The battle of the Somme is the most famous battle of World War I in the English-speaking world. This wide-ranging collection of articles sheds new light on this famous story, examining it from all angles.
Dr Matthias Strohn FRHistS was educated at the universities of Münster (Germany) and Oxford. He has lectured at Oxford University and the German Staff College (Führungsakademie der Bundeswehr).
From 2006 until 2016 he worked as a Senior Lecturer in the Department of War Studies at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. He is currently on secondment to the British Army's think tank, the Centre for Historical Analysis and Conflict Research in Camberley. In addition, he is a Reader at the Humanities Research Centre at the University of Buckingham where he works in the areas of Military History and War Studies. He holds a commission in the German Army and is a member of the military attaché reserve, having served on the defence attaché staffs in London, Paris, and Madrid.
He has published widely on 20th-century German and European military history and is an expert on the German Army in World War I and the inter-war period. He has advised British and German government bodies on the World War I centenary commemorations.
Hew Strachan is Chichele Professor of the History of War at the University of Oxford, UK
Jonathan Krause is a Research Fellow at the University of Oxford working on the ARHC-funded project Rebellion and Mobilisation in French and German colonies, 1914-1918. This project is a collaboration with scholars from France, the US and UK examining the widespread unrest that wracked France's overseas colonies during the First World War, with a comparative look at German colonies. It seeks to expand our understanding of the political, social, cultural and geographic boundaries of the First World War, whilst also repositioning the war as a crucial moment in the long struggle for decolonisation. Jonathan is the winner of a 2014 Moncado Prize for his article 'The French Attack on Vimy Ridge, Spring 1915' (Journal of Military History, 2013), author of Early Trench Tactics in the French Army: the Second Battle of Artois, May-June 1915 (Ashgate, 2013) and editor of The Greater War: other combatants and other fronts, 1914-1918 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).