@simnettpratt:
Sympathies, posthumously, to your uncle.
The Somme was one of the greatest, most costly military blunders in history. Prior to the advance on the first day, the British dropped more than one and half million (MILLION) shells on the German lines with two specific goals: 1. Cut up the barbed wire laid down to slow down infantry and make them vulnerable to machine gun fire. 2. Destroy the German dugouts that contained the MGs.
Well, the shelling didn't cut the bred wire at all -- it only made it more tangled and difficult to negotiate, while creating a landscape so pockmarked that it was nearly impossible to cross at any speed. And the vast majority of the MGs were too deep for the types of shells being used, so the German cross fire was more or less undiminished. On the first day, Tommy went over the top in nice, neat lines that WALKED slowly across the open ground to avoid over-running their own artillery, which was supposed to advance before them.
The result was that the Germans -- who placed their machine guns obliquily so as to rake the British formations -- were able to saturate the beaten ground with MG fire. The advancing troops suffered 60K casualties; 20K or so killed.
The intransigence and inflexibility of the British Army leadership -- bouyed and insulated by a caste system that prevented new ideas from being heard, let alone understood -- was responsible not just for the 600,000 (!) casualties at the Somme in about four months. (But hey, hey did gain all of about six miles in some parts of the line.)
That same caste structure and military culture lead directly to countless deaths in the RFC in that war -- and in the RAF 20 years later -- when pilots in both wars were constrained to outmoded, pointless, ineffective flying tactics that favored neat formations over initiative and aggression. The RFC NEVER figured it out in WWI. The RAF came to its senses in WWII after being run out of France, then very nearly losing the Battle of Britain.
If you want good reading on the air war in both generations, just about any of the fiction of Derek Robinson is an enjoyable way to get the education. His novels are wonderful and he is scrupulous about the facts.