Attack on the Somme

” … Dr. Hampton is able present the Australians’ successes and failures in context and at the brigade and division level. This approach makes the eminently readable book a valuable piece of scholarship that is well supported by her sources … [This is] a well-written counterpoint to narrowly-focused histories that place the Australian contribution to the BEF as a uniquely Australian venture divorced from a larger British, or even Coalition, effort during the Somme Campaign. Furthermore, her analysis avoids drawing unnecessary and limiting categorizations of senior leaders as either “butchers or bunglers.” Attack on the Somme is an important close campaign analysis of one part of the larger Somme Offensive that sheds light on the months the Anzacs fought an increasingly futile sideshow.“– “Western Front Association Digital Newsletter”
“This is a quality ‘must read’ from Wolverhampton Military Studies.”– “Stand To! The Journal of the Western Front Association”

Dr. Meleah Hampton is an historian in the Military History Section of the Australian War Memorial. Her primary interest is in the operational conduct of the Great War on the Western Front, with a particular interest in the process of learning, applying and transmitting lessons learned in the field of battle. She is a graduate of the University of Adelaide and completed her PhD with a thesis on the 1916 battles for Pozières and Mouquet Farm under the guidance of Professors Robin Prior and Gary Sheffield. In 2009 Meleah Hampton was a Summer Scholar at the Australian War Memorial, completing a research paper on the relationship between Australians and Americans during the First World War. Following on from this she was a speaker at the 2008 International Conference on 1918 at the Australian Memorial. She has published a chapter on Americans in the First World War in its proceedings, 1918: Year of Victory (2010: Ashley Ekins, ed.) Meleah Hampton is a member of the editorial staff of the Australian War Memorial’s magazine, Wartime, and continues to research and write biographies for the Last Post Ceremony project. She is a keen ‘battlefield sniffer’, having visited the Western Front many times. She currently lives in Canberra with her husband and son.

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