Author: Taylor Downing
Narrator: Gordon Griffin
Unabridged: 12 hr 47 min
Format: Digital Audiobook
Publisher: Hachette UK
Published: 04/07/2016
Paralysis. Stuttering. The 'shakes'. Inability to stand or walk. Temporary blindness or deafness.When strange symptoms like these began appearing in men at Casualty Clearing Stations in 1915, a debate began in army and medical circles as to what it was, what had caused it and what could be done to cure it. But the numbers were never large.Then in July 1916 with the start of the Somme battle the incidence of shell shock rocketed. The high command of the British army began to panic. An increasingly large number of men seemed to have simply lost the will to fight. As entire battalions had to be withdrawn from the front, commanders and military doctors desperately tried to come up with explanations as to what was going wrong. 'Shell shock' - what we would now refer to as battle trauma - was sweeping the Western Front.By the beginning of August 1916, nearly 200,000 British soldiers had been killed or wounded during the first month of fighting along the Somme. Another 300,000 would be lost before the battle was over. But the army always said it could not calculate the exact number of those suffering from shell shock. Re-assessing the official casualty figures, Taylor Downing for the first time comes up with an accurate estimate of the total numbers who were taken out of action by psychological wounds. It is a shocking figure.Taylor Downing's revelatory new book follows units and individuals from signing up to the Pals Battalions of 1914, through to the horrors of their experiences on the Somme which led to the shell shock that, unrelated to weakness or cowardice, left the men unable to continue fighting. He shines a light on the official - and brutal - response to the epidemic, even against those officers and doctors who looked on it sympathetically. It was, they believed, a form of hysteria. It was contagious. And it had to be stopped.Breakdown brings an entirely new perspective to bear on one of the iconic battles of the First World War.
1914. The Origin of The War The industrial revolution, started in the last decades of the eighteenth century, triggered the economic expansion towards the colonies, particularly those in the African continent. Nationalism, imperialism and militarism...
World War I, also known in its time as the “Great War” or the “War to End all Wars,” was an unprecedented holocaust in terms of its sheer scale. Fought by men who hailed from all corners of the globe, it saw millions of soldi...
Love history? Know your stuff with History in an Hour. World War One brought with it the world’s first experience of Total War, involving all of the world’s great powers, polarized between the Triple Entente, lead by Britain, France and ...
World War One was called "the war to end all wars"...it didn't. In this concise recounting of the first world war, we take a look into the reasons for it, the reactions to it, and ultimately the death of those that gave the greatest sacrifice.S...
"Somme. The whole history of the world cannot contain a more ghastly word." - Friedrich Steinbrecher, a German officer. World War I, also known in its time as the “Great War” or the “War to End all Wars”, was an unprecedente...
The First World War was supposed to be the war that ended all wars, hence the name, the Great War. The Great War was off to a bad start from the German perspective. The plan was to fend off France and Russia while focusing on the main purpose, helpi...
President Woodrow Wilson won the 1916 re-election largely because he had thus far kept the US out of World War I. Yet when Germany resumed unrestricted submarine warfare against US vessels in 1917, Wilson approached Congress with a change of heart. ...
The enduring image of World War I is of men stuck in muddy trenches, and of vast armies deadlocked in a fight neither could win. It was a war of barbed wire, poison gas, and horrific losses as officers led their troops on mass charges across No Man&...
This Canadian military history story details the rise of Citizen soldier, Sir Arthur Currie. For 100 years Canada's role in ending WWI sooner than anyone thought possible has gone largely unrecognized. The Canadian Corp on the Western Front in WWI l...