Oberleutant-der-Reserve Kienitz, a machine-gun officer in RIR110 near Sausage Redoubt described the attack:
The serried ranks of the enemy were only a few metres away from the trenches when they were sprayed with a hurricane of defensive fire. Some individuals stood exposed on the parapet and hurled hand grenades at the enemy who had taken cover to the front. Then, initially in small groups, but later in huge masses, the enemy began to pull back towards Bécourt [opposite the entrance to Sausage Valley] until finally it seemed as though every man in the entire field was attempting to flee back to his jumping off point. The fire of our infantrymen and machine guns pursued them, hitting them hard. . . . Our weapons fired away ceaselessly for two hours, then the battle died away.68
Lieutenant-Colonel Somerset’s grim forecast had proved correct. ‘The bombardment had by no means extinguished the German machine guns which increased their fire as the waves advanced, and our Artillery barrage moved off the front line of the German system,’ he wrote.69 ‘They were almost wiped out & very few reached the German front line.’ An artillery smoke screen on La Boisselle was largely unsuccessful, due to the direction and weakness of the wind, and failed to obscure German machine-gunners’ views.70 ‘The Germans put down a terrific barrage on our front line directly the assault commenced & opposite La Boisselle it was doubled. Chapes Spur & the forward slopes of Tara & Usna [Hills] were swept by machine gun fire,’71 Somerset said. ‘The 11th Suffolks in the support line had further to go & walked straight into the German barrage.’72 This was the ghastly experience of all of the 34th’s follow-up battalions, not just 11th Suffolks.
Attempts to cross no-man’s-land by the three sections of 207th Field Company, Royal Engineers (RE), at about 10 a.m. faltered in the face of ‘impossible’ machine-gun fire.73 At 1 p.m., a single company of 18th Northumberland Fusiliers (with about 30 bombers from 10th Lincolns) attempting to reinforce the Royal Scots also failed to get across.
Survivors recalled chattering machine guns and likened the patter of bullets to heavy rain or hail. They told of friends falling face down, one after another, and wondered when they themselves would be hit. ‘It shook my faith in every certainty. Your officers, your pals, maybe even men you didn’t care for much, all falling in front of you,’ wrote Lance-Sergeant Jerry Mowatt, 16th Royal Scots.74 Private Lew Shaugnessy, 27th Northumberland Fusiliers, was at first curious when he saw scores of soldiers falling around him: ‘I wanted to find out what they were looking for, it didn’t occur to me that they were men in their death agonies kicking and screaming.’75 Others spoke of near misses, shot-through tunics and equipment, fractured bones, arterial spurts, gunshot wounds to limb or torso and of bullets slamming into corpses. Some veterans even remembered the smell of battle: Private Corbett, 15th Royal Scots, said the stench of cordite ‘resulted in an atmosphere that was choking to the throat.’76 Those who advanced furthest often felt isolated and put their progress down to luck. The wounded spoke of terrible injuries and prolonged, parched agony.
Machine-gun fire almost tore Captain Peter Ross, 16th Royal Scots, in two at the waist. The mathematics teacher was in unimaginable pain and begged somebody to end his misery. It came down to an order; two of his men reluctantly obliged.77
No-man’s-land was covered with hundreds of soldiers, the living motionless and pressed hard to the ground to avoid snipers’ bullets. Private Senescall saw a man shot in the head. ‘I distinctly heard, in spite of the other noises, him give a loud groan.’78 He saw ‘Gerry hats moving about’ in trenches further up Sausage Valley. A shell landed nearby:
With all the bits and pieces flying up was a body. The legs had been blown off right up to his crutch. I have never seen a body lifted so high. It sailed up and towards me. I can still see the deadpan look on his face under the tin hat, which was still on, held by the chin strap. He still kept coming and landed with a bonk a few yards to my left. Lucky me that he missed me.79
More shells burst near Senescall, followed by a spatter of bullets. A delirious soldier sobbed for his mother: ‘He sounded like one of the fifteen or sixteen year olds of which there was a sprinkling in the battalions.’80 Dusk fell, and, after a testing 13 hours in no-man’s-land, Senescall bolted roughshod over bodies until he made it back to the British lines. Private Edward Dyke, 26th Northumberland Fusiliers, chanced his arm, too: ‘The return to safety was as bad as the charge. We came down a slope, which we had now to ascend. Machine guns were rattling, and German snipers from the opposite hill were picking off the wounded.’81
The mixed bag of 10th Lincolns, 11th Suffolks and 24th Northumberland Fusiliers who had reached the crater held its still-warm rim closest to the German trenches. Soon enough, machine-gun fire played along the chalkstone lip; the wounded and dead rolled down into its still-steaming core. ‘It was as hot as an oven after just being blown up,’ said Lieutenant Ambrose Dickinson, 10th Lincolns.82 Nearby, Lieutenant John Turnbull, same battalion, was wounded in the spine as he crawled for the crater: ‘There were 50–100 unwounded men. We consolidated around the lip of the crater; our parapet was of uncertain thickness and very crumbly. There was a certain amount of cover for all but very shallow,’ he later wrote.83 Turnbull continued: ‘I found my flow of language very useful several times; especially when the fit men wanted to bolt for it and leave a good hundred wounded who couldn’t walk. I asked them what the — — they thought they were doing and they all meekly went back, much to my surprise.’84 Private Frank Stubley, 10th Lincolns, made it beyond the crater but said machine-gun fire ‘cut us a bit thick just as we got over his second line. That is where he stopped most of us. He gave me one through my nose and out by the cheek.’85 These soldiers would hold the ground around and just beyond the crater rim for the rest of the day, incurring a constant trickle of casualties in the process.
A Russian Sap known as Kerriemuir Street extended almost up to the German front line near Lochnagar crater and was used as a forward supply route for bombs, ammunition and water.86 Two other Russian Saps on III Corps’ front were Waltney in 2nd Lincolns’ sector and Rivington in 2nd Royal Berkshires’ area; the former was opened on 1 July but apparently went unused, while the latter remained unopened. Meantime, Kerriemuir Street was 12–14 feet below ground, its 410-foot-long corridor being almost 9 feet high and roughly 3 feet wide.87 It finished about 180 feet short of the German line, a jot northwest of the crater, and had its head opened late on 30 June.88 From about 10 a.m., it was clogged with wounded men heading back and supply parties moving forward. By about 7 p.m. it had been extended to the old German front line.89 It was via this route that 18th Northumberland Fusiliers and 209th Field Company, RE, lugged forward bombs, ammunition, water and so forth. ‘It was due to their exertions that the men in the front line were able to hold on,’ wrote 34th Division’s war diarist.90 As one soldier who plied this course later wrote: ‘A small [Russian] Sap head had been blown [open] not many yards from the German front line and through this came supplies and we also got a telephone cable from it and we signals [sic] fixed up a telephone to Advanced Brigade H.Q. & this was fixed up at the bottom of some stairs of a German front line dugout.’91
Through the afternoon German officers and NCOs set to reorganising RIR110’s garrison, particularly in the areas where 101st Brigade had broken into its lines. That meant organising counterattack groups, establishing which ground was still German-held and, most importantly, working out exactly where the enemy was. Unteroffizier Gustav Brachat, RIR110, tried to make contact with parties of German soldiers near Scots Redoubt. ‘I suddenly heard “Halt”. I stood in front of a barricade and firmly determined through listening and observing that it was occupied by Englishmen. I went back to relate the news to my platoon.’92
CLOSER TO THE Albert–Bapaume road the 102nd made limited, bloody headway. In the right column, 21st Northumberland Fusiliers began crossing the 200-yards-wide no-man’s-land about two minutes before Zero and quickly overran the pulverised trenches between La Boisselle and the Lochnagar
crater. It linked up with the 101st to its right at Schwabenhöhe. The 21st was followed by 22nd and then 26th Northumberland Fusiliers, which both suffered severely on the exposed eastern slopes of Tara Hill at the hands of the La Boisselle machine-gunners and the German defensive barrage.93 The fusiliers’ few survivors made it some 500 yards beyond the German front line, running into increasingly stiff resistance from support companies of RIR110 and Infantry Regiment 23 (IR23). Leutnant Paul Fiedel, IR23, likened the experience for his men to rifle-range shooting: ‘They grinned at their Leutnants with pipes in their mouths and were happy. This was an opportunity to do something other than the endless entrenching. A machine-gun crew of the 2nd Company, RIR110, smoked at their guns.’94
Whistles blew and Private Thomas Easton’s platoon of 21st Northumberland Fusiliers began moving towards the Lochnagar crater area. He was in one of the battalion’s later waves and noticed German machine-gun fire passing overhead: ‘This was so until we passed our own front line and started to cross no-man’s-land, then trench machine guns began the slaughter. Men fell on every side, screaming with the severity of there [sic] wounds, those who were unwounded dare not attend to them.’95 Dead lay on the enemy’s wire, and ‘their bodies formed a bridge for others to pass over and into the German front line.’ Small groups of bombers worked their way up communication trenches between La Boisselle and the crater. Grenades were tossed into dugouts and nests of resistance were bombed into submission:
There was [sic] fewer still of us but we consolidated the lines we had taken by preparing firing positions on the rear of the trenches gained, and fighting went ok all morning and gradually died down, as men & munitions on both sides became exhausted. Some of our Battalion troop got consolidated on the edge of the Great Crater on our right, but little further progress was made.96
The severely wounded lay in a 30-foot-deep dugout in the old German front line, but ‘many of them just died, for nothing much could be done until darkness set in.’ Easton recalled sitting briefly with an older soldier named Jack in the captured trench. Jack was delirious; he reckoned he could hear a band playing. ‘This man finally flopped forward and he had no back. He had been hit by an explosive bullet which blew out the whole of his back between the shoulders and he was dead.’ Easton continued, ‘the day wore on, no rest, no let up, wounded men pleaded for water to make up the blood they had lost, but water was at a premium for the day had been hot.’ Company Quartermaster Sergeant Gawen Wild, 26th Northumberland Fusiliers, was wounded and hauled into a shell hole by a friend who was killed in the act. ‘You can imagine my feelings, lying there with one of my best chums who’d given his life to save mine,’ he wrote.97
Surprisingly, a few fusiliers made it to Bailiff Wood, near Contalmaison, about 2000 yards behind the German front line. As Leutnant-der-Landwehr Alfred Frick, Reserve Field Artillery Regiment 28 (RFAR28), told it: ‘Runners, telephonists and men from the Construction Company were formed into a defence platoon and set off under the command of Leutnant Strüvy [of Reserve Field Artillery Regiment 29 (RFAR29)]. This little united force succeeded in ejecting the bold intruders.’98 These endeavours towards Contalmaison, along with those mentioned earlier, were exceptions to the rule. The overall pattern was scores of Northumberland Fusiliers being shot down as they closed on the trenches held by IR23 a couple of hundred yards beyond the crater. Local counterattacks and limited bomb supplies saw the 102nd’s early gains halved within hours, and of the roughly 2100 officers and men of the 21st, 22nd and 26th Northumberland Fusiliers who set out, only several hundred remained in the German lines.
‘In the event of my death I leave all of my property and effects to My Wife Mrs Norah Nugent,’99 wrote Private George Nugent, 22nd Northumberland Fusiliers, before battle. He was killed within an ace of Lochnagar crater, likely by a bullet or shrapnel. The 28-year-old labourer’s bones were found there in 1998 and identified by an engraved cutthroat razor. A weathered oak cross with metal plaque now stands near the spot. Nugent — then a married father of a one-year-old girl — is now buried at Ovillers Military Cemetery. His epitaph’s opening line: ‘Lost. Found.’100 Captain William Herries, same battalion, made it further than Nugent but found his progress blocked by the support companies of IR23 and RIR110:
Most of the men were killed, and the only thing to do was to get a machine gun up, which we were fortunate enough to do. Then we gave them it hot. Further along [Captain John] Forster, [Lieutenant William] McIntosh and [Lieutenant Walter] Lamb got over with a party of men, but the whole lot were mown down with a machine gun. In the meantime our bombers were at work and reached their [German] third line, which they held for a short time, but out of which we were bombed step by step — all our bombs having been used. I won’t tell you of any of the scenes in the trenches, but I had to pull myself together with a mouthful of brandy once or twice. We were now busy digging the Bosches out of their dugouts. They all threw up their hands and yelled, ‘Mercy Kamerade!’ and seemed very surprised that they were not killed off.101
Forster and Lamb have no known grave and are today named on the Thiepval Memorial. McIntosh died of wounds on 6 July 1916 and is buried at St Sever Cemetery, Rouen.
Back in the British lines, battery commander Captain Ivan Pery-Knox-Gore, 152nd Brigade, Royal Field Artillery (RFA), saw a machine gun firing from La Boisselle’s southern outskirts, and resolved to break orders. ‘Took the law into my own hands, stopped firing per [barrage] time table and turned our gun onto the M.G. [machine gun]’102 His gun silenced that machine gun and several others nearby, and blew a sniper ‘to bits.’103 Pery-Knox-Gore then directed his guns to support the infantry’s limited gains just south of La Boisselle. ‘Turned our guns onto the points where M.G. & rifle fire were coming from & eventually silenced all & our men were left in peace & started consolidating. It was nervous work strafing the [German] bombers as at times they were only about 50 yards from ours.’104 Nervous work, too, for the infantry, as Lieutenant Turnbull recalled: ‘For some unknown reason, our artillery started shelling us with whizz-bangs.’105 He lit a red flare, signalling to an artillery-spotting aircraft, which flew off and alerted the batteries. The barrage was stopped. ‘Of course,’ wrote Turnbull, ‘the Boche redoubled his efforts, though we escaped without further casualties.’ Generally, though, the RFC’s contact patrols were a complete failure in III Corps’ sector, wrote Lewis of 3rd Squadron: ‘No flares or any ground signals seen. Nothing whatever to report to corps.’106
In Mash Valley the 102nd’s leading 20th and 23rd Northumberland Fusiliers were almost annihilated by machine-gun crossfire from Ovillers and La Boisselle.107 Here the width of no-man’s-land varied greatly, at the extremes 100–800 yards wide but mostly 500–750 yards. Fantastic as the Y-Sap mine blast appeared, it — along with two smaller ones at the Glory Hole — utterly failed to shatter resistance close to La Boisselle, or even provide piles of spoil high enough to reduce observation and enfilade from its ruins. Barely any of the 23rd reached the crater after starting off at 7.35 a.m. to avoid falling debris from the explosion. But some, along with disorganised groups of the neighbouring 20th, which began at 7.30 a.m. and had the widest stretch of open ground to cross, breached the German trenches north of La Boisselle. Fewer made it a hundred or so yards behind its piles: ‘It was seen later from the position of the dead that some [of the 20th and 23rd] had crossed the [German] front trench and moved on to the second before they were shot down, and that flanking parties had tried in vain to force an entrance to La Boisselle.’108
One officer amazingly walked unseen up the Albert–Bapaume road, into La Boisselle, collected some souvenirs from a German dugout and returned them to the headquarters of 102nd Brigade, which was commanded by Brigadier-General Trevor Ternan.109 Further back, Lieutenant James Hately recalled how the 25th Northumberland Fusiliers, coming on behind the 23rd, formed up in the western lee of Usna Hill, swapping ‘cheer’o’s and ‘good luck’s before moving up the slope:110 ‘I could see the men stumble and fall head
long or see others go up in the air, but still the remainder went steadily forward, till I lost them when they crested the hill.’111 Once over the crest, the exposed 25th, like the 103rd’s three other battalions, was briskly destroyed by the overworked Ovillers and La Boisselle machine-gunners: ‘Heavy fire from machine guns and rifles was opened on [the] battalion from the moment the assembly trenches were left also a considerable artillery barrage. . . . The forward movement was maintained until only a few scattered soldiers were left standing,’ wrote 25th Northumberland Fusiliers’ war diarist in his matter-of-fact after-battle report.112
A horrified Vizefeldwebel Laasch saw clusters of British soldiers behind his trench at the northeast end of La Boisselle, most likely some of the very few 20th or 23rd Northumberland Fusiliers who made it that far:
We fired, partly standing upright, into the Englishmen at close range. Did the excitement race through my veins or was our success still not damning enough for me? I staggered around between the groups and shouted: ‘Blast it, fire at them, fire at them!’ until an annoyed Landwehrmann yelled at me while loading: ‘By thunder Herr Feldwebel, I am firing!’ I fired there with him and it grew quieter. How we knocked them over like hares!113
Laasch ventured gingerly down a communication trench towards the front line. Suddenly he was confronted by three British soldiers: ‘I threw my hand grenade in front of their feet and jumped back as fast as lightning.’ Later he found the grenade had killed a British officer with red hair and freckles.
Thirty-fourth Division’s attack was effectively over by 10 a.m., although localised fighting would continue for the rest of the day. The division’s only meaningful gains were atop Fricourt Spur, around Scots Redoubt and Round Wood, where it was in contact with XV Corps, and a besieged footing around and slightly beyond Lochnagar crater. None of the 34th’s battalions came close to achieving even their first objectives, even though a few isolated groups advanced good distances beyond the German front line. ‘It was no fault of theirs that they did not reach their allotted objective,’ said Brigadier-General Robert Gore, commander of the 101st.114 The advances directly along Mash and Sausage Valleys were predictable failures. The wounded and unscathed alike sheltered in noman’s-land among the dead, under the blazing sun. Their chance to slip back unseen to the British front line — itself jammed with bloodied, broken men — would only come in the half light of dusk or under the cover of night. Until then they risked adding to what was an already swollen casualty roll: ‘Exposure of the head meant certain death. None of our men were visible but in all directions came pitiful groans and cries of pain,’ said one officer stranded in the Mash Valley no-man’s-land.115
First day of the Somme Page 28
