One of the unique aspects of World War I was simply the huge scale of the battles, with numbers of soldiers, sailors, and even airmen that the world had not seen in a long time. Some of the Roman battles back in the day involved over 100,000 men on each side. Way back in episode 8, on the Persian Wars, I mentioned that the Persian army under King Xerxes might have had as many as a million men. But World War I dwarfed even this. There were more than 5 million men on each side over the course of the war, and that was only on the western front, not counting the several million more involved on the eastern front and in other parts of the world.
We’re going to look at several of these big battles today, including the bloodiest one of the war, the Battle of the Somme, which is going to feature the single bloodiest day of the war, and is one of the deadliest battles in human history. In fact, if it wasn’t for a couple of battles between Germany and the Soviet Union in World War II, the Battle of the Somme would be the deadliest, bloodiest battle in all of human history.
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