The Battle Of Somme
General Douglas Haig, the British commander, believed the Allied forces could break through the German lines at a location of the Somme river. For two weeks before the battle of Somme began, Allied artillery bombarded the German line along a 45km front to destroy the German trenches and the barbed wire, but the tactic failed. When British and Canadian troops started moving across no-man's land on July 1st 1916, they found the barbed wire intact and the Germans waiting with machine guns loaded. When the battle ended in November 1916, the allies had suffered about 650, 000 causalities to gain just 545 square kilometres of land.