Changing Attitudes towards the First World War.
At the start of the war the British public was very positive towards the war and thought that it was heroic. The government gave people false hopes and told the public false things like telling the public it would be a quick and easy war and “it will be over by Christmas”. People were dancing in the streets and thousands of young men were enlisting to fight. This attitude to the war soon changed as people grew bored of it.
.After a few months and the war wasn’t going as people expected and loads of people had died less people were enlisting and in March 1916 people were forced to enlist. As the war went on people were only aloud rations of food because of the import ships being destroyed and food supplies were running low. As the soldiers got bored with the war some of them tried to injure themselves so that they could be sent home. People were missing their families and the soldiers were growing sick of fighting and risking their lives every day. As the public were receiving letters from the soldiers telling them how bad the conditions were and how they missed them the more they wanted the war to be over and for their family to come home. The longer the war went on the more problems it caused like lack of food and power, so people were forced to have rations.
The battle of the Somme was supposed to be the battle that won the war for Britain but it was the worst one of all with 400,000 deaths and only a few km gained. The people didn’t know how bad the Battle of the Somme really was until several months later when a film was released showing the true horrors of the battle with all of the dead soldiers and injured uncensored. Peoples attitudes changed immediately and war weariness had set in. The bad tactics of the generals made the battle of the Somme the worst battle for Britain because the German spies had seen the British preparing extra ammunition for the battle so they dug 12’ deep dug outs so that they were hardly affected by the shells. The British soldiers were told to walk across no-mans land without running and enter the German trenches , this shouldn’t have been a problem for the soldiers because the heavy shelling should have killed the Germans but when they got on no mans land the Germans were waiting for the British with machine guns , the generals kept sending more and more men over the top. The pubic learned of all of this and lost their faith in the generals and wasn’t as sure of victory as before. This was the battle that was supposed to win the war for Britain but it was the biggest disaster of the war, the British thought that if they couldn’t beat the Germans then, how could they ever beat them because that was Britains strongest and most expensive attack on the Germans.
