In emotional terms, I'd say 9/11 is the closest analogue for Americans. The first day of the Somme was essentially the first time in British history that a mass army in the sense of the American Civil War or the French army in the Revolutionary war had gone to war, and it had been very roughly handled (20,000 dead, a further 40,000 wounded). For comparison Antietam or D-Day both had around 2,500 American dead. Worse, at the time we were still letting neighbours serve together so the losses were very geographically concentrated - for example the 11th East Lancashire Regiment was essentially recruited from the town of Accrington and set up by the mayor of the town. They suffered 584 out of 720 on the first day of the battle killed, wounded or missing.Johnnie Lyle wrote: ↑Sun May 14, 2023 12:25 amVietnam or the Global War on Terrorism is probably the closest we can get in the US to how a lot of our British cousins feel about WWI, especially the Somme.
We’re very fortunate we have not had to bear that particular burden. We have never had to pay that particular butcher’s bill, and the wars where we have come remotely close to that butcher’s bill were the Civil War or WWII, both of which have a much more successful outcome, while our own WWI experience is largely forgotten, probably because it was so short.
The lyrics are also very specific - "We all volunteered / And we wrote down our names / And we added two years to our ages / Eager for life and ahead of the game". That happened precisely once in British history - with the raising of the Kitchener armies in 1914 and 1915 - and died forever on the 1st of July 1916. Lemmy also said the same:
It’s about the Battle of the Somme in World War I… Nineteen thousand Englishmen were killed before noon, a whole generation destroyed, in three hours – think about that! It was terrible – there were three or four towns in northern Lancashire and south Yorkshire where that whole generation of men were completely wiped out.