"quit the control freakery malarkey where you try to set the agenda in the thread in a way that does nothing more than shine the best light on your own take on events. "

QUE?????

Tell you what Steve you've got some brass neck!! Coming out with that crap then fully expect someone else to mildly accept that the First World War could be summed up by what occurred on one tiny part of a front that extended for hundreds of miles from the North Sea to the Swiss border on a single day in July in 1916.

The Somme Offensive of 1916 did not start and end on the 1st July 1916 - Fact - So if you are going to introduce it you discuss the whole Battle of the Somme - not just the bits you want to chat about.

If you "have no comment on the leadership over the whole four years of the war." then butt out of the discussion because that is indeed what is being debated.

There might well have been ~60,000 British casualties on the first day on the Somme but you would not have seen anything like 60,000 men lying on the ground, the dead would have been on the ground ~19,000 of those. Average death toll throughout the Battle of the Somme was ~3,600 per day - the German death toll was greater.

"A soldier might have been just under two yards tall"

Where on earth did you pull that statistic from - your backside?

Average height of a recruit in 1914 was 5ft 5inches, he weighed just over 8 stones. Ever heard of the "Bantam Battalions"? They were for men who were only 5ft to 5ft 3inches tall. When conscription kicked in the conscripts were found to be extremely poor physical specimens and once in the Army subject to physical training and three square meals a day within the period of the training they put on on average one stone in weight and 2inches in height.

Unfortunately for all your wittering on about what mistakes and errors were made on the 1st July 1916, it was the same Commanders who on the 8th August 1918 that directed and led the offensive that resulted in the ending of the war. By the 11th November 1918 they were the same Commanders who led the only Army of any of the 1914 combatant powers that had not mutinied.