At 07:30 on 1 July 1916, the men of the 15th Battalion, The Prince of Wales’s Own (West Yorkshire Regiment), better known as the Leeds Pals, left their positions in a series of copses named after the Gospels and advanced towards the village of Serre, near Bapaume, in the Somme Valley, only to be met by heavy German machine gun fire, suffering over 500 casualties in a few minutes. Recruited from volunteers in the heady days of September 1914 following Lord Kitchener’s call to arms and trained at Colsterdale in the Yorkshire Dales, the battalion was initially deployed to Egypt to defend the Suez Canal before being sent to France in March 1916 to join the build-up for the Battle of the Somme as part of 31st Division along with other famous Pals Battalions from Yorkshire and Lancashire. In this book, Stephen Wood tells the story of the Leeds Pals.
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