Footsteps of the fallen

Send us Fan Mail Standing at the side of the main road from Bethune to Armentieres, the Le Touret Memorial commemorates over 13,400 men who died on this part of the battlefield between October 1914 and September 1915. In our latest podcast, we discover the stories of the men who are commemorated here including a Private who wasn't, the distant relative of the founder of Georgian England'...

Send us Fan Mail In our latest podcast, we visit the hulking mass of Plugstreet Wood and look at the actions of December 1914 around the German strongpoint known as The Birdcage. Formed of trenches captured from the Worcestershire Regiment and three ruined farm buildings, it was a show-stopper for the men of the Rifle Brigade, Somerset LI and Hampshire Regiment who paid a heavy toll in trying to c...

Send us Fan Mail In this latest episode of the podcast, we look at bravery on the battlefield through the stories of six remarkable men. Between them, they won 4 Victoria Crosses, 4 Distinguished Service Orders, 8 Military Crosses, 6 Military Medals, 2 Distinguished Conduct Medals, and 2 Distinguished Flying Crosses, and were mentioned in despatches no less than 17 times. What does bravery on a ba...

Send us Fan Mail On the 9th May 1915, the British launched an attack on the billiard table flat fields of Artois against the Aubers Ridge.  What was supposed to be a gentle stroll across the Artois countryside,  turned into one of the great military disasters the British suffered during the Great War. As night fell, nearly 11,000 men lay dead or wounded, and the ridge remained firmly in German&apo...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, it's a real pleasure to be joined by the American writer and former History professor, William Stroock. William's historical interests are many, but his book on the WW1 American general John J "Blackjack" Pershing is a fascinating insight into one of the Great War's most complex and colourful characters. We talk about Pershing's early...

Send us Fan Mail During the Great War over 16,000 men registered as Conscientious Objectors; men whose conscience wouldn't allow them to take the life of another human.  Ridiculed in the press, humiliated by the Government, and shunned by friends and neighbours, the life of a CO was a lonely one.  An organisation aimed at helping those who objected to war was set up, the No-Conscription Fello...

Send us Fan Mail The Gallipoli campaign presents military historians with some of the great "what-ifs" of Great War history, and perhaps nowhere more so than the fighting around Gully Ravine in June 1915. The ravine was a barren strip of land running from the Aegean to within touching distance of the town of Krithia. Flanked by tall spurs on either side, Gully Spur to the North and Fir T...

Send us Fan Mail 1917 was a difficult year for the Allied high command.  With the British and the French suffering from the exertions of the Somme and Verdun, the French army was in a state of mutiny on the Chemin des Dames,  and the British were bogged down in the hell of Passchendaele. The Spring of 1918 saw the British on the defensive around the city of St Quentin, in a series of eight heavily...

Send us Fan Mail In today's podcast we visit one of the forgotten battlefields of the Great War, the tiny farming village of Epehy.  While small in size, it proved a formidable obstacle to be captured as the Allies advanced towards the Hindenburg Line. We look at the origins of the Hindenburg Line and the fighting for villages and copses that the British had to undertake in order to get near...

Send us Fan Mail In our latest episode we visit a group of cemeteries that were attached to the Casualty Clearing Stations and discover the stories of some of the men and women who lie buried within them. Our journey begins at Dozinghem, Bandaghem, and Mendinghem cemeteries in Belgium, where we hear the personal recollections of an American surgeon, and meet a VC winner who was a Lt. Col aged only...

Send us Fan Mail In today's podcast, we visit the battlefields of Artois, the scene of so much fighting during the spring and summer of 1915.  It's a battlefield region that provides so much for the battlefield tourist in a very small place.  But, if you haven't visited the battlefields of Artois and only have one day in which to visit some of the key sites, where should you go and...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to our latest podcast, which was recorded live on the streets of London.  In this episode, we travel around the capital to discover the stories behind six memorials, all of which have a connection to the Great War. Some of them are very well known, some of them less so, but they each tell a story of this tumultuous period of social and military history. Please do check out...

Send us Fan Mail The Great War saw casualties on an industrial scale. The changing face of warfare placed demands on the medical profession like no conflict before or since.  How did medicine adapt to cope with the demands of Great War casualties? We begin at Lijssenthoek Cemetery at the grave of Nurse Nellie Spindler who was killed by shell fire while working at a CCS near Brandhoek, and is the o...

Send us Fan Mail In our latest episode of Trench Talk it's a real pleasure to be joined by illustrator Tim Godden ( http://www.timgodden.co.uk ) Tim is an artist and illustrator with an instantly recognisable style of cartoon drawings illustrating scenes of life in the trenches and cemeteries of the Great War.  In this wide ranging chat we talk about his career as an artist, his unique style...

Send us Fan Mail In today's podcast, we visit Croisilles cemetery near Arras to discover the personal stories of some of the men who lie within. Many of the men who lie dead in the cemetery were killed in the actions against the formidable German strongpoint of Tunnel Trench which ran just to the east of the village.  We look at the Sassoon poem "The Rear-guard" which documents his...

Send us Fan Mail In today's podcast, we make a welcome return to the battlefields of Gallipoli and look at the fighting at Suvla.  It was a disaster that spelled the end of a disastrous campaign. Ian Hamilton, the commander of the British Mediterranean Force had been dealt a bad hand by the British Government.  Short of trained soldiers and supplies, and forced to fight on a battlefield defen...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to our first podcast of 2023! In today's podcast, we are off to Carnoy on the Somme, a farming hamlet between Mametz and Montauban that was the scene of terrific fighting on the 1st of July 1916. Dominated by the massive Pommiers Redoubt, this area of the front line was one of the few successes for the British that fateful day. We meet Captain Wilfred "Billy&quot...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to our Christmas episode of Footsteps of the Fallen. The Christmas Truce has often been portrayed as a mass act of rebellion by soldiers tired of fighting, who wilfully disobeyed the instructions of senior officers not to fraternise with the enemy.  The commander of II Corps issued an order on the 5th of December 1914 forbidding any form of ceasefire or armistice with the...

Send us Fan Mail In this latest podcast, we look at the fighting for a small but heavily defended German strongpoint on the Somme battlefield, which proved to be one of the only successes for the British in this sector on the 1st of July 1916, the Leipzig Redoubt. We begin by looking at John Masefield whose seminal work The Old Front Line provided a remarkable view of the Somme battlefields and de...

Send us Fan Mail In this latest episode of Trench Talk, it's a real pleasure to be joined by the writer Sarah Wearne, whose 30-year odyssey to study the epitaphs of the Great War culminated in the publication of three collections of epitaphs, The Somme, Passchendaele, and The Last Hundred Days. In this wide-ranging chat we talk about Helen's quest to track down some of the more unusual a...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome back to Season 5 of the podcast! In this first episode, we meet five remarkable men, Maurice Dease, Hugo Throssell, Noel Chavasse, Phillip Konowal, and Martin Doyle.  They all came from very different backgrounds, different countries, and different regiments; their lives took very different paths to each other, but each of them was awarded a Victoria Cross (in Chavasse&apo...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to our 100th podcast! In today's episode, we look at the trenches that formed the 450 miles of the Western Front, running from the Swiss border to the Belgian coast. We look at how trenches were designed, and where the naming patterns came from.  We hear the macabre reasoning behind Woman Trench, learn about the role of the Sanitary Corporal and discover how a German...

Send us Fan Mail This episode looks at the fighting around Touvent Farm, a critical strong point on what was to become the Somme battlefields.  For seven days in June 1915, French infantry fought hand-to-hand with fanatical German defenders to capture this important strongpoint. We begin by looking at the French army and its evolution during the Great War.  Consisting largely of conscripted men, o...

Send us Fan Mail Apologies for the sound issues in this episode, it was recorded online and sadly the Internet connection was misbehaving. The sound is not of the usual standard, but this was out of my control. In our latest episode of Trench Talk we are joined by Richard Dunning MBE, the owner of the Lochnagar Crater at La Boiselle.  In this wide-ranging chat we talk about how reading a paperback...

Send us Fan Mail In today's podcast, we look at the remarkable story of Tank F41 "Fray Bentos"  which took part in an attack on the heavily defended German lines near Hill 35 just outside Zonnebeke in August 1917. The attack failed but for three days and nights, Fray Bentos and its crew performed one of the greatest defensive actions of the Great War. Our journey begins at Oxford Ro...