World War I had been raging for nearly two years, and the western front had devolved into a stalemate.  To break the impasse, the British hatched a battle plan they thought would break the German lines and bring them victory. They chose a narrow front along the river Somme to make the attack.  What transpired next was maddening incompetence bordering on criminal negligence by the British army. Every officer and noncom in the army knew that frontal assaults on prepared positions resulted in slaughter.  But the British general in command, Douglas Haig, believed that the key to victory was in a massive artillery bombardment that lasted a full week.  But the shells had little effect on the German defenders, who, once the fire slackened, came out of their bunkers to man thousands of machine guns.  The results were predictable: Journalist and cartoonist Joe Sacco, who illustrated a massive panorama of the first day of the battle, spoke to NPR in...(Read Full Post)