Original subtitles

July 1st, 1916, 7.30 a.m.

For thousands of British soldiers, it's zero hour.

They'd been waiting for this moment for months.

After a devastating artillery bombardment of the German positions, the

soldiers had been told to expect only minimal resistance.

The huge attack was supposed to overwhelm the Germans.

Instead, it's a catastrophe of unprecedented proportions.

In just one day, nearly 60,000 British soldiers are killed or wounded.

It's the bloodiest day in the history of the British Army.

Why was the first day of the Battle of the Somme such a disaster?

By 1916, the western front of World War I has bogged down into trench warfare.

Front lines, demarked by trenches and barbed wire, run across the entire

continent from the Mediterranean to the North Sea.

It's a stalemate, but time is running out.

Britain's French allies are under massive German pressure.

and the key strategic town of Verdun could fall if something's not done soon.

The area chosen for an attack is the region of open country known as the

Somme.

The whole idea of the Battle of the Somme in 1916 is to have a good kick at

the Germans, get the Germans' attention, force the Germans to turn their combat

power away from Verdun.

to face a British attack, and that will allow the French to take a deep breath,

sort themselves out, and start fighting properly again.

British commanders prepared an enormous force for the Somme offensive.

On the first day alone, 150,000 British infantry took part.

But most important of all, the attack was preceded by an overwhelming

artillery bombardment of the 70,000 German troops entrenched there.

Unprecedented in scale, the barrage involved more than 50,000 British

artillerymen and almost 1,400 guns.

For seven days and nights, the enemy defenses were pounded.

The whole concept, of infantry operations was just to occupy ground

that had been already destroyed for you by the guns

but when british troops went over the

top to attack they were horrified at what they found the german defences

still intact

Somehow the much-vaunted bombardment had failed.

But why?

Woolwich Arsenal in London was where the Royal Artillery's ammunition was stored

prior to the Somme.

Today it houses the regiment's World War I archive.

Many documents relating to the Somme barrage still remain.

One is the actual fire plan.

It contains details of every British gun and the German positions it was to fire

at.

The document underlines the true scale of the bombardment, the largest that had

ever been attempted by the British artillery.

Yet they were not equipped for such a major operation.

Once trench warfare had developed in 1914, the main problem that faced the

British artillery was a lack of heavy guns.

They prepared for a war of manoeuvre using light field guns, which they hoped

would be over quickly.

And what they found was tantamount to siege warfare.

So first they had to make new guns, many of which were actually converted from

the coast batteries around the ports in the United Kingdom.

The British artillery's massed firepower seemed impressive, but over an area

covering 5,000 yards of German front line, it was stretched to the limit.

The British also had problems with their artillery crews.

only three of the divisions that took part in the assault on the first day of

the song were made up of regular troops and some of those had come from

gallipoli where they had already suffered a number of casualties the

majority of the attacking divisions were made up of new army gunners and there

was considerable evidence that they were not as thoroughly trained as their pre

-war regular counterparts had been yet even with these problems such a huge

artillery barrage should have done great damage

90 years on, clues to what went wrong still litter the Somme battlefields.

Here at Mametz, we've got an example of what can be found still on the Somme,

and these are pretty dangerous live munitions.

The vast majority of them are British. We can see here live British mills

bombs, grenades.

This thing here.

This is a mortar bomb and they're notoriously dangerous things to handle.

The fact that so many unexploded munitions still remain suggests that the

British artillery were let down by their own suppliers.

They'd only had limited stocks at the outbreak of war because they anticipated

a relatively short war.

and British industry was just not geared up to produce ammunition in the

quantities or to the standards which were necessary, particularly for

sensitive fuses.

It's now estimated that more than a third of all British shells fired on the

Somme failed to explode.

In 1916, British industry was still gearing up to the demands of a world

war.

For quite a long time, and really right up until mid-16, late 16, British

munitions are not good.

Too many shells are dead, too much of the ammunition doesn't work, too many of

the grenades don't go off. Now, this wasn't sabotage or stupidity or

idleness. It was simply that we're using unskilled labour to try and make

something that requires an awful lot of skill.

Defective ammunition, insufficiently trained crews, and too few heavy guns

meant that British artillery had serious shortcomings.

Nevertheless, during the seven-day bombardment, more than one and a half

million shells were fired at the enemy lines.

Yet the attacks on day one were still a disaster for the British.

Almost every unit that attacked on July 1st reported the same problem.

The guns had failed to clear away through the most effective component of

the German defenses.

Frontline barbed wire on the Western Front is man-killer barbed wire. The

barbs are much, much longer. The space between the barbs is much, much less.

And what it's designed to do is, of course, not kill you. It's designed to

ensnare your clothing, where you get stuck in the barbed wire, and then the

machine guns get a chance to cut you in half.

Arranged in thick belts a few yards in front of the German trenches, the wire

was a fearsome obstacle.

The British artillery chose air bursting shrapnel shells for the task of

destroying the wire.

On a test range in England, Lieutenant Colonel Simon West sets out to simulate

the effect of shrapnel on barbed wire.

And what we've done here is set up a representative section of barbed wire.

And what we're going to do is to fire a shrapnel shell into it and see what

damage that causes.

Modern wire is used in place of original German barbed wire.

Shrapnel shell we've put up on the top of a pole here to represent the position

in which the shell operated as an airburst shell to throw the shrapnel

down onto the ground.

But shells had to be timed to explode at exactly the right height.

There was very little margin for error.

As you can see on this cutaway from an original shrapnel shell, you've got a

time fuse at the top. When that initiates, it sends a flash down this

central tube to the gunpowder charge which sits in the base.

And it's that gunpowder charge, as it blows, it pushes that plate up and all

these shrapnel balls are thrown forward of the shell.

Now what we've done is reconstruct something similar here, an electrically

initiated black powder charge at the bottom.

And I'm now going to fill up with these lead balls the remainder of the shell to

represent the same effect that we would have got originally.

Three, two, one, fire.

Well, the wire's looking pretty intact.

I can't actually see any damage to the wire at all, but I can begin to see

holes now in the ground where the shrapnel's been fired down.

Of course, that's just the effect that you want when you're shooting a

personnel in the open, but no obvious damage to the wire.

Now Simon simulates what could have happened if the gunners timed their

shells incorrectly and fused them too long, and they exploded not above the

wire, but in the ground beneath it.

In terms of damage to the wire, well, there's a bit of smoke blackening, but

still none of it's cut.

Even under ideal test conditions, using modern wire, less formidable than World

War I German wire, shrapnel has so far inflicted little or no damage.

Just what kind of weapon would it have taken to smash the German defenses?

The attacks on the first day of the Somme were a disaster.

The British artillery failed to smash the German barbed wire defenses.

Simon West demonstrated that the problem did not lie with the poorly trained

gunners, but with the shrapnel they were firing.

But the British artillery could have fired other types of ammunition.

The other type of shell that should have been available to the 18-pounder was the

high explosive shell.

And what we've done here is recreated that, cast steel body filled with high

explosive, and I'm going to put that in the ground to act as if it was going off

on point detonation, and we'll see what damage that does to the wire.

Three, two, one, fire.

The contrast with shrapnel is striking

Well

what we can see is that the high explosive has caused a completely

different effect to the shrapnel There's a lot more energy in that shell the

chemical energy and the high explosive has allowed far more damage to be

created and what we've got is pieces of wire sliced probably by fragments of the

shell casing, a crater, and a huge amount of lift,

and a sort of cutting and compressing to reduce the obstacle as a whole.

Barbed wire damaged in this way would have been far less of an obstacle to

attacking troops.

It seems the British artillery used the wrong ammunition for the job.

The fault for this poor decision lies with British military planners.

They had expected fast-moving battles in open terrain, and so had stockpiled

shrapnel.

There were no such supplies of high explosive.

It was a miscalculation that would cost British infantrymen dearly.

Air-bursting shrapnel was horribly effective against people.

So why did the British artillery barrage not cause more casualties among German

troops sheltering in their trenches?

At the outbreak of war, head protection was thought unnecessary.

But by 1916 and the Somme, soldiers on both sides wore helmets.

But the German Stahlhelm, or steel helmet, was particularly effective.

When the German army decides that in modern warfare it's important to have

good head protection, they get some researchers out there, people we'd call

human factors engineers today, and they figured out what parts of the head and

neck do you really have to protect.

And then the German research people go out and design a helmet that is going to

protect every German soldier from the likely threats to his life.

Ivan Williams has developed body armor for the British police.

He's studied the German Stahlhelm and believes that producing its deep

protective curves was a major achievement.

The depth of the German helmet at the time apparently was incredible.

To actually produce a helmet, mass produce a helmet of that shape was very

advanced. And no one in Allied forces knew how they did it.

He believes that to make a hardened steel helmet without it thinning or

cracking, the Germans used a special process, unknown at the time in Britain

and France.

Today, it's called progressive steel tooling.

At Wolverhampton University in central England, he sets out to demonstrate the

process.

Williams first creates a mold from an original World War I Stahlhelm.

It's into this concave former that the metal would have been pressed.

Instead of sheet steel, he uses plastic, and a vacuum former replicates the

effect of a steel pressing machine.

First, he shows what would have happened with the standard British or French

technique of using just a single quick pressing.

Cutting the helmet in two, Williams measures its thickness.

This is a cut-through section of a plastic helmet we just pulled.

And you can see the difference in thickness.

The material there is 1.2 per millimetre, and when it's stretched to

the top of the helmet, it's down to 0.2.

So that would be useless, because the metal's been stretched in one go, right

to the top of the helmet.

In fact, to get that far, by that time it would have split or cracked.

Now William simulates the German process.

The sheet is vacuum-formed, just as before.

But this time, while the plastic is still hot, he uses a press tool to ease

the material down into the former.

The Germans included as many as 12 repeats of this tool.

each time manipulating the hot metal progressively deeper.

There's a significant difference between the two methods.

If you look at this one, it starts off at 1.5 and then

at the crown it's down to 1 mm.

It's hardly lost any thickness at all.

And so that's sort of forming.

is the sort of forming the Germans achieved with their press tooling.

Advanced industrial techniques like this gave German soldiers in open trenches

more protection against shrapnel.

But as well as helmets, the Germans had an even more effective defense against

the British artillery.

The scars of trenches have today disappeared from the rolling French

countryside.

On the first day of the Somme, British shell fire failed to destroy not only

the barbed wire, but also the 70,000 German defenders.

The reason was that for two years, the enemy soldiers had been hard at work.

The Germans have had since 1914 to develop some very sophisticated and

really formidable defense positions.

The Germans constructed large numbers of deep dugouts in which to shelter their

soldiers. Often 30 feet deep and reinforced with timber or even concrete,

the dugouts were virtually bomb-proof.

But it's not just that they had time to build them.

Military geologist Peter Doyle has examined every inch of the Somme front

line and its network of dugouts and trenches.

He's convinced that one reason for the effectiveness of the German trench

system was the way their engineers exploited the natural chalk landscape.

We're at Beaumont Hamel on the Somme, and this is really a supreme example of

the way in which terrain had a major role to play in this battle.

This is called Wye Ravine.

It's a natural ravine cut into the chalk soil of the Somme.

And the important thing about this is that the Germans were able to build it

into their trench fortifications and it became in itself another trench, a very

natural, supremely strong trench line.

Just 100 yards from the British front line, the Germans incorporated this

natural feature into a hive of underground shelters.

Protected from artillery by the steep slopes, the Germans constructed whole

galleries of reinforced dugouts.

There was room for an entire German battalion, almost a thousand men, right

under the noses of the unsuspecting British troops.

Later in the war, when British troops did take German bunkers, they were

astonished by what they found.

When they broke through and took the German frontline trenches, they were

literally horrified to find that deep beneath the lines there were these

dugouts. And they found these home comforts. They found wine bottles,

bread, things lying around, coffee that had been brewed. And they were thinking,

well, there was no way that we could have taken the line with these trenches,

these dugouts intact like this.

By comparison, the British troops' own trenches and dugouts seemed Spartan,

even haphazard.

Doyle believes they were designed for a different purpose than the German

defenses.

It's incredible now to think that during the First World War, and particularly

during the first stage, the British Army literally didn't want to have their men

underground for fear that they'd get soft, that they'd think it was a cushy

number, that they wouldn't want to come out of dugouts and go over the top.

The difference in approach, and the Germans, of course, knew that by

protecting their men, by giving them comfort underground, meant that when

they came out, they were ready to face the onslaught.

Protected by deep dugouts, the majority of German troops survived the heavy

bombardment. When the British infantry attack came, they were ready.

But they were still heavily outnumbered by 150,000 British infantrymen who had

gone over the top at 7.30 that morning.

So this should still have been more than a match for the Germans.

The way this wave of Allied infantrymen were to overwhelm the enemy had been

meticulously planned.

When the senior British commanders are trying to sort out how you're going to

battalions, groups of five to eight hundred soldiers across no man's land,

they see it as being an exercise in traffic control.

And it had become clear early in the war that if you don't exercise a certain

amount of traffic control, everything goes to hell in a handbasket in no man's

land and nothing gets done.

The opposing front lines were made up of not just one, but several fire trenches

running parallel to one another up to 150 yards apart.

The plan was for the first wave of British troops to advance from their

frontline trench.

Subsequent waves would then move up to the frontline along communication

trenches, which provided the vital links between the main fire trenches.

These communication trenches were the lifeline for the British soldiers as

they staggered forward to the front lines.

Quite often they'd be bringing up their rations, reserves would be coming along

here and in the opposite direction wounded.

The theory was that this system would allow casualties to be moved back while

ammunition and supplies moved forward with the attacking waves.

But on day one of the Somme, when the attack was only two hours old, the

system began to break down moving forward hundreds of thousands of

men to the front lines is of course extremely complex the best of times but

when you're moving them forward in trenches they've never been in and these

are these trenches are rabbit warrens of communication trenches of rearward

defenses of midline defenses and then front line defenses troops physically

get lost troops have no idea where they're going parties wander off into

the wrong trench system and units get mixed up It's a communication system.

It's a living, breathing military system that is prone to breakdown.

But troops getting lost was not the main problem that day.

Contrary to the plan, the Germans weren't wiped out by the artillery

barrage. German machine guns inflicted terrible casualties on the advancing

British.

Now thousands of wounded men came pouring back into the British trench

system. as further waves were trying to make their way forwards.

At Tape Fall Wood, a team of archaeologists is excavating part of one

of many Somme battlefields.

In 1916, this was a shattered moonscape of shell craters and trenches.

After the war, the trees were allowed to grow back, and with no farming on this

land, the area remains a time capsule of the ordinary soldier's life in the

trenches.

The team uncovers the remains of communication trenches.

The trenches provide revealing clues as to what went wrong on July 1st.

Where I am now is standing in the base of a communication trench. It stretches

that way up to the front line and then right back here, curves round, round the

base of that tree and then down in a very sinuous line.

And when I'm standing in it here, we've got the sides battering back and it

looks relatively spacious, but I'm not wearing full equipment, I'm not carrying

all the impedimenta. You take over the top with you. If I met someone coming

the other way, there are big, big problems.

Attack troops, men carrying resupply, and the hordes of wounded were all

crushed together in these narrow channels.

There was chaos in the trenches.

Yet British commanders failed to halt the forward movement of troops.

In terms of communication, this is the only war before or since where the

commander cannot...

personally influence what's happening by his voice.

In previous wars, the commander could sit on his horse, he could see what was

happening, he could send a galloper to tell a brigade commander to stop going

right, go left instead.

Because there is no means of instant communication, the whole operation has

to work on a time plan.

When artillery left from a specific line will happen at a certain time, and that

has to be coordinated with when the infantry will get to that line.

Now if the infantry moved more slowly than was expected, or more quickly, then

the plan will start to fall apart.

You've then got the problem of trying to get resupply up and wounded back.

And what you end up with is gridlock.

The attacks began at 7.30 a.m.

But because messengers could not get through, it was not until around 2 p.m.,

six and a half hours later, that British commanders realized the extent of the

problem.

The British army discovered that waves of

battalions, waves of soldiers coming out of reserve British trenches were not

even getting to their own forward trenches, much less into no man's land,

much less the 800 yards across no man's land into the German trenches.

But this was happening behind the British troops' own front line.

When the troops advanced into no-man's land, why were there far more casualties

than expected?

Before the mass attacks on the first day of the Somme, British troops were told

that artillery would have wiped out the Germans, and all they would have to do

was occupy their shattered trenches.

But the bombardment failed, and the surviving German defenders were ready

for the British troops.

German machine gunner.

German artillery spotters sees British soldiers moving in their well-organized

waves across all of that space.

They just kill them.

Why were the British soldiers so vulnerable to German machine gun fire?

One possible reason was that equipment loads carried by many of the attacking

soldiers were unnecessarily heavy.

What we've got is James here wearing the uniform that would have been worn by a

soldier on the 1st of July 1916, basically service dress, with that he's

carrying his weapon, the rifle with wire cutters, and then a full set of

equipments. Pouches at the front containing a grand total of about 120

rounds of ammunition.

He'd then have two bombs in his pockets, two hand grenades, and then of course if

we just turn around James...

On the back, we've got his mess tins, inside which is his food, and he'll use

those for cooking.

Then, in his haversack, he's got a spare sandbag to help him dig in or carry

anything extra he needs.

In there, knife, fork, spoon, shaving gear.

Head for your entrenching tool on your bum.

And then next to that one, water bottle with two pints of water.

And because he will have to dig in, he's got a shovel on his back. And then,

James, turn around again.

we can finish it off by saying on this side of the body we've then got his

respirator because we might actually have gas which he encounter and this is

the minimum he can carry this basic load weighed 72 pounds but in

addition many british troops carried extra cumbersome equipment such as

ammunition and supplies soldiers carry massive

massive packs that really have very little to do with attacking the German

lines. The only thing they have to attack the German lines is their

infantry weapons, which is going to do very little. What they're largely

carrying are tools through which to rebuild the German trench system once

they have seized it, and then counter a German counterattack.

Was the failure of the attack simply due to the weight carried by many of the

British soldiers?

Squad, jet!

Squad will move to the right in twos. Right turn.

Using a team of British Army officer cadets to represent 1916 British

soldiers, Major Tim Saunders stages a unique experiment.

What we're going to do is simulate one of the incidents of the Battle of the

Somme. And of course you'll all know that the first day of the Somme was the

greatest disaster that ever befell the British Army.

The big killers on the day were artillery and this thing here, the 1908

pattern Maxim machine gun.

What we're going to do today is conduct a time and movement study, your movement

against the machine gun.

And to help us, we're going to use the machine gun, but also this snazzy kit

that you've got on. It's state-of-the-art battlefield simulation

equipment.

Known as Miles 2000, the simulation equipment worn by the cadets will

register hits from a laser firing along the line of sight of the machine gun.

As well as basic equipment, each cadet carries a heavy Bergen pack to represent

the bulky extra loads carried in the Somme attacks.

For the first test, the platoon will advance using the same tactics as most

of the British infantry on July 1st.

The cadets will climb out of their simulated trench, then walk steadily

forward in what's known as extended line, just a few paces apart.

Bend in the middle, please.

Come on, have a walk!

Advance!

Just climbing the bank is difficult enough with the heavy packs.

When a cadet is hit, the MILES equipment emits a high-pitched whine.

The slow moving line is an easy target for the machine gun.

It seems a suicidal tactic to use, but this is just how many British units

advanced on July 1st.

Okay, casualties, stand up!

It's a disaster.

Almost the entire platoon is wiped out. There we are.

Eight out of ten.

Not good odds.

It certainly doesn't represent a military success.

That's barely 100 metres, and we've lost 80% of our men.

You survived.

Did you feel you were in any kind of organized formation?

Well, I mean, it was kept together well. I mean, it was kept in a straight line.

Whether the straight line and that close together is the best idea for the time

is another story, but... Next,

the cadets will carry the same weight load, but Saunders will allow them to

change their tactics as soon as they come under fire.

Keep going, but a bit of zigzagging, and you're running this time.

Extended line!

I'm dead.

Alive. I'm still alive as well.

It's an improvement.

Even with their heavy packs, as faster-moving targets, the cadets

sustain fewer casualties.

Well, one, two, three, four.

Fifty percent improvement just goes to show that moving was the key.

But still, almost half of our men killed.

Casualties, stand up, please!

The change in tactics alone significantly reduces the number of

casualties.

But losing 50% of the attacking force is still unacceptable.

For the final test, Saunders allows the cadets to leave behind the burdensome

extra packs and instead attack with just their basic equipment.

This time only two of the ten cadets are hit. I am dead.

Mr. Miles says that he is dead.

Weight has proved a vital factor, but being able to take avoiding action is

also extremely important.

The way most British units attacked on day one, advancing slowly in extended

line, did not happen by chance.

It was a tactic ordered at the highest level.

British commanders believed it was the only way the recently trained volunteers

could be trusted to attack.

Yet not every British attack resulted in disastrous failure.

How was it some units avoided the calamity of July 1st?

By 4 p.m. on July 1st, most British attacks have either stalled in no man's

land or have been wiped out completely.

But not every British unit met with complete disaster.

A handful of divisions, out of the 14 that attacked on the first day, actually

achieved their objectives.

One such unit was the 18th Division, led by General Sir Ivor Maxey.

General Maxey stands out because he wasn't by the book.

He adapted tactics to the specifics of the battle.

Units like the 18th Division under Ivor Maxey do a tremendous job on the 1st of

July. Why?

Well, they use a creeping barrage. They move forward behind this barrage. Ivor

Maxey gets the units to go right into no man's land, so they're just outside the

German wire. Therefore, they don't have very far to go.

And he uses the dark, he uses all of this in a very combined way, which means

that the artillery is able to support the infantry and essentially is able to

overcome all the features of the German defensive system more effectively than

elsewhere.

Even before the Somme, Maxi had begun to learn from the French army, whose hard

-won experience in battles like Verdun had taught them tactics better suited to

trench warfare.

Some French commanders start figuring out in 1915 that the best way to get

across no man's land is not for everyone to stand up and walk slowly towards the

enemy. And a French commander called Lefargue writes a manual which says that

what you want to do is infiltrate the enemy trenches.

The idea is that you get a bunch of guys working together in a little blob.

and they work their way up close to their objective.

And then when they get close to the enemy trench system, they break cover,

run to the enemy trench system, chuck a bunch of grenades in, wait for the boom,

and then the rest of the guys can come up and walk across no man's land with

comparative safety.

Tactics like these saved lives in 1916 and today still form the basis of modern

infantry doctrine.

But the majority of troops who attacked on the Somme's first day suffered

appalling casualties.

The British Army's largest ever attack came to be remembered as its bloodiest

ever hour.

In a war that's seen as senseless in Britain, the Battle of the Somme is seen

as the most senseless event of a senseless war that leads to the death of

an entire generation and achieves nothing.

five miles of forlorn countryside that's worth not the life of one soldier.

In some ways, this is the view that is almost a cherished mythology.

And one that some historians now dispute.

After its disastrous first day, the Battle of the Somme lasted nearly five

months more and was claimed by the British as a success.

People see it as butchers and bunglers throwing the flower of British manhood

across a patch of mud against impenetrable barbed wire and machine

guns.

The truth is rather different.

Yes, there were 19,000 men killed on that first day. That's a lot of British

soldiers. If we look at the Somme battle as a whole, 76% of all

the soldiers who took part in the Somme come out of it without a scratch.

So perhaps the scale isn't so bad after all.

The Somme is now seen not simply as a dreadful calamity, but also as a pivotal

moment for the British Army.

More than two years after the first day on the Somme, the British Army was able

to defeat the Germans and win eventual victory in the war in 1918.

Each aspect of the July 1st attacks that had failed was overhauled.

Artillery tactics were completely reviewed.

The shortages of heavy guns and trained crews were put right.

Gunners were supplied with more high-explosive shells and advanced new

graze fuses that exploded on contact with barbed wire.

Tactics, too, were changed in favor of the French-style infiltration tactics.

Within days of July 1st, British units reduced the equipment their men carried

to a bare minimum.

Subsequent waves were detailed to carry the heavy loads.

And learning from German successes, units were provided with more machine

guns until British units eventually outgunned their German opponents.

As recruits became more experienced and better trained, army units were

reorganized. and broken down into smaller, more flexible platoons.

A lot of these ideas had been thought of before 1916,

but they hadn't really been nailed down.

And by 1970, the ideas of traffic flow on the battlefield had changed.

The idea of what you tell the soldier had changed by 1917.

The idea that you should unify a group of soldiers not by lining them up where

you could see them, but by giving them a common mission, that idea had started to

filter through the British Army.

Well, after the middle of 1916, the British Army knew what worked and what

didn't work.

In many ways, the psalm is a necessary first step towards learning the craft of

modern war, a very disheartening first step, a very

mistaken first step, but a very valuable one.

In 1916, more than one million British, French, and German soldiers were killed

on the psalm.

To this day the bodies of 80,000 of them are still undiscovered.

It remains one of the bloodiest battles in history.