by Peter Hart
It was one thing to recruit soldiers, but another thing entirely to convert them into soldiers capable of meeting the relatively well-trained Germans in battle. Variously lacking officers, NCOs, uniforms, kit, modern weapons or even the most basic accommodation for the men—the situation was soon desperate. There was a shortage of specialist personnel of all kinds: clerks to record the details on recruitment, drill and weapons instructors, doctors to check and maintain the recruits’ health, cooks to prepare food, armourers to set up and maintain weapons. Any kind of military experience was soon at an absolute premium and many old officers and NCOs were ‘dug out’ and called back to the colours to drill the ranks into some semblance of discipline. Even worse were the problems in recruiting new artillery units. There were hardly any guns left in the country to train with and the skills that accurate gunnery required were considerably more advanced than those required by the infantry.
With these quickly amassed and ramshackle legions the old British boast of the quality rather than the quantity of her army now rebounded. In contrast to the instruction received by the bulk of the German Army there is no doubt that the British training programme was rushed, lacked any depth or detail and was often irrelevant to the real needs of the troops in modern conditions of trench warfare. In an attempt to give newly arrived battalions an easy introduction to the war, they were first attached to a regular battalion serving in the line to gain practical experience under close supervision in the strange routines and lurking dangers of trench life. Then the whole division would serve in a quiet area before being ‘blooded’ in battle. For many soldiers the Somme would be their first real baptism of fire. The training process never really finished. When they were out of the line after a couple of days rest all units would resume a programme of individual training designed to reinforce the basic military skills and to prepare them for the imminent offensive. For the service battalions this was little more than a continuation of the training they had received before they crossed the Channel, but even the ‘old sweats’ in the regulars could greatly benefit from a course of refresher training.
Our time was devoted to training for the offensive, or ‘fattening up for the slaughter’ as we cheerfully called it. For the first week or so we confined ourselves to platoon and company training, to smarten up the men and correct the somewhat slouching habits which there was always a tendency to contract during a long spell in the trenches. Three or four days of drill, bayonet fighting, musketry, bomb throwing and kindred pursuits had a wonderfully enlivening effect on us, and we were soon in fine fettle.5
Lieutenant William Colyer, 2nd Battalion, Royal Dublin Fusiliers, 10th Brigade, 4th Division
The men were armed with the Short Magazine Lee-Enfield rifle, a bolt action rifle, which in the hands of the pre-war regulars could fire up to 15 aimed rounds per minute. Accurate up to a mile it was at its most effective at ranges of up to about 600 yards. The 18-in sword bayonet that clipped on to the end was not neglected and many of the older officers put great store in bayonet fighting. The usual myths were peddled, implying some racial inferiority lurking deep within the heart of the German soldier, which thereby rendered him constitutionally unable to face any attack pushed home at the point of the bayonet.
A red-tabbed and red-faced Major gave a lecture, a gruesome lecture on the use of the bayonet. He might as well have been trying to teach his grandmother to suck eggs, talking to infantrymen who had been there in battle on the use of the bayonet. He said he’d been to examine men who had been killed by the bayonet and how unnecessarily it had been used. Because the bayonet is grooved, if you bayonet a man and try and withdraw, very often it’s very hard because the flesh closes—you’ve got to give it a twist. If you withdraw without giving it a twist, the outside could close and it won’t bleed, it will only bleed internally. As the bayonet’s grooved, giving it a twist allows the air into it; then the blood flows freely.6
Private Basil Farrer, 2nd Battalion, Green Howards, 21st Brigade, 30th Division
One of the most important new weapons that the pressures of war had added to the British armoury was the Lewis light machine gun. This weighed just 26 lbs and it fired drums of 47 rounds up to a range of 2,000 yards. Sustained fire was impossible and the gun was not particularly accurate, but what the Lewis gun offered was relatively high firepower that could actually accompany the attacking infantry as they moved forward. It was a complex weapon and officers and NCOs were sent on training courses to master the intricacies of the gun mechanism.
For three days, then, I thought and talked of nothing but body-locking pins, feed actuating studs, pinion casings, pawls, racks, plungers, strikers and all the other jargon connected with the study of the Lewis gun. My great desire was to attain the record speed for changing the bolt of the gun. This operation is not at all as simple as it sounds; for instance, it would probably take you about three-quarters of an hour, at the end of which time you would be oily and angry and flushed, and moreover would probably have put in the new bolt the wrong way round, with the distressing result of the bullet shooting backwards, prematurely completing the day’s work of the firer. My time for changing the bolt correctly was thirteen seconds.7
Lieutenant William Colyer, 2nd Battalion, Royal Dublin Fusiliers, 10th Brigade, 4th Division
There were soon some sixteen Lewis guns for every battalion, one per platoon and the specialist knowledge of how to operate them was assiduously passed on to their men once the officers and NCOs returned to their units.
The Vickers machine gun was the heavy machine gun used by the British Army. By 1916 the guns had already been withdrawn from the infantry battalions and concentrated in specialist machine gun battalions of the Machine Gun Corps, whose numbering corresponded to the infantry brigade to which they were attached. The water-cooled, belt-driven Vickers heavy machine gun fired at a rate of up to 500 rounds per minute, spraying bullets across the beaten zone with a range of 4,500 yards. It was also slowly being appreciated that the Vickers could be fired as part of a barrage, using indirect firing at extreme elevation to hose bullets up into the air that would then pour down on targets behind the German lines. It was indeed a heavy weapon and needed a six-man crew to carry the 40-lb gun, 50-lb tripod, water container, condenser tubes and ammunition belts. Once in action, however, it could be operated by a team of two with the rest occupied in bringing up ammunition and extra water supplies.
One crucially important weapon that had to be mastered was the hand grenade. The lineage of this weapon was fairly ancient but it had not been considered part of modern war until the reality of trench warfare forced a rapid reassessment. Many different, makeshift ‘bombs’ were tried, of which the two best known were the ‘hair brush’, which had a slab of explosive tied to a wooden handle, and the ‘jam tin’ bomb—a lethal concoction of explosive and shrapnel packed into an ordinary jam tin with a spluttering fuse to complete its ramshackle appearance. By 1916 the army had settled on the mass-produced Mills bomb, which was reliable, could be thrown with a round arm cricket bowling-style action to about 30 yards and was possessed of a segmented case that fragmented to maximum lethal effect.
All in all there were many new skills for the soldier to learn as the horrors of war unfolded before them. Gas had not been considered when the war started, but now every man had to learn to put his gas mask on properly in conditions designed to simulate the kind of pressure they might face in action.
Yesterday we had the regiment ‘gassed’. All had to pass through a room and stay in it in squads for two or three minutes while gas was fired off at them. The idea is to give the men confidence in their flannel helmets and also to show them the necessity of wearing them in such a way that no outside air can get in under them. Which means the bottom end of the bags have to be tucked well into their coats which later must be buttoned up over them. One man I hear funked it, so no doubt the experience has now overcome his fears.8
Lieutenant Colonel Frank Maxwell VC, 12th Battalion, Middlese
x Regiment, 54th Brigade, 18th Division
The gas helmets described were undoubtedly of the hooded P. H. helmet pattern that had been introduced in November 1915 and would continue to be the standard gas mask in the British Army until replaced by the small box respirator in August 1916. Even such a grim item of personal protection was not immune from the slightly surrealistic perceptions of the British soldier.
The gas mask was a grey flannelled hood, saturated in an evil smelling chemical and uncomfortably sticky. It was drawn over the head and the base was tucked under the collar of the jacket or shirt, as the case may be. The hood had two large eye-pieces of metal rimmed glass. A rubber mouthpiece within the hood was gripped tightly between the teeth, through which the heavily impregnated disinfectant air, inhaled through the nose, was expelled through a rubber ‘flipper’ outside the mask, which opened and closed as one breathed. After a while the excess saliva in the tube coagulated—for want of a better word—causing the ‘flipper’ to sound like a raspberry blower each time one exhaled. It is not difficult to imagine the cacophonous effect of thirty-odd ‘flippers’ performing at the same time!9
Signaller Dudley Menaud-Lissenburg, 97th Battery, 147th Brigade, Royal Field Artillery, 29th Division
Books about the war in 1916 have often deliberately downplayed the most important element of the weaponry of the British Army because it does not fit in with their neo-romantic picture of helpless suffering amongst the ‘victim’ infantry. Yet it was the artillery that lay at the centre of the Battle of the Somme, which was destined to be a gunners’ battle right from the start. By 1916 the generals had correctly identified that artillery held the key to success on the Western Front, although they had not yet gained the experience in how best to use it to unlock the tactical conundrum that bedevilled them. The generals knew, however, that they needed ever-greater concentrations of guns and howitzers if they were to make any progress at all. Yet gunnery demanded a complex network of skills that could not quickly be imparted. The hordes of new gunners needed constant practice at gun drill to build up the kind of teamwork and fitness that was required to allow rapid fire for long periods of time.
The No. 1 was the sergeant or NCO in charge. He’d repeat the orders that would come from the officers, say they got the order, ‘Drop 50 yards!’ He used to give that order. The No. 2 on the right-hand side of the gun, he worked the range drum, it was just a dial all calibrated up to about 6,800 yards that was your total range. Instead of sitting on the seat facing forward, he always used to sit swivel legged, with his left leg out and his left arm out. His right arm was on the range drum. When the gun fired with the recoil of the gun the cam lever practically came into his hand as the gun came back, he used to whip that out, the breech would open and the empty cartridge case used to fly out. The No. 3, the gunlayer got onto the aiming point, laid the gun and actually fired it, he had a handle at the side. We used to register, you couldn’t see the targets you were firing at. They used to plant an aiming post out in front about four foot high, black and white and on the top was a little square, that was white. They used to lay this gun on to that post and any target was so many degrees right or left of this aiming post. The No. 4 and No. 5 worked alternately as loaders, standing there with another shell, they’d whip the shell in. The weight of the shell going in practically helped to close the breech. While No. 5 was loading No. 4 would be picking another one and setting the fuses if it was needed. No. 6 would assist in setting fuses. No. 2 would close the breech again. As soon as he’d closed the breech he used to say, ‘Set!’ No. 3 used to say, ‘Ready!’ No. 1 would say, ‘Fire!’ Set, ready, fire! When you’ve got into the style, you could fire the gun and before the gun came back at the end of its recoil, it was nearly loaded again.10
Gunner George Cole, C Battery, 253rd Brigade, Royal Field Artillery
While their men sweated over drill, officers had to master the skills of ranging shells on to targets from observation posts and faced the problem of mastering the mathematics, and in particular the trigonometry, that had blighted so many of their young lives at school.
The 18-pounder gun was the workhorse of the British artillery. A solid, reliable weapon, firing as one might expect a shell weighing just over 18 lbs, its main fault was its limited range of just 6,500 yards, although this could be raised to 7,800 yards by digging in the gun trail. The other field artillery gun was the 4.5-in howitzer. These fired a 35-lb shell up to 6,600 yards with an entirely different looping trajectory. The heavy artillery were in short supply in 1914 but the demands for ever-heavier shells to smash down the German defences soon caused a massive expansion in the siege batteries of the Royal Garrison Artillery who operated the heavier guns and mortars. These were many and varied but the key type amongst the artillery was the 60-pounder guns that hurled their shell up to 10,500 yards. The bulk of the howitzers were 6-in or 9.2-in types although the 8-in howitzer was developed by the simple expedient of shortening the barrel of the 6-in gun. The howitzers had an obvious value in conditions of trench warfare.
The howitzer fires upwards in a rather curved trajectory, so that when it arrives at the target it drops rather from the sky, instead of a flatter trajectory of a gun that doesn’t rise so much. A gun is superb for shooting at a battleship and a howitzer is superb for shooting at targets which are behind a hill. A lot of enemy batteries were behind hills so that howitzers were ideal for that purpose, and also for dropping down on trenches where there were minenwerfers and machine guns. A gun couldn’t touch them but a howitzer could.11
Second Lieutenant Montague Cleeve, 36th Siege Artillery Battery, Royal Garrison Artillery
At the start of the war when the whole emphasis of the Royal Artillery had been on the necessity of providing shrapnel shell-fire support for the infantry the range was not a problem as the guns were brought into action in direct sight of the enemy. Shrapnel shells were indeed lethal weapons if they caught infantry advancing across open ground.
Shrapnel shell is like a shotgun cartridge really. The nose of the shell is spigotted into the body of the shell and is held by either lead or little wooden rivets. In the bottom there’s a bursting charge, a cast iron plate above that, a rod goes right through the shell. There’s a time fuse and a percussion fuse and the flash from that goes down into the base, ignites the bursting charge, the iron plate pushes the bullets up and forces the nose of the shell off and then the bullets are all sprayed out of the shell. Well, if the shell hits the ground first, it’s useless. You did have a percussion fuse, but all that happened is that the bullets are just driven into the ground. I’ve had a shrapnel shell burst alongside me and no damage at all—practically all gone into the ground. The shrapnel shell time fuse has to be set according to what height you want it to burst. The fuse has a ring marked out in tenths of a second and according to your time of flight, you try to make that shrapnel shell burst just nicely above ground level.12
Signaller Leonard Ounsworth, 124th Heavy Battery, Royal Garrison Artillery
Once trench warfare began it was soon found that infantry in the trenches were relatively safe from the effects of shrapnel. High explosive shells with direct-action fuses that exploded only on impact were required to blast them out from their burrows, but these were initially in very short supply. Shrapnel shells came to be used mainly as a means of cutting barbed wire. This was not what they had been designed to do.
At that time we had no really efficient means of cutting the many square miles of wire entanglements protecting the German lines. Shrapnel to be effective had to burst low, which meant that three-quarters of the shells burst on percussion. It was extremely expensive and almost useless. We did not at that time possess a high explosive shell with direct-action fuse sensitive enough to cut wire.13
Second Lieutenant Alfred Darlington, 283rd Brigade, Royal Field Artillery, 56th Division
By this time methods had been developed by which the fire of the guns could be controlled even when the gunners at the gun positions coul
d not see their targets. Observation posts would be set up in the front line with telephone lines leading back to the guns’ positions. The forward observation officer would correct the fire of the guns up and down in range by means of a simple bracketing system.
Yet the view from the front line was restricted, particularly when the German lines ran along the higher ground which prevented any view of the German rear lines and artillery battery positions. Here the men of the Royal Flying Corps truly came into their own. At the start of the war, during the period of open warfare, aircraft had been seen as a minor addition to the armoury of war. The RFC was mainly used as an advanced reconnaissance patrol, to send a pilot out to locate the enemy and discover in which direction they were moving. As such it had performed a valuable role. But when the trench lines became established it was obvious that aircraft could perform a far greater role. The pressure cooker of war acted to speed up the technological development of aircraft and their engines, allowing more equipment to be carried aloft. It was soon realised that cameras could allow the pilots to bring back a record of what they had seen for later intensive study back on the ground. Soon cameras capable of taking pin-sharp glass negatives were being fitted to the basic army cooperation aircraft—the BE2c. Once the plates were back on the ground the emerging science of photographic interpretation allowed a large amount of valuable information to be gleaned. German gun batteries were exposed despite their best efforts at camouflage, machine-gun posts were obvious, the entrances to dugouts could be clearly seen and headquarters or communications centres were apparent by the tracks of buried telephone wires. Such information was obviously invaluable in planning the assault. The BE2cs could also take up a wireless with which the crews could guide shells right on to their targets using a simple clock-code system for range corrections. The work of the army cooperation aircraft was invaluable and the commander of the RFC, Brigadier General Sir Hugh Trenchard, had developed an aggressive aerial policy to enable them to carry out their duties free from the attentions of German scout aircraft. The British scouts waged a ceaseless offensive, pushing forward over the German lines and seeking to engage any German aircraft as soon as they appeared, keeping them well away from the crucial battlefield where the army cooperation aircraft plied their trade.
