Private Tour WW1 Somme Battlefields 1916-1918 (PRIVATE TOUR)

As you booked a Private tour, the driver guide will pick you up around 06:15 am at your hotel location in Paris.

You will travel aboard a comfortable and air-conditioning minivan (7 passengers max).

Expected time for being pickup at your hotel: From 06 :00 am till 06 :30 am

Due to new traffic rules in Paris which ban on the majority of vehicular traffic crossing the city center in 2022, Hotel Pick-up and Drop-off would be operated only in the following listed Paris districts: 75008, 75007, 75006, 75005, 75016, 75015 and 75014.

LIDO DE PARIS 116 Av. des Champs-Élysées, 75008 Paris

Dowload the map here

The tragedy of the Somme in 1916, even nowadays is remembered by all commonwealth countries as the bloodiest battle ever. At the end of the fisrt day (1st July 1916) of the attack, casualties  went up to 56,000 and among them at least 19,000 commonwealth countries'soldiers got killed. By the end of the offensive in November 1916, more than 1 million soldiers would have been wounded, captured or killed.

Come and join us for a day of remembrance and discover this large and very flat areas of farming lands. War cemeteries are standing everywhere in the fields and forever will testimony of the violence and bloody battles of the Great War.

To start your journey, you will be pickup by the driver guide aboard a comfortable minivan directly at your hotel location in central Paris at 06H40 in the morning. Leaving Paris, we are now heading north towards the county of Somme wich is Located at only 1h40mn drive away from the french capital.

This tour wil also give you the opportunity to see both the front line of the battle of the Somme 1916 (July to November) and also the front line of the battle of the Somme 1918 (March to September).

Your full-day history’ tour will begin in the areas of the Somme 1918 battlegrounds.  First stop to visit the «Australian War Memorial » at Villers- Bretonneux who stands on top of a ridge overlooking the town.

The Australian National Memorial, Villers-Bretonneux is the main memorial to Australian military personnel killed on the Western Front during World War I. It is located on the Route Villiers-Bretonneux (D 23), in the Somme département, France. The memorial lists 10,773 names of soldiers of the Australian Imperial Force with no known grave who were killed between 1916, when Australian forces arrived in France and Belgium, and the end of the war. The location was chosen to commemorate the role played by Australian soldiers in the Second Battle of Villers-Bretonneux (24–27 April 1918).

Designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens, the memorial consists of a tower within the Villers-Bretonneux Military Cemetery, which also includes a Cross of Sacrifice. The tower is surrounded by walls and panels on which the names of the missing dead are listed. The main inscription is in both French and English, on either side of the entrance to the tower. The memorial and cemetery are maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.

In addition you will have time to discover the new visitor centre "Sir John Monash", unveiled on the 25th of April 2018 to commemorate the centenary of the Battle of Villers Bretonneux and the recapture of the town by 2 australians brigades.

The Sir John Monash Centre tells Australia’s story of the Western Front in the words of those who served.Adjacent to the Australian National Memorial in Villers-Bretonneux, the Sir John Monash Centre is the hub of the Australian Remembrance Trail along the Western Front.

This cutting-edge multimedia centre reveals the Australian Western Front experience through a series of interactive media installations and immersive experiences.

A cinema offers you a 20 minute modern film which broadcasts impressive sounds system and 3D special effects that will plunge you directly into the heart of fierces fightings alongside the Australian soldiers during the battles of the Somme between 1916 and 1918.

On 21 April 1918, exactly a month after von Hindenburg and von Ludendorff launched their last offensive, the  Kaiser's Battle, the Canadian pilot, Captain Roy Brown, claimed to have shot the Red Baron down, in a field, near Vaux sur Somme.

Von Richthofen was involved in an active dogfight with British RE 8s and Camels led by Captain Arthur Roy Brown. During the last stage of this pursuit, Von Richthofen was hit by a single bullet that caused massive damage to his heart and lungs, resulting in rapid death.

In the last seconds of his life, he managed to make a hasty but controlled landing in a field, just north of the village of Vaux sur Somme, in a sector controlled by the Australian Imperial Force (AIF). His Fokker was not damaged by the landing, but Australian souvenir hunters stripped most of it.

Leaving the « Red Baron » crash site, then the ride will takes you 20km north more far away to discover the most importants sites of the battle  of the somme in 1916.

Impressives sites such as the huge mine crater in « La Boisselle » detonated by the british tunneling companies in July 01th 1916.

The Lochnagar Crater was created by a large mine placed beneath the German front lines on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, it was one of 19 mines that were placed beneath the German lines from the British section of the Somme front, to assist the infantry advance at the start of the battle.

The British named the mine after ‘Lochnagar Street’, a British trench where the Tunnelling Companies of the Royal Engineers dug a shaft down about 90 feet deep into the chalk; then excavated some 300 yards towards the German lines to place 60,000 lbs (27 tons) of ammonal explosive in two large adjacent underground chambers 60 feet apart. Its aim was to destroy a formidable strongpoint called « Schwaben Höhe » in the German front line, south of the village of La Boisselle in the Somme département.

Then you will pay your respects to the « Memorial of the Missing » in Thiepval, unveiled by the Prince of Wales in 1932 and the French State Président Mr Albert Lebrun . This massive british war monument commemorates more than 72000 soldiers from the UK and Commonwealth countries which where all reporting missing during the battle of the Somme 1916 and have no graves known.

Maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, the memorial reminds visitors that the Battle of the Somme was one of the most deadly of the Great War, incurring 1,200,000 casualties from 1 July to 18 November 1916. Each year, hundreds of thousands of visitors (of which a great number are British) come to the memorial in remembrance of the fallen.

At the entrance a large animated map, enriched with period photographs and film, shows the impact that the battles of the First World War had on the Somme.

The gallery devoted to the Battle of the Somme opens onto a panoramic mural by illustrator Joe Sacco; it depicts the harrowing day of 1 July 1916, hour after hour. Reproduced onto 60 metres of back-lit glass, it provides a panoramic view of the battlefield, a graphic narrative of military operations.

In the centre of the hall, a vast display pit covered by glass presents collection pieces and archaeological remains of the war. Short videos provide complementary information about the mural: commentary on the scenes presented, historical information, archive footage, and educational animations.

At the end of the hall, a Maxim machine gun captured by a British regiment at Thiepval reminds visitors of how heavily the Germans defended this location: Thiepval ridge was an Allied objective of the 1 July 1916; it was not taken until the end of September.

Opposing the multitude of Missing, the exhibition examines the creation of great heroic figures. This large hall presents a life-size replica of the aeroplane belonging to Georges Guynemer and portraits of First World War aviators.

From 1916, the role of aviation in war had affirmed itself, encouraging the advent of great heroic figures. Individual heroes, like the “Knights of the Sky”, emerged in the face of the continuing death of the masses. 

Following, the guide is now taking you to visit the Newfoundland Memorial Park in Beaumont Hamel. Over there, quite a large portion of the battleground has been preserved and so while walking through the network of the now-serene originals trenches you will see the scars of the battle which still remain on the ground.

The Beaumont-Hamel Newfoundland Memorial is a memorial site in France dedicated to the commemoration of Dominion of Newfoundland forces members who were killed during World War I. The 74-acre preserved battlefield park encompasses the grounds over which the Newfoundland Regiment made their unsuccessful attack on 1 July 1916 during the first day of the Battle of the Somme.

On 1 July 1916 at 8:45 a.m. the Newfoundland Regiment and 1st Battalion of the Essex Regiment received orders to move forward. Of the 780 men who went forward only about 110 survived unscathed, of whom only 68 were available for roll call the following day.

In the afternoon, you will discover the town of Peronne where we will take a break for lunch in a local restaurant or you will just decides by yourself of your own choices of meals (own expense).

After lunch and to end that very moving day, you will get a free access to explore the «Great War Historial and museum" in Péronne. A 13th century medieval castle house the WW1 museum which display a a large exhibits of uniforms and weapons  all worn, designed and used by the soldiers during the conflict.

The historial of peronne museum also offers a permanent collection of Trench Artists such as « Otto Dix » who did testimony of  the atrocities of the war with sketching some very graphic etchings.

Museum Layout

The Historial, Museum of the Great War in Péronne opened in 1992. A highly respected museum devoted to the history of the First World War, the Historial studies the full cultural, social and military scale of this important chapter of history.

The central part of each gallery pays testimony to life at the front, that which concerned every population at war the most.

Soldiers of various nationalities are represented by mannequins dressed in their uniforms with their weapons and personal effects by their sides. These bodies, lying in white marble pits cut out of the museum’s floor, symbolise the entire territory of the Somme riddled by trenches, and the common suffering of the men at war.

Weapons and military equipment are displayed in the centre of the galleries; placed on the ground, in pits, they pay testimony to the common suffering of the soldiers. The lives of the civilians, each and everyone ‘mobilised’ by war, are studied in the wall cabinets, divided into three sections and respectively dedicated to Germany, France and Great Britain.

During the return drive to Paris you will have time to relax aboard the minivan before to be dropped off at your hotel location in the evening (between 06:00 pm till 07:00 pm).