Footsteps of the fallen

Send us Fan Mail For a period of three months between July and September 1916, the Allies and Germans battled for control of the fortified village of Combles, on the northeast of the Somme battlefield. A coordinated Franco-British assault on the 26th of September 1916 finally took the village but at a very heavy price.  In this episode, we look at the battle from a German, British and French persp...

Send us Fan Mail The disease-ridden and inhospitable landscape of Salonika is one of the forgotten campaigns of WW1.   For almost three years soldiers from all over the world fought against each other in increasingly awful conditions. More men became casualties from disease than from enemy action and the Allies had over 160,000 cases of malaria during the campaign.  We hear about the Allies first...

Send us Fan Mail For a period of 8 days in early September 1914, the situation for the Allies was precarious. The Germans were just two days march from the French capital, and the situation looked desperate. Through a combination of poor German communication, some inspired French leadership, and the commandeering of over 600 Parisian taxi cabs, the French and British successfully stopped the Germa...

Send us Fan Mail The "Cold Meat Specialist" or Regimental Burial Officer was a vital cog in the military machine responsible for coordinating the retrieval and burial of the dead and ensuring that their grave locations were accurately marked.  With over 500,000 dead littering the battlefields of the Great War, the task was nothing short of monumental. How did the Army manage casualties o...

Send us Fan Mail For a period of six weeks in the summer of 1916, the British and Germans battled for control of the small but strategically important village of Guillemont.. The capture of the village was the story of the men from the south and west of Ireland, men from Limerick, Connaught, and Munster who successfully drove the Germans out, albeit at great personal cost.  Over 15,000 men died in...

Send us Fan Mail The 14th Battalion of the Australian Imperial Forces was known as "Jacka's Mob" after their officer, the  profane, insubordinate, and much-loved larrikin Albert Jacka, a dairy farmer's son from Victoria. A man more inclined to use his fists than his reasoning to solve a problem, Jacka would surely have been promoted higher in the ranks than he was, were it not...

Send us Fan Mail In the dark waters of the Atlantic, the German U-Boat fleet was taking a monstrous toll on Allied merchant shipping, to the extent that Admiral Jellicoe feared Britain would cease to exist as a fighting force unless something was done to stop the U-boat menace. Spurred on by the sinking of the Lusitania in May 1915 the Royal Navy introduced a new weapon to fight against German sub...

Send us Fan Mail On the afternoon of the 14th April 1917 men of the 1st Essex and the Newfoundland Regiment were given the unenviable task of attacking and holding Infantry Hill, just to the east of the small but strategically vital village of Monchy le Preux. By mid-morning, not a single man remained unwounded to the east of Monchy and men were being captured in their hundreds by the rapidly adva...

Send us Fan Mail In June 1916, Lord Kitchener of Khartoum was on board HMS Hampshire, heading for Archangel in Russia for top-secret talks. About 1 mile from the Orkney Islands, HMS Hampshire exploded and sank to the bottom of the sea, killing 737 of the 749 souls on board, including Kitchener himself.  For the Great War generation, this was their 9/11 or Kennedy assassination. There was a genuine...

Send us Fan Mail Our latest episode begins in Couin military cemetery where a top hat and white gloves marks the final resting place of Edwardian theatre's greatest dandy, Basil Radford, or as he was more commonly known Gilbert the Filbert.  Before his untimely death on the Somme, Radford was one of a huge number of entertainers and theatre stars who served in the Great War and used their tal...

Send us Fan Mail In this second episode about the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing, it's an absolute pleasure to sit down and chat with Georgia Brusby, who served as an Intern for the Commonwealth War Graves Commission at Thiepval through the summer and autumn of 2019. Her passion and enthusiasm for history and the Memorial come through as we talk about the importance of remembrance, some of...

Send us Fan Mail In this first episode of a two-part podcast, we visit the largest British war memorial in the world, Sir Edwin Lutyen's geometric masterpiece, the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing. Bearing the names of over 72,000 British and South African soldiers who died on the Somme and have no known grave, the memorial stands as a testament to the volunteer Army who responded to Lord Kit...

Send us Fan Mail On the 29th of September 1918, men from the Staffordshire Brigade successfully smashed through the German lines in the most heavily defended area of the Western Front, around the canal at Ricqueval. It was a remarkable success for a Brigade so unfairly criticised for its actions at Gommecourt in 1916 and was a fine example of planning, coordination, and derring-do.  The battle did...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, we visit the famously preserved trenches at Sanctuary Wood near Ypres.  This remarkable landscape of trenches and dugouts is a must-see for any battlefield visitor.  The museum attached to the cafe contains a remarkable and often chilling set of stereo-scope images that show the Great War in a level of violent detail very rarely seen. We examine the work of a Roya...

Send us Fan Mail In this special episode of Trench Talk, I have the pleasure of sitting down with Belgian archaeologist Simon Verdegem and talking about his career specializing in the excavation of WW1 sites.  We talk about his introduction to archaeology and the poignant discovery of the remains of a New Zealand soldier in excavations in Messines.  We look at the hugely successful Dig Hill 80 pro...

Send us Fan Mail In January 1917, a  German encrypted message was intercepted by a small relay station in Cornwall and passed to the secretive world of the code breakers inhabiting the dingy Room 40 in the Admiralty building in London's Whitehall. In the room were some of the finest minds in England, led by the enigmatic and charismatic Oxbridge scholar Albert "Dilly" Knox.  The tea...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, we begin our journey through the footsteps of the fallen in Brighton, where one Autumn afternoon in 1915 the Constabulary were called to a disturbance on the seafront, following the appearance of a large collection of saber-wielding men. On arrival, however, they found calm, with the genteel folk of Brighton swapping cigarettes for chapatis with the Indian soldier...

Send us Fan Mail In our latest episode, we walk the battlefield in one of the lesser-known killing fields of the Somme, Trones Wood. While diminutive in size, the wood was a fearsome obstacle, whose capture was essential for the wider assualts planned on the Somme front, starting on the 14th July. For a period of five days, the British and Germans fought brutally for control of the wood, and it wa...

Send us Fan Mail On the 31st October 1914, men of the 2nd Battalion the Worcestershire Regiment fought one of the greatest counter attack actions in British military history, in an afternoon of brutal close quarters, hand to hand combat against the Germans, in the small Belgian village of Gheluvelt. If the Germans had taken Gheluvelt, nothing stood between them and the city of Ypres, and then the...

Send us Fan Mail In our latest episode, it's a real pleasure to sit down with the CEO and Trustee of the Western Front Way project, Rory Forsyth. The project is a charitable foundation dedicated to installing a walking and cycling path that follows the line of the Western Front, from Nieuport on the Belgian coast to Pfetterhouse on the Swiss border; the 1000km path is a joint collaboration be...

Send us Fan Mail On the 6th July 1915, hundreds of British soldiers left their trenches near the small Belgian village of Boesinghe in an attack against the German lines. Men from the Hampshire Regiment were tasked with the unenviable task of attacking a German strongpoint called Fortin 17. Over 600 men were killed that day, and thousands wounded.  Almost 100 years later a team of amateur Belgian...

Send us Fan Mail Shortly after the first German gas attack at Ypres in April 1915, rumours began circulating among the troops that the body of a Canadian soldier had been found crucified on the door of a barn, his body pierced by eight German bayonets. The crucified soldier remains one of the great legends of the Great War. Did it really happen, who was he, did his family know? In this episode we...

Send us Fan Mail On the 31st July 1917, the third battle of Ypres, or the Battle of Passchendaele as it is more commonly known began.  Near the small village of Boesinghe, men of the Welsh division went into action at 3.50 am with the objective of capturing the hamlet ofPilckem.  As they ran the gauntlet of machine guns from Wood 15 and Artillery Wood, they fought up the ridge and by 9.30 am had c...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode we hear the remarkable stories of two exceptional men, neither of whom fired a shot in anger during the Great War, but through selflessness, humility and bravery have entered into history. We meet the Reverend Geoffrey Studdart Kennedy, better known by his nickname of Woodbine Willie, a man whose sermons were so legendary he was forced to hold up to 10 services on...

Send us Fan Mail On the evening of the 15th May 1915, men from the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers left their trenches and crawled into No Mans Land in preparation for a massive attack against the Germans, just to the east of the tiny village of Festubert.  As the men lay in No Mans Land surrounded by the bodies of the dead who had been killed in a fighting a week earlier, they waited for zero hour....