Why Is Source B Important

The format of Source B is very different to that of Source A and it also agrees with the statement. Source B is a table showing the losses of the British on the first day of the battle. The figures presented on the table show that more soldiers were killed/wounded/missing/taken as prisoners on the first day than officers. This is because firstly there were fewer officers to start with but also because officers usually gave directions and stayed behind the frontline instead of going out to fight. Therefore, I believe this to be fairly accurate. The huge numbers of deaths, for example 18247 soldiers killed/died of wounds, in particular indicates that the first day was a failure and thus it agrees to an extent with that statement. This source
The origin of this source is not given to use and nor is the purpose. However this type of information was probably given to inform others of the ongoing incidents and also to see that drastic changes needed to be made. For this reason, I think that the source is accurate and dependable as in order for the country to progress, the statistics that were passed on had to be feasible. This source is useful in this examination concerning the statement as it allows us to see the initial death toll so that we can assess if the rest of the battle was a success as well. This source only has data from the first day and this limits what we can conclude about the whole battle being disastrous. Though we cannot deny that the start of the battle was catastrophic, it is illogical to deduce that the whole event was a failure. The source is useful in part as it gives statistics yet there are limitations when we are considering a single day out of five
The source is a short excerpt from some a piece of writing about the first day. Despite the catastrophic events of day one (with so man deaths as noted in Source B) the writer of this source has written about it from a different perspective than what we are used to. The extract focuses on the heavy artillery bombardment of the German trenches with constant attacks of ammunition. The negative impacts on Britain are not really mentioned in this section however the author does talk about the ‘immediate effect on the Germans’ and how it caused a ‘transfer of 60 heavy guns’ and also the movement of ‘two infantry divisions from Verdun to the Somme’. This shows some success as it is now known that this battle was mainly a way to free up French soldiers in Verdun and to distract the Germans from Verdun to stop their motive which was to ‘bleed France white’. This means that Germans wanted to kill as many of the French as possible so that their force became too weak and had to surrender. The colour white represents surrendering and to bleed them referred to killing the soldiers. However, as aforementioned, the writer does not talk about how the Germans had hidden in dugouts and then later came out with machine guns after British soldiers went over the top, thinking that they had killed the Germans. This piece of writing was produced by a modern historian in 1994. Even though it was written almost eighty years after the Battle of the Somme, this