Visiting and studying battles and the associated locations can have real value to understanding the history, how the ground impacted the outcomes and also just to give a feel for scale.
Over the years I’ve become involved in several ways with battlefield studies and providing support to them.
Research, Planning and Reconnaissance
All good battlefield studies come with sound research and planning to ensure that you have the right details and information to provide an interesting and worthwhile tour or study. Once you have this detail then there is a need for a Recce, both in terms of a desk top study and then to follow this up with time spent on the ground.
While the desk top recce will provide that fundimentals and feel for where you need to be and also what you want to look at/ visit, it is often only when you step out onto the ground and walk the actual ground that you realise certain things happened.
For me one of the key moments happened during an event at High Wood at 2016. we were looking at doing an event to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Cavalry Charge of the 7th dragoons and the 20th Deccan Horse on the 14th July. While the thought of such a charge on horseback seems mad, it is only once you do an on the ground recce that you realise that there is sufficient ‘dead ground’ to allow mounted riders to get very close to the woods without being seen.
Pre Tour Training and Briefings
These are ‘Show and Tell’ talks that are tailored specifically to what ever the theme is of the the Battlefield study/ Tour is, This could be a case of talking about the kit and equipment of a particular period of the war or going into even more specialist details such as the tactics and developments that related to that period or that specific battle.
Taliored Tours and Studies.
Where some one is looking for something specific with their visit to the Battlefields then it is possible for me look at tailoring the visit to the specific requirements.
For example a group from the Small Arms School Corps wanted to visit the Some and look at something focused on the Machine Gun Corps. With some research I put together a day looking at the 100th MG Company and the 1 Million Rounds fired myth at High Wood on the 24th August 1916. The event took the form of an investigation into how the weapons functioned and also how they were used on the actual ground and in the firing positions.
Another focused tour was provided for a group looking at the work of the First World War Tunnellers, with a series of visit to the craters and Monuments at Hooge and across to Railway Wood near Ypres and then across to the well known Craters at Hill 60 and the Caterpillar.
If there is something specific, with some warning then research can be done and a focused tour can be developed ready for a visit to the battlefields.