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Breakdown : the crisis of shell shock on the Somme, 1916 by Taylor Downing is a history book available to read on EtoBox.

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Paralysis. Stuttering. The 'shakes'. Inability to stand or walk. Temporary blindness or deafness. When strange symptoms like these began appearing in men at Casualty Clearing Stations in 1915, a debate began in army and medical circles as to what it was, what had caused it and what could be done to cure it. But the numbers were never large. Then in July 1916 with the start of the Somme battle the incidence of shell shock rocketed. The high command of the British army began to panic.An increasingly large number of men seemed to have simply lost the will to fight. As entire battalions had to be withdrawn from the front, commanders and military doctors desperately tried to come up with explanations as to what was going wrong. 'Shell shock' - what we would now refer to as battle trauma - was sweeping the Western Front. By the beginning of August 1916, nearly 200,000 British soldiers had been killed or wounded during the first month of fighting along the Somme. Another 300,000 would be lost before the battle was over. But the army always said it could not calculate the exact number of those suffering from shell shock. Re-assessing the official casualty figures, Taylor Downing for the fi

Who reads Breakdown : the crisis of shell shock on the Somme, 1916?

Author

Taylor Downing

Publisher

Little, Brown and Company

Published

2016

Language

EN

ISBN

9781408706619

Category

history

Subjects

Fiction, History, Humanities

Rating

4 / 5 (20 ratings)

Updated

2026-03-13