This offensive, often called 'The Battle of the Somme' involved some 53 British and Commonwealth Infantry Divisions opposed by 50 German Infantry Divisions. The general location was a front stretching about thirty miles north from the river Somme, almost in the centre of the Western Front. Total, both sides, casualties were in thr region of one million, two hundred thousand. The Allied gains at the time the offensive petered out in the awful November weather was a strip of land about twenty miles wide by an average of six miles deep. An Allied casualty rate of over five thousand men per square mile gained. The initial bombardment began on the 24th June 1916 and the first trops went 'over the top' on the 1st July.