The bloody price of failure: the 46th racked up 2455 casualties, for no lasting gains. Included were 853 killed, 1411 wounded, 186 missing and five prisoners. Among the division’s casualties were five battalion commanders, three of them killed, one dead from wounds and another wounded.200 Most of the killing was over by 8.30 a.m. German casualties totalled 265.201 RIR91’s dead, wounded and missing ran to about 150, while those of the battalion of RIR55 deployed in the northern half of the salient totalled about 115, including 18 killed, 95 wounded and two others missing.202 For every German casualty north of the Foncquevillers–Gommecourt road there were 9.2 British, a ratio that emphasises the impact of the in-form German artillery and machine-gunners and resultant one-sided nature of the fighting.
Montagu-Stuart-Wortley was sacked a few days later. In Snow’s words to Haig, the 46th had shown a ‘lack of offensive spirit.’203 The implication was that VII Corps’ attack might have achieved more but for the 46th. This was a serious allegation and revealed that Snow had no concept of the 1 July battlefield, or of how the 46th’s ordeal had been framed by his and corps headquarters’ failings. He said Montagu-Stuart-Wortley was too old and lacked the constitution required for command, and that a younger man would be preferable. On every count Snow was lobbing stones from a glass house. He probably wanted to appease Haig, who was already fuming over the mistaken belief that few of the neighbouring VIII Corps’ men had left their trenches on 1 July. Montagu-Stuart-Wortley was the obvious fall guy for the 46th’s failure. Allenby agreed. Haig already disliked Montagu-Stuart-Wortley and blamed him for the Hohenzollern Redoubt debacle on 13–19 October 1915, an action that had resulted in the useless slaughter of British infantry for no lasting military gains. That Montagu-Stuart-Wortley had previously corresponded with King George V, at the latter’s request, only fuelled Haig’s distrust. As Home, a senior staff officer at 46th headquarters, said, ‘they meant getting rid of him and I suppose this was the opportunity.’204 Montagu-Stuart-Wortley’s career was over. He died an embittered old man in 1934.
Walk among the headstones at Foncquevillers Military Cemetery and you will find some of the 46th’s dead. There are 600 named headstones; 115 of the 124 soldiers killed on 1 July and buried here rest in a mass grave beneath 59 headstones. They were shoemakers, errand boys, colliery labourers and rag-trade workers. Nine were husbands, the rest probably single. Private George Palmer, 1/4th Leicesters,* was also buried at this cemetery. The 21-year-old bookbinder, who stood just five feet and twoand-a-half inches, was treated for debility and concussion before the Somme. He survived the carnage of 1 July, but his luck expired at the end of a shell burst on 28 February 1917. His effects — some letters and photos, a Bible, a few coins and a badge — were sent to his mother, Harriett. She chose her son’s epitaph knowing she would likely never visit France: ‘Will some kind hand in a foreign land place a flower on my son’s grave.’
‘JULY 1ST TERMINATED in a complete victory,’ crowed Süsskind-Schwendi in his after-battle report.205 He had good reason to gloat. Gommecourt salient remained entirely in German hands after VII Corps’ incursions were destroyed according to established artillery and infantry defensive doctrine. The tremendous firepower deployed by 2nd Guards Reserve and 52nd Infantry Divisions’ largely intact artillery was the decisive factor. These gunners first disrupted VII Corps’ advance by cutting off infantry that made it into the German lines, and then destroyed the attack by stopping supporting waves from crossing over. As the morning progressed and VIII Corps’ attack at Serre failed, more of the 52nd’s batteries opened up in enfilade, along with those of 111th Infantry Division further north. On-the-spot officers and their men erased the isolated London and North Midland pockets of resistance with template concentric counterattacks. The situation was always under control; there was simply never any need for either Süsskind-Schwendi or Borries to request reinforcements from XIV Reserve Corps. ‘Every man in the Division is proud of this result and of the success won,’ wrote Süsskind-Schwendi.206
Thousands of crumpled khaki bundles in plain view to all outside Gommecourt were evidence of the killing. Seventh Corps recorded 6769 casualties, including 2206 dead, 3766 wounded, 559 missing and 238 prisoners. The regiments of Süsskind-Schwendi’s 2nd Guards Reserve and Borries’ 52nd used to some extent or another in the fighting around Gommecourt lost a combined total of about 1391 men,207 among them at least 463 dead, 746 wounded and 160 missing from RIR55, RIR91, IR170 and IR66.208 Additionally, RIR15 and RIR77, the latter in the line further north and not under direct attack, suffered a combined 22 losses.209 Those figures equated to one German casualty for every 4.9 British: a ratio that confirmed Süsskind-Schwendi had well and truly achieved his mission statement of annihilation, although not without cost.
Snow somewhat surprisingly also claimed the operation as a success. He alleged his corps had drawn in enemy troops to ‘oppose it, which might otherwise have been used against Fourth Army.’210 He was referring to the arrival of Süsskind-Schwendi’s division back in May, of which he amazingly only learned some time on 30 June. This division was slotted into XIV Reserve Corps’ order of battle to strengthen the entire line north of the Somme, not, as Snow suggested, in response to the visible battle preparations by VII Corps. He never knew this, but in any case his self-professed success in this sense related only to one element of VII Corps’ objectives. Snow had been wholly committed to the other, which was to literally draw German artillery and infantry fire away from Serre and onto his own battalions in the hope that it might benefit VIII Corps’ attack. While VII Corps certainly acted as a magnet for German fire, it produced no tactical benefit whatsoever for VIII Corps. When the assault on Gommecourt failed, Snow blamed the large number of active German guns, the breadth of no-man’s-land and the 46th’s delayed rear waves.211 He said VII Corps’ counter-battery work had been ‘inadequate,’212 which was a serious understatement. Most of these failings were, in fact, directly attributable to his corps-controlled artillery. Snow was touting his faulty understanding of 2nd Guards Reserve’s arrival as proof of success, but avoiding directly incriminating his headquarters for the bungled artillery and other preparations that led directly to his infantry’s failure.
In the days afterwards Snow and Haig went on a morale-boosting exercise. Snow — who on battle day thought all was ‘going alright’213 — stuck to his story. ‘Although Gommecourt has not fallen into our hands,’ he said in an open message to the men of his corps, ‘the purpose of the attack, which was mainly to kill and contain Germans, was accomplished.’214 Haig chimed in with a declaration that he deplored the casualties, but that VII Corps’ operation had ‘proved of material assistance to the success of the general plan of operations.’215 Allenby no doubt thought much the same. There was no substance to any of it. VII Corps had neither contained Süsskind-Schwendi’s or Borries’ divisions, nor drawn in any of XIV Reserve Corps’ reserves from Bapaume or elsewhere. Snow’s corps had not even provided any kind of useful diversion for VIII Corps, or killed many Germans at all, whether in military or comparative terms. Moreover, the theme of Fourth Army’s operations on 1 July was mostly one of unmitigated failure, which was really quite difficult to confuse with success. Snow, Allenby and Haig were on a spin exercise to buff tactical defeat into the intangible strategic victory it never was with bunkum and falsehoods.
Careless-with-words Snow did not have the skillset to sell lies. ‘When I heard that you had been driven back,’ he later told the remnants of the 56th, ‘I did not care a damn. It did not matter whether you took your objective or not. Our attack was only a feint to keep the German Guards Divisions [sic] occupied whilst the main attack was being made down south.’216 There it was. Callous ‘Slush’ still did not understand the difference between a feint and a diversion, falsely implied VII Corps’ objectives had had some kind of direct link to the gains made at Fricourt, Mametz and Montauban, and revealed he knew absolutely nothing about working a crowd of grieving soldiers. An embittered Captain Ferd
inand Wallis, London Rifle Brigade, thought Snow tactless given the 56th’s survivors had ‘been through Hell’ and, insightfully, that their friends had been ‘deliberately sacrificed.’217 Plenty of others felt that way, too. Sergeant Isaac Read, 7th Leicesters, 37th Division, was behind the battlefield as a scarecrow column of South Staffords trudged by late on 1 July:218 ‘“How d’you go on mates?” No one took the slightest notice, save a corporal carrying three rifles, who was bringing up the rear of the party. He halfturned, and, indicating the weary straggling figures before him, shrugged expressively. “General f. . . up in command again!” and he went on. Then he turned again. “Back where they f. . . well started!”’219
By no means all of them, though.
CHAPTER 11
The Earth Abideth
A British defeat and coalition positive
‘I have been waiting for years to put on record items of horror, ineptitude of commanders, callous indifference to the suffering of the infantryman.’1
— Rifleman Henry Barber, 1/5th Londons (London Rifle Brigade)
ALMOST TWENTY THOUSAND British and Newfoundland soldiers lay dead or dying around the Somme battlefield at midnight on 1 July. Observers that day and thereafter, until the bloodied khaki bundles disintegrated into the earth or were buried, looked upon the grisly evidence of an almost complete German victory over General Sir Douglas Haig’s British army. It was certainly far more that than a singularly British tactical defeat, which deftly airbrushes out the work of skilled German commanders, infantrymen and gunners who inflicted the bloodletting. Lieutenant-General Sir Henry Rawlinson, the prone-to-highs-and-lows commander of Fourth Army, well knew it, too. Come 2 July he was beginning to realise the scale of the tragedy between Montauban and Gommecourt. According to one historian: ‘Frequently, he [Rawlinson] walked about the garden of his headquarters [at Querrieu], slashing at nothing with his stick, the round dome of his bald head bent forward.’2 Rawlinson was a troubled man, mired in one of his funks as the enormity of British losses for negligible gains slowly dawned on him.
Officially, Third and Fourth Armies suffered a combined 57,470 casualties on the first day of the Somme.3 This included 19,240 dead, along with 35,493 wounded, 2152 missing and 585 taken prisoner.* Blood from the dead alone would fill about two-and-a-half Olympic-sized swimming pools. By anyone’s maths these numbers jar the mind — more so if one realises that most of these deaths took place in the one or two hours from about 7.30 a.m., as was the case.
This grim statistical palette was not available to Haig, Rawlinson or Lieutenant-General Sir Edmund Allenby, commander of Third Army, on battle day. Provisional casualty numbers reached their headquarters several days later, and certainly not before 3 July. One must not be too hard on them about this: these were days before calculators and databases, where ledgers, typewriters and manual arithmetic were everything. Battlefield confusion, delays in reporting casualties and technology limitations simply did not allow for instant data compilation at General Headquarters (GHQ). Late on 1 July, Rawlinson estimated casualties in Fourth Army at 16,000–20,000.4 On 2 July, Haig, who was a man more interested in evaluating the tactical situation and planning his next moves than totting up casualties, said: ‘Total casualties are estimated at over 40,000 to date. This cannot be considered severe in view of the numbers engaged, and the length of front attacked.’5 He was out by a whopping 17,470, or about 30% of the eventual total.6 Nowadays the Commander-in-Chief’s (C-in-C) unempathetic diary comment is a magnet for epithets; not so then, when it went unread by others. Without doubt Haig’s primary military concern on the night of 1 July and morning of 2 July was to clarify the ground his two armies actually held and then develop the Anglo-French offensive accordingly;7 the optimist was still very much looking towards what could yet be.
By midnight on 1 July, roughly two-thirds of the British army’s attack on the Somme had ended in disaster. The diversionary operation by VII Corps at Gommecourt and the assaults by III, VIII and X Corps broadly between Serre and La Boisselle had failed. Notable footings at Gommecourt, Heidenkopf near Serre, Hawthorn Ridge at Beaumont Hamel and Schwaben Redoubt above Thiepval were either lost, or about to be lost. An unsure footing remained at Schwabenhöhe, just south of La Boisselle, while the tip of Leipzig Redoubt near Thiepval was still in British hands. Fricourt had been outflanked by XV Corps’ gains on Fricourt Spur, Hill 110 and around the captured village of Mametz. Brickheap-like Montauban and the ridge between that village and Mametz had fallen to XIII Corps. But, Haig and Rawlinson’s infantry had scarcely broken into the German positions around Ovillers and La Boisselle, the focal point of the British army’s operation, the infantry and cavalry of Reserve Army had not been pushed through, the high ground of Pozières Ridge was no closer than it had been that morning and there was no hint of mobile warfare out towards Bapaume and beyond. Haig’s first day of the Somme was, on sum of parts, an abysmal tactical failure accompanied by industrial-scale casualties.
Even given the hefty casualty rate and negligible gains in ground, there was no possibility that Haig would close the Somme operations down. As General Sir William Robertson, Chief of Imperial General Staff, explained in August 1916, the coalition of Allies was ‘under a mutual obligation to go on’ and ‘we could not tell Paris that we had had enough and meant to stop.’8 The same was true on 1–2 July, and — even if Haig had grasped the extent of the tragedy more quickly — there were still the matters of the late-1915 Chantilly agreement, and the broader coalition aim of evicting the German army from France and Belgium, along with supporting the French army at Verdun and the Russian army’s Brusilov Offensive in western Ukraine to consider. In short, the Somme’s continuation after 1 July — it coughed and spluttered on until mid-November and produced more than a million casualties — was all about the necessity of coalition politics, plans and strategy. Quite apart from that, it really was not that easy for Haig to turn a big battle off just as one might flip a light switch at night before heading off to bed.9
Haig began 1 July at his advanced headquarters at Chateau Valvion, near Beauquesne, admiring the sunny morning, gentle breeze and mist that shrouded his assembled infantry. At 8 a.m., half an hour after the battle began, he assessed incoming reports as ‘most satisfactory’ and noted his infantry had ‘everywhere crossed the Enemy’s front trenches.’10 By 9 a.m., his troops were ‘in many places’ advancing to timetable.11 Evidence exists that Haig at this time hoped to achieve big gains in the northern part of the battlefield, specifically at 9.10 a.m. This can be seen in the war diary of II Corps, which was in Haig’s GHQ reserve and grouped around Villers-Bocage, about 14 miles west of Albert as the crow flies. It directed the 23rd and 38th (Welsh) Divisions to ‘reconnoitre roads to NE [broadly towards Serre, Beaumont Hamel and Thiepval] in case a move in that direction has to be carried out.’12 More specific information arrived at Haig’s headquarters. Twenty-ninth Division was held up south of Hawthorn Ridge, 31st Division was moving into Serre, VII Corps’ attack at Gommecourt was progressing well even if part of 46th (North Midland) Division had not pressed on, and while some of X Corps was held up north of Authuille Wood other elements were apparently entering Thiepval.13 Haig later said the reports of infantry in Serre and Thiepval were wrong, but on this point he was rather sanguine:14 ‘On a sixteenmile front of attack varying fortune must be expected! It is difficult to summarise all that was reported.’15 Haig’s understanding of events was improving as the minutes ticked steadily by, and his hopes were increasingly focused on the central and southern parts of the battlefield. This can be seen, again, in II Corps’ war diary. At 11.55 a.m., 23rd and 38th Divisions were directed to ‘consider [the] possibility of a move to areas to [the] east at present occupied by 12th [(Eastern)] and 25th Divisions [both in Fourth Army reserve].’16 Such a move to the ground immediately east of Albert would imply those latter two divisions had already moved further forward, something they were only to do if the cavalry had advanced before them.17 As the morning progressed Ha
ig formed an overall positive if marginally worsening impression of events and was still anticipating the cavalry might be deployed to battle.
At midday, four-and-a-half hours after the killing began, Haig wrote an upbeat letter to a politician in London. ‘The wire has been more thoroughly cut than ever before, and also the Artillery bombardment has been methodical and continuous,’ he wrote.18 One must not be too harsh on Haig for the tone of this letter; he was very obviously writing in a general sense about battle preparations. We know now that Haig realised his infantry was making better progress in the southern part of Fourth Army’s sector. Overall he remained positive. GHQ’s reserve divisions were, as we have seen, still mulling moves closer to Albert that first required Reserve Army’s cavalry to be deployed. Haig also likely knew General Marie-Emile Fayolle’s French Sixth Army was making excellent gains astride the Somme, between Hardecourt and Estrées, the latter about 5.5 miles southwest of Péronne. But he was unaware of the extent to which his artillery had failed to perform, the negligible benefits produced by the massive mines and that most of his infantry had been caught in the open by an alert and unsurprised enemy. Come noon, Haig very much retained ‘great hopes of getting some measure of success,’19 and he still had no idea that his opening masterstroke on the Somme was already moribund.
First day of the Somme Page 43
