Several tumbled-down red-brick villages hemmed into the forward German defensive system remained formidable infantry obstacles. These fortified villages totalled nine across the entire battle front, all engineered to hold multiple shell-proofed machine-gun posts in their mazes of interconnected cellars and ruins. These posts were difficult to pinpoint before the bombardment, and near impossible when their camouflaged firing apertures looked pretty much like any other dark void in the piles of rubble. It did not matter much whether that was at Gommecourt, Serre, Beaumont Hamel, Ovillers, Mametz or Montauban, which were all a jot behind the front line, or at Thiepval, La Boisselle and Fricourt, which were part of it. Machine-gunners sat out the bombardment in their dugouts and more than likely were under orders to stay their fire to avoid detection. At La Boisselle, for example, all of its 35 cottages were wrecked save a few lonely walls and topsy-turvy roofs. As one historian has noted, ‘To all appearances, therefore, La Boisselle was but a rubble heap, which afforded poor protection against an attacking force; actually it was a terribly strong position in which a small garrison of brave and determined men could offer a stout resistance for a considerable length of time, causing heavy casualties amongst assaulting troops.’204 These razed villages received nothing like the dead weight of shell needed to neutralise their firepower, and each successive blast only made it more difficult to locate machine-gun posts hidden among their ruins.
German infantrymen who chanced death by shell blast for a look above ground found their earthworks devastated. All line regiments reported their trenches flattened, reduced to shallow scrapes or pitted wastelands of overlapping shell holes and quite unrecognisable, while barbed-wire entanglements were damaged.205 Leutnant-der-Reserve Gerster outlined the scene in his typically vivid manner: ‘Tangles of wire wrapped around steel supports still showed in some places. . . . Where the front line trench once ran, shreds of corrugated iron, splinters of timber shuttering, empty food tins, smashed weapons and the kit and equipment of the dead and wounded lay everywhere.’206
RFC aerial photographs, however, showed that many heavily shellpocked trench lines retained at least some of their pre-bombardment form, more so between Gommecourt and La Boisselle than between Fricourt and Montauban. Evidently some of these German regimental writers — several of whom published their books as propaganda during the First World War, others during the more nationalistic 1930s — overwrote the hardships and difficulties to emphasise the victory of 1 July. Soden was closer to the mark when he said his 26th Reserve Division’s positions initially withstood the shellfire well, but were soon severely damaged.207 The inevitable conclusion among German officers and men was that their positions were increasingly ripe for attack,208 but that did not mean they were indefensible.
The acid test was whether enough deep dugouts had been destroyed, killing or incapacitating their occupants. If sufficient German soldiers lived and won the race to their parapet, British infantry would be met with a storm of bullets in no-man’s-land and their attack would almost certainly fail. Intelligence gathering fell to night-time patrols that stole into the hostile ditches, inspecting damage and nabbing prisoners. The large tracts of uncut or partially broken wire before VIII, X and III Corps — between Serre and Leipzig Redoubt — frequently blocked the raiders. In places they were driven off by rifle fire from an alert garrison, suggesting either that the dugouts were intact or that the shellfire had not hit the trenches sheltering enemy infantry.209 Before XV and XIII Corps, the wire was better cut and patrols frequently breached the enemy parapet, finding several dugouts blown in.210 Even in this area, on the eve of battle, several patrols were forced back by heavy German machine-gun and rifle fire, implying that here too enemy soldiers had been sheltering underground.211 Twelve prisoner interrogations were published by Fourth Army in the period 25–30 June, nine from XV Corps’ area and one each from III, X and XIII Corps’ sectors.212 These suggested some dugouts had been destroyed around Fricourt, Mametz and Montauban, but negligible intelligence for the ground between Leipzig Redoubt and Serre meant no such conclusions could be drawn for that part of the battlefield.213
German casualty figures provide a telling insight. That the preparatory bombardment caused 2500–3000 casualties, or 2.6–3.2% of XIV Reserve Corps’ strength, meant the remaining 92,000–92,500 officers and men, or 96.8–97.4%, were alive and able to defend their positions. This survival rate very obviously reveals that the vast majority of German dugouts across XIV Reserve Corps’ sector were intact at the end of the preparatory bombardment.
Senior British intelligence officers, who were unaware of this data at the time, ignored the abundance of available warning signs that the shellfiretorn German positions remained not only defensible, but also defended. ‘From the examination of prisoners,’ said Fourth Army Intelligence, ‘it is apparent that our artillery fire has been most effective. Most of the dugouts in the [enemy] front line have been blown in or blocked up. Even the deep dug-outs of a Battalion H.Q. were not proof against our big shells.’214 This singular optimism was shared by Brigadier-General John Charteris, Haig’s toadying chief of intelligence. ‘So far as I can see, the Germans have no real idea of any attack in force being imminent,’ he wrote on 28 June, entirely out of touch with reality. ‘The chief danger I fear is that they should leave their front-line trenches practically empty and hold in strength their second and third lines. Evidence to-day tends to show that this has not been done as yet.’215 Was Charteris implying he knew the enemy front line remained well defended with its infantry holed up in dugouts, or was he suggesting more worryingly that distant German trenches remained intact and defensible? Charteris was also well aware that the German artillery and infantry had not been silenced.216 A day earlier he had assessed that there ‘must be heavy [British] casualties,’ referring more to the overall scale of Haig’s attack than hinting at pending disaster, ‘but everything looks well for success.’217 With hindsight, Fourth Army Intelligence’s and Charteris’s conclusions can be seen as vacuous — but at the time they were the official line given to Haig and Rawlinson.
German accounts reveal that infantrymen all along the line were waiting for Haig’s attack to begin, which did not bode well for its chances of success. Sentries sheltered in dugout entrances, popping out to nose around, or using a mirror to peer into no-man’s-land.218 It was harrowing work; death and injury were commonplace.219 ‘Many a time,’ wrote Feldwebel Schumacher, RIR119, ‘I came across a man on sentry, his rosary in his hand and his thoughts directed to the strict fulfilment of his duties.’220 Near Ovillers on 25 June a sentry of IR180 alerted his company to an enemy patrol, which was shot into retreat.221 Patrols near Beaumont Hamel and Thiepval on the nights of 26 and 29 June were also thwarted by vigilant lookouts; dugout dwellers raced up into fresh air and drove the raiders back.222 South of Serre, RIR121 said repeated British patrols were fended off by alert soldiers who rushed from their dugouts at a moment’s notice.223 Referring to 26th Reserve Division’s sector north of the Albert–Bapaume road, Leutnant-der-Reserve Gerster was correct when he said the battered ‘German positions were ripe for attack, but not the crew!’224 Further south, at Montauban, IR62 believed that ‘although the position was battered, the garrison was still prepared to defend it.’225 The message was clear: the broken forward German positions remained at least defensible, their garrisons largely intact and responsive to enemy activity.
The shellfire had little physical impact on the German chain of command, but severely disrupted its communication network. Fourteenth Reserve Corps commander Generalleutnant Hermann von Stein’s headquarters at Bapaume was tested by long-range shellfire, but stayed put and in contact with its subordinate divisions via telephone. Two regimental headquarters were destroyed — those of RIR110 and RIR121, the latter’s commanding officer killed — but brigade and divisional headquarters remained operational. Officer losses were few. RIR99 recorded 16 officer casualties during the bombardment, or about 3% of its total losses during that period
.226 More worrying were the frequently cut telephone links in the forward battle zone.227 Frontline infantry companies and platoons were all too often isolated from their own battalion and regimental headquarters, and crucially their supporting artillery.228 Runners took too long to convey messages, and emergency flares to call down defensive shellfire often went unseen in the shroud of smoke. Light-signalling equipment was equally ineffective, and risked revealing headquarters’ locations.229 This patchy communication in Stein’s forward battle zone meant he was dependent on infantry units standing firm when the enemy attacked, relying on rehearsed defensive tactics and on his artillery chiming in independently with a defensive barrage.
MUCH DEPENDED ON how effective Haig’s counter-battery fire was in pinpointing and destroying the guns and artillery positions of XIV Reserve Corps. Most commonly these German batteries were located in some valley, ruined building or shot-through wood, or otherwise simply dug into the ground and camouflaged. They were supposed to be spotted by eyes-peeled observers in aircraft or tethered kite balloons, the latter likened to ‘great gorged leeches of the air,’230 ‘yellow dragons in the blue skies’231 or ‘pensive and somewhat inebriated tadpoles.’232 The giveaways were muzzle flashes, piles of shell casings or the wicker baskets that held them, and poorly disguised earthworks. Sound-ranging was nascent, and in any case the ballad of shellfire rendered that technology more or less useless.233 The idea of counter-battery fire was to destroy or neutralise a sufficient number of German artillery batteries to either prevent or reduce their ability to fire a defensive barrage that could break up Haig’s infantry attack.
The problem was that Haig simply did not have big enough guns — 60-pounder guns and howitzers with bores of six inches or greater — for the job. There were only about 441 (24.9%) of these artillery pieces suitable for counter-battery fire across the attack fronts of Fourth and Third Armies.234 Available data suggests these fired roughly 226,300 high-explosive shells on Fourth Army’s front, or an estimated 15% of the 1.5 million released.235 But shellfire from these big, vital weapons was neutered from the outset by being apportioned over seven days, spread across Fourth Army’s 25,000-yard-wide (14.2-mile-wide) sector, diluted throughout XIV Reserve Corps’ depth positions and split by a variety of destructive tasks beyond counter-battery. ‘There were not sufficient guns on the [VIII] Corps front to attend to the hostile batteries,’236 said Captain James McDiarmid, RGA, adding that the ‘importance of efficient Counter Battery Work had not been fully realised.’237 Emphasis on this type of fire varied between corps: XIII Corps gave it greater priority than XV Corps, the others falling somewhere in between. Even then, competing target priorities, wet weather, poor observation and limited ammunition supply meant the volume of this fire could vary from one day to the next, even within a single corps. Fortunately for Stein the planners at Fourth Army headquarters attached less priority to counter-battery work, which was already far too thinly spread, than to wire-cutting and trench destruction.238
On the face of it, Fourth Army’s counter-battery gunners appeared to make progress. Corps artillery war diarists recorded alleged success in their counter-battery work almost daily, but the data and the way in which it was compiled varied considerably.239 By 30 June it was clear from German shellfire that the counter-battery work had not gone to plan. Fourth Army’s five corps variously assessed hostile fire that day as ‘heavy,’ ‘active,’ ‘moderate,’ ‘considerable’ and ‘fairly active.’240 Two days earlier Rawlinson noted the destruction of German guns was not going well.241 It was this that Major William Dobbie, VIII Corps headquarters, referred to when he later said the ‘reports received at first were very rosy and it was not for some time that we realised that something was amiss.’242
RFC reports confirmed Rawlinson’s counter-battery worries. Of the 571 active battery positions and gun emplacements the RFC claimed to have spotted in the period 24–30 June, just 59 (10.3%) were alleged to have been hit by shells.243 Part of the difficulty lay in the artillery’s accuracy. Captain Ware said of every 800 shells his gun fired only a ‘very small number’ landed on target, and the number of misses ‘must have been very large really.’244 The rest of the problem lay in faulty munitions and unreliable measuring of the counter-battery gunners’ effectiveness. During the bombardment the RFC logged at least 1120 hours of flying time in the battle zone by a total of 468 pilots, many flying multiple sorties.245 Unfortunately these sorties were often ineffectual: the foul weather undermined RFC–artillery co-operation,246 severely crimping aerial observation and frequently forcing counter-battery gunners — already encumbered with poor-quality weapons and shells — to fire blind. As the RFC’s official historian wrote years after the war:
Every hour of bad weather that kept aeroplanes away from the front brought respite to some German battery, and the full effect of the lost hours must be borne by the infantry when they advanced to the assault. No one realised this better than the airmen. Pilots flew in and under the low clouds and took advantage of every bright interval to continue their work of helping the artillery to destroy the enemy guns, but the grey days took their toll of flying time, and the effect on the day of attack, although it cannot be estimated, was none the less important.247
Even when the weather allowed, aerial observation did not always function smoothly, at least according to the artillery. RFC observers were often unable to distinguish the shellfire they were directing from that of other guns.248 Artillerymen on the ground were flooded with too many and often vague target locations from their eyes in the sky,249 and at other times were either unable to locate aeroplanes for the work or were plagued by patchy ground-to-air communication.250 Inexperienced and inefficient observers were also a problem.251 Most of these issues would have been resolvable with time, but immediately prior to 1 July there was no slack and they became just further drains on the quality of British counterbattery fire.
German soldiers were ignorant of the RFC’s difficulties but understood the dangers of aviators’ prying eyes.252 Major Max Klaus, RFAR26, described the British airmen as vultures,253 while Leutnantder-Reserve Ernst Moos, Reserve Field Artillery Regiment 27 (RFAR27), thought them a plague.254 ‘These British arimen,’ wrote one German historian of the Somme, ‘observed for their batteries, dropped bombs on troop quarters, harassed artillery batteries and columns of infantry with machine-gun fire, and photographed the German defences down to the smallest detail.’255 Leutnant-der-Reserve Gerster was one of many who lamented the loss of air superiority,256 and when several German tethered balloons were shot down on 25 June he said the situation worsened.257 As the German historian of the Somme noted: ‘The aerial reconnaissance of the XIV Reserve Corps was hereafter almost paralysed. . . . The enemy completely dominated the air.’258 Klaus said that without observation balloons the German gunners were figuratively blindfolded and the ‘air was almost purely English.’259 The only option to conserve lives and guns, said Gerster, was to avoid detection: ‘Soon no infantryman dared to be outside his dugout when an aircraft was circling overhead. With brown, clay and earth-stained tarpaulins they tried to camouflage the dark holes that marked the entrances to dugouts from the keen eyes of observers.’260 Sometimes these efforts were successful;261 other times not.262 Many German soldiers were angry at their own lack of aerial support ahead of the looming battle.
With this in mind, Stein ordered restraint among his artillery batteries to preserve their ability to provide essential close defensive support for his infantry. The order probably went out in May or June; the exact date is unknown. Stein realised he needed functional guns to destroy or neutralise enemy infantrymen as they attempted to cross no-man’s-land when their preparatory bombardment and supporting barrage lifted. As Leutnant-der-Reserve Georg Büsing, with RFAR20 at Gommecourt, explained: ‘The artillery commander issued orders to maintain a certain level of restraint, as the British seemed, in the first stage of their preparatory fire, to be trying to tempt us to fire in defence so that they could identify
our positions, to induce us to expend a lot of ammunition, to find our batteries by aerial observation.’263 Artilleryofficer Moos agreed, as did Gerster, who noted the order was enforced across 26th Reserve Division’s sector.264 In practice, however, the order was not followed to the letter across XIV Reserve Corps. In general terms it was implemented between Gommecourt and Ovillers, to a lesser extent around La Boisselle and Fricourt, and virtually not at all between Mametz and Montauban, the latter two areas also having the poorest quality gun positions to begin with. Unsurprisingly, those divisions exercising caution in retaliatory artillery fire suffered fewer barrel losses than others.
First day of the Somme Page 17
