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Description: | Ms diary (15pp), with a ts transcript (5pp), written at intervals during the morning and early afternoon of the first day of the Battle of the Somme (1 July 1916) when he was in command of the X 30th Trench Mortar Battery RA, giving his impressions of the fighting. In the early morning his Battery moved into their emplacements just behind the front line, where he felt "pretty rotten" (nervous) until they began to fire their rounds an hour before the attack began; afterwards the German retaliatory bombardment put both of Russell-Jones' guns out of action and forced them to remain with some badly wounded men to a dugout until late morning, when they withdrew to Maricourt. His vivid account of this disastrous day ends on a note of unfounded optimism - "what a success it has all been ... let us hope we are in sight of the finish."
Cataloguer Backlog
Catalogue date 1973-04-21 | Publisher: | http://www.iwm.org.uk | Source: | Imperial War Museum | Creator: | Russell-Jones, E | Identifier: | http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/o... | Go to resource |
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