What were conditions like in the trenches of the first world war?
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... one night and got fixed in the wire - the raid was a failure. Private Jack Sweeney, letter to girlfriend (May 1916) This shows how effective the barbed wire was used. They were very hard to get through and often very tangled. An example of this is the battle of the Somme. The British had planned a very heavy bombardment of the German trenches and had believed that the Germans would all be dead by the end of the bombardment. They marched forward finding all the barbed wire was still standing and the Germans, still alive, launched a heavy attack on the British. The problem with this was they had thought all the barbed wire would have been destroyed but the barbed wire was almost indestructible without wire cutting tools.
"Who told them that artillery fire would pound such wire to pieces, making it possible to get through? Any Tommy could have told them that shell fire lifts wire up and drops it down, often in a worse tangle than before." Arthur Coppard a soldier in the Somme
With many other poor judgements made by the officers many battles were lost without them realising it. At the battle of the Somme, there was an argument ...
