First day of the Somme

by Andrew Macdonald

  German accounts outlined the fate of the few Staffords who made it into their trenches in chillingly brief detail. Small counterattack groups of RIR91 squeezed the North Staffords out with repeated concentric skirmishes and then chased them ‘over the first line with hand grenades and infantry fire, so that only a few Englishmen escaped.’157 Adjacent to the Foncquevillers–Gommecourt road it was the same. Two companies of RIR55 killed, captured or ejected any South Staffords with the same tactics. By 8 a.m. the only Staffords still in the German front line opposite the 137th were corpses or prisoners. They were supposed to be at their final objective.

  For most, the 137th’s high-tide mark began about halfway across noman’s-land and petered out at the frequently intact thicket of German wire. Private John Atkins, 1/6th North Staffords, recalled that ‘most of us got shot down there [at the wire].’158 One officer remembered the battalion’s first two waves were heavily depleted before even reaching the wire, noting that few of the third wave got that far.159 Shell-hole dwellers and those in the open clawed at the earth with hands, bayonets and entrenching tools to improve their cover. Private Higgins, 1/5th North Staffords, lay winded by shrapnel under the broiling sun: ‘I was parched with thirst, my water bottle had been knocked off somehow coming over. The smell of blood and dead bodies was sickening. I mentally said goodbye to those I loved, as I did not seem to have the ghost of a chance of living through that day.’160 Once at the wire, said Lance-Corporal Jack Maycock, 1/6th North Staffords, the ‘Germans threw bombs at us and opened rapid rifle fire from their front trench, which was strongly manned. They had grey uniforms and little round grey caps.’161 Some stood atop their parapet to get a better shot.162 It continued into the evening. Any sign of life or resistance was quietened with bomb and bullet. Lieutenant John Stansby, 1/6th North Staffords, lay thrice wounded: ‘When darkness fell the Germans threw volleys of hand grenades into the wire, and then came out to pick up the pieces.’163 He was taken prisoner.164

  A jot further north, 139th Brigade made better initial progress. Its leading battalions snatched a toehold in the enemy line, also under cover of smoke. The attack was led by 1/5th* and 1/7th Sherwood Foresters† abreast, the latter on the left. Behind were 1/6th‡ and 1/8th Sherwood Foresters,§ respectively support and reserve battalion. Altogether these battalions were to comprise nine waves, all of their soldiers burdened with much the same equipment as the 137th and the rear-most lines again lugging heavier supplies. The attacking battalions totalled about 1700 men, excluding the 1/8th, which did not actually attack, and were to advance up to 300 yards behind the German parapet on a 550-yard frontage, protecting the 137th’s left flank in the process. Minutes before Zero, German artillerymen and machine-gunners — once again forewarned by the smoke and audible dilution of the shellfire as the British barrage stepped off their front line to targets further back — began sweeping the path of advance.

  Casualty-depleted leading waves made it to the German wire, fewer still filtering through occasional gaps towards the enemy parapet. Some of RIR91’s front-line infantry had yet to sortie from its dugouts: perhaps the entrances were blocked or the soldiers had not heard the spoiler of lifting shellfire. Small groups of Sherwood Foresters dropped into the hostile ditch unopposed, fewer still ventured further on. On the far left a few of the 1/7th veered into Schwalbenneste, where they were spied by RFC observers. Shellfire to suppress the redoubt’s multiple machine guns was stopped, which proved disastrous for subsequent waves of the 139th and the 137th, these respectively having 2/1st North Midland and 1/2nd North Midland Field Companies, RE, attached. Soon numerous soldiers of RIR91 were at their parapet,165 many tossing stick grenades at Sherwood Foresters still scrambling to get through stretches of intact wire. Leutnant-der-Reserve Kümmel said machine guns were brought into position and ‘directed a murderous fire on the English.’166 This and defensive shellfire ‘crushed’ the attack.167 Only elements of the 139th’s fourth, fifth and sixth waves stepped beyond their jumping-off line.168 Battlefield communications failed. No-man’s-land was alive with metal. Forward movement faltered; the 250-odd Sherwood Foresters in German lines were cut off.

  ‘It was like driving sheep to the slaughter,’ said Private Joseph Singleton, 1/7th Sherwood Foresters, who was shot in the calf while in the German trenches.169 Singleton, together with 17-year-old Private Donald McAllister, of the same battalion, hobbled back to no-man’s-land. Just as he dived into a crater he saw German soldiers in the trench he had just left. ‘Fuck ’em!’ said McAllister as a bullet smacked fatally into his head.170 Singleton crawled to safety that night. McAllister was later buried at Hannescamps New Military Cemetery. Eighteen-year-old Private Auberon Tomlinson, 1/7th Sherwood Foresters, saw someone fall wounded and shrieking into the barbed-wire web, and his commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Lawrence Hind, shot through the head. ‘He was beyond help,’ said Tomlinson, who lay among corpses, ‘pretending to be dead all day.’171 Second-Lieutenant Sydney Banwell, also 1/7th Sherwood Foresters, was shot and fell, and over the next four days was wounded six more times before managing to crawl back. He had survived on water and food scavenged from the dead. Private Herbert Ulyatt, same battalion, saw a wounded officer grasp at his chest and fall to his knees, as if praying amid the fusillade. He saw a bullet thud into another officer, who ‘turned a somersault and lay still.’172 Nearby, a shrapnel splinter ruptured Private Sidney Smith’s left eye and scored his right. The 1/5th Sherwood Foresters soldier was taken prisoner just outside the German lines: ‘I cannot now see the features in a person’s face.’173

  Captain John Green, Royal Army Medical Corps, attached to 1/5th Sherwood Foresters, won a posthumous Victoria Cross for half dragging, half carrying a wounded officer back from the German wire against orders. Twice the keen rower and all-round sportsman stopped to bind Captain Frank Robinson’s wounds; the second time he was killed by a bullet to the brain. Green, a 27-year-old surgeon, lies at Foncquevillers Military Cemetery under the shadow of a catalpa tree. Twenty-three-year-old ‘Bubbles’ Robinson, the 139th’s machine-gun officer, died and was buried at Warlincourt Halte British Cemetery.

  Sherwood Foresters who had made it into the German line pressed deeper into the labyrinth of trenches, some of which were 8–12 feet deep, while others were little more than mounds of loose chalkstone. Soon they ran into RIR91’s support companies. Behind them the just-bypassed frontline garrison exited its dugouts and fired into their backs. The 35 men of 1/7th Sherwood Foresters who made it into Schwalbenneste were forced back into the wire and killed. A break-in just south of the redoubt by a further 25 was ‘destroyed through bitter close combat’ in a matter of minutes.174 Between this point and the northern corner of Gommecourt Wood small groups of the 1/5th and 1/7th, likely totalling no more than 200, had made it to the German second trench and attempted to bring a machine gun into action. Fighting spluttered back and forth for three or four hours. The Sherwood Foresters were always going to lose: they were fewer in number, and short of bullets and bombs. German shellfire meant that neither reinforcements nor ammunition could be run over. RIR91’s counterattack companies rushed the machine gun, thereafter snatching successive trench bays until any still-living Sherwood Foresters had fled.175 By 11 a.m. the 139th’s gains had been lost.176

  The German trenches were rent by gunshots and grenade blasts and hobnailed boots clattering along duckboards. ‘I threw three bombs. I did not wait to see the result,’ said Private Frank Bates, 1/5th Sherwood Foresters, of encountering a German soldier.177 Corporal Peter Murphy’s band of 1/5th Sherwood Foresters rumbled a group of nine enemy soldiers. One was shot. The rest bolted. ‘I bayoneted the last two while the remainder of the enemy was shot down by our party.’178 They then ran into a strong counterattack group:

  A German ran up along the parados from the left. Captain [Arthur] Naylor [of 1/5th Sherwood Foresters] shouted ‘That man — shoot him,’ but we were too late for as we raised our rifles the German dropped his bomb and jumped into [the] far
end of [the] next [trench] bay. We were now subjected to bombing from both flanks, and having exhausted our own bombs we replied with the German ‘potato-mashers’ [grenades]. We held the bay while the store of bombs lasted.179

  Not far away, half a dozen bullets thudded into a trench wall near Lieutenant Theodore Downman, 1/5th Sherwood Foresters. He moved on, made it to the second German trench and linked up with a dozen others. Bombs were spent fighting off German soldiers who snatched pot shots around trench corners before darting away. Downman saw Second-Lieutenant John McInnes, 1/5th Sherwood Foresters, stagger dazed when a bullet glanced off his helmet: ‘He was hit again, this time right through the helmet and into the brain. He died immediately.’180 McInnes is named on the Thiepval Memorial. At about 8 a.m. Downman’s left arm and hip were pierced by grenade splinters:

  The men scattered immediately and Bosch opened with rifles from the direction in which we had been going. I was hit by a bullet in the left arm, through the bicep, the bullet then struck a steel shaving mirror which I carried in my left breast pocket, and so being turned made a shallow groove across my solar plexus and landed in a box of safety matches in my right breast pocket, igniting them. . . . Almost immediately after the bombs the trench filled with Germans from both sides, and before I could offer any resistance I was pounced on.181

  Downman, who died aged 88 in 1970 at Penzance, was collared. Six weeks later his family received word he was a prisoner of war.

  Mid-morning, Brigadier-Generals Hugh Williams of the 137th and Charles Shipley of the 139th were mulling over their next moves. Both knew their gore-spattered trenches were clogged with battle stragglers, knots of men whose units had yet to attack, and discarded equipment. Hostile shellfire was still falling and machine-gun bullets kicked up parapet dust or whistled overhead by the thousands. By 9.01 a.m., Williams had been told the 137th’s attack had failed, but he wanted to stop any freed-up German infantry and artillery from being deployed against the 139th’s and 56th (1st London) Division’s gains. He sanctioned an attack comprising any available men of 1/5th South Staffords and 1/5th North Staffords, followed by elements of 1/5th Leicesters.* Lieutenant-Colonel Raymer, 1/5th South Staffords, was wounded while organising the operation and the job then fell to Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Jones, 1/5th Leicesters. Jones later commented on the proposed operation: ‘A second attack by the same troops is always very difficult to organise, and in this case the difficulties were many.’182 By contrast, Shipley, aware that the 139th’s role was to provide flank support for the 137th, wanted to run ammunition across to any Sherwood Foresters still in the German lines. He saw anything else as futile.183 Dwindling supplies of trench-mortar smoke bombs needed to be restocked if the infantry’s move across no-man’s-land was to be masked with smoke. Based on these reasons, and common sense, both brigadiers realised further operations were not immediately possible.

  A ‘worn-out’ and ‘incapable of inspiring any enthusiasm’184 Montagu-Stuart-Wortley, the 46th’s commander, was not dissuaded. He ordered an attack involving his two brigades to be carried out as soon as possible.185 The 137th would attack afresh and the 139th would send over one company to support its men still thought to be in the German lines. It was about 9.30 a.m., and Snow, who was at the 46th’s headquarters, had already confirmed the 56th’s break-in. It was probably on the strength of Snow’s words that Montagu-Stuart-Wortley now told Williams the ‘success of the whole [VII Corps] operation depends on your pushing on as soon as possible.’186 It suggested Snow saw any hold-up of the 46th as transient. At about 10 a.m., Montagu-Stuart-Wortley insisted Williams’ brigade take ‘Gommecourt Wood at all costs.’187 This was an interim objective, and clarified that he and Snow were thinking in terms of a salvage operation that just might have a spill-over benefit for the 56th. Even then, the pair was plainly out of touch with events and interpreting the clutch of increasingly grim battle reports in their possession far too charitably. They did not appreciate the 46th’s operation was already in its final stages. Snow sanctioned the attack.188

  A truculent Shipley wanted none of it, as Lieutenant Claude Good, 1/7th Sherwood Foresters attached to 46th’s headquarters, recalled of a telephone call he overheard:189

  The GOC [General Officer Commanding, Montagu-Stuart-Wortley] said, ‘The 5th Battalion must go over and regain contact.’ The Brigadier [Shipley] said it was impossible. The gunfire & machinegun fire was so intense nothing could get across, also, the enemy wire was not cut, [and] no-man’s-land was three hundred yards across. The GOC said: ‘They must go over under a smoke screen.’ General Shipley replied that it would blow back over our own lines. I cannot remember the details of the row which followed. I recall that Shipley said ‘I stand by my decision and am willing to face the consequences.’190

  At 11.20 a.m. Montagu-Stuart-Wortley — impatient, growing in resolve and unaware the last Sherwood Foresters had finally been evicted from the German line — stipulated a 12.15 p.m. start.191 Remnants of the 137th — two waves of 1/5th North and South Staffords followed by two of 1/5th Leicesters — would attack under smoke, as would one company and ammunition-carrying parties of the 139th’s 1/6th Sherwood Foresters. The Staffords men had to be side-stepped left through congested trenches to attack opposite the northern end of Gommecourt Wood, roughly where the 1/6th North Staffords had gone over that morning. Delays, disorganisation, confusion and lack of smoke bombs saw the attack delayed a trinity of times to 3.30 p.m. British artillery shelled the German lines in the 30 minutes before Zero. The thin veil of smoke provided by the trench mortars from 3.20 p.m. provoked an instant reflux of German shell- and machine-gun fire. Shipley cancelled the 139th’s operation,192 Williams following suit with the 137th as officer casualties and confusion within the attacking battalions caused more delays.193 Snow, now knowing the 56th’s gains were being fast eroded on the south side of the salient, finally called off the attack.

  ‘I was, and am, quite satisfied that there was no possible chance of reaching the objective and no result could have been achieved,’ wrote Lieutenant-Colonel Godfrey Goodman, 1/6th Sherwood Foresters, of the attempts to restart the attack.194 Twenty of his men did not get word that it had been cancelled. Eighteen were felled by shrapnel and bullet within 20–30 yards of their own parapet. One made it back. Others, too, had seen the writing on the wall. Lieutenant Moore, 1/5th Leicesters, thought orders for the afternoon flutter would produce ‘sheer murder’ and had contemplated refusing the order.195 ‘I gave myself a metaphorical kick up the bottom and pulled myself together,’ he said.196 It was fortunate for him that the attack was cancelled.

  Not so lucky were the 1/5th Lincolns, 138th Brigade. Snow and Allenby, the commander of Third Army, wanted to provide a 2.30 a.m. diversion on 2 July to support a renewed attack by Hunter-Weston’s derelict VIII Corps at the same time. Hunter-Weston hoped to reach and evacuate any of his men then mistakenly still believed to be at Serre, but VIII Corps cancelled this operation shortly before 10 p.m. Meantime, Allenby’s supporting plan was essentially a watered-down version of VII Corps’ already failed operation that would see one brigade of the 46th and two battalions of the 56th link up behind Gommecourt. On receiving word that VIII Corps was not going ahead, Allenby dropped these plans: ‘The general situation does not appear to me to demand the sacrifice.’197 But he, Snow and Montagu-Stuart-Wortley were still keen to reach and extract Sherwood Foresters still believed to be in the German lines around and just south of Schwalbenneste. Plans for this 11 p.m. operation had bubbled along throughout the evening, and were eventually signed off by Snow’s headquarters. Hull of the 56th wanted no part in either this or the now-cancelled plan for early on 2 July; Montagu-Stuart-Wortley was as game as ever. So it was that, at about midnight, a much-delayed company of 1/5th Lincolns ventured towards the German line just north of Gommecourt Wood, which had been attacked by 1/5 Sherwood Foresters that morning. They lost direction and were rumbled outside the enemy wire. German infantry once again blazed away with machine guns and rifles
, and called down defensive shellfire in the flickering light of flares. Forty-eight Lincolns were casualties. Survivors went to ground and were eventually ordered to retire.

  The commander of 1/5th Lincolns, Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas Sandall, later described the night-time operation as a ‘forlorn hope,’ citing lack of organisation and time, and assembly trenches clogged with wounded, dead and battle stragglers. ‘It is obvious that failure was inevitable.’198 Neither was the futility of the operation lost on Private Arthur Ward, 1/5th Lincolns, whose platoon was one of several that did not go forward. Ward’s sergeant thought the orders vague and demanded definite instructions. He wanted to know whether his men were to gain and defend a foothold in German lines or bring prisoners back. Neither Sandall, who obviously harboured reservations of his own, nor his adjutant could provide answers to the platoon commander’s question. ‘They informed the sergeant that his action might be looked on as mutiny,’ wrote Ward. ‘Still he remained firm stating that the men would follow willingly, but they must have a fair chance. We were recalled and that was the end of that incident.’199

  It was a pathetic epitaph to a day-long tragedy. The 46th’s failure was the result of mostly intact German wire, numerous defenders who sat out the preparatory bombardment in shell-proof dugouts, and large numbers of operational enemy artillery batteries that intervened when the attack began and ultimately decided the outcome of the battle. Cosmetic damage to the German positions had scarcely interfered with 2nd Guards Reserve Division’s pre-planned defensive scheme and any British incursions were efficiently eliminated by long-standing counterattack tactics. Smoke cover offered no protection to Montagu-Stuart-Wortley’s infantry, and its pre-Zero release only flagged the pending attack to already-alert German observers. It was then quickly dissipated in this part of the battlefield by wind. The barrage supporting the 46th was fundamentally flawed, in that it lifted off the German front line too quickly and for the most part allowed defenders to man their parapets and begin shooting into no-man’s-land. The message was clear: the 46th had been categorically defeated by poor planning in the face of an intelligent and flexible German defensive scheme that was almost entirely intact on battle day.