was a triumph of German discipline, planning and tactics, with German commanders mostly outclassing their opposite numbers.

The First Day of the Somme is the first-ever balanced and top-to-bottom account of that tragic day as told from both British and German perspectives. It is a major contribution to World War I history, and an epic story of courage, misery and endurance in its own right.

FIRST DAY OF THE SOMME

The complete account of Britain’s worst-ever military disaster

By Andrew Macdonald

NZ RRP $39.99  |  PUBLICATION DATE 1 APRIL 2016  |  HarperCollins Publishers NZ

                                                                                                                                     

About the author

Andrew Macdonald is a New Zealand author and military historian now living in London. He holds a PhD (University of London) in military history, which he completed while working as a Reuters correspondent.  He works full time as a writer, and has penned two other books, On My Way to the Somme: New Zealanders and the Bloody Offensive of 1916 and Passchendaele: The Anatomy of a Tragedy, both published by HarperCollins to critical acclaim.

First Day of the Somme has been a life-time in the making for Macdonald. This grim day, along with the remainder of the four-and-a-half-month offensive, have captivated the kiwi since first reading about them as a teenager, when he began interviewing veterans of WW1.

“Writing a battle of this scale is the most testing of ordeals given the sheer volume of moving parts. So it was that I spent hundreds if not thousands of hours ferreting out information, pouring over almost 100-year-old documents, all of this supplemented with frequent visits to the battlefield to add on-the-ground context. This was a massive