Nobody, on either side, had ever attacked after such a long and sustained bombardment. Everyone thought it would work, and that it did not is one of the risks inherent in trying something for the first time.
To the south, in the area of Fricourt, Mametz and Montauban, the British positions overlooked those of the Germans, which was not the case anywhere else. This meant that artillery observation officers could see the fall of shot and adjust accordingly, rather than having to wait for air photographs up to twenty-four hours later. In many places the artillery did not cut the German wire; but in many places it did, as evidenced by the patrol reports and trench raids. However, the British underestimated the German ability to repair breaches in the wire at night when, although still being shelled, they were subjected to a less intense, and unobserved, bombardment.
The critical time for the infantry was between the British artillery’s lifting from the German front line and the British infantry’s closing on that objective. Had more use been made of Russian saps and digging out across no man’s land, the attacking infantry might have been able to start their attack much closer to the German lines than they actually did. Perhaps this advantage was not considered worth the effort and the loss of surprise involved. A distance of 100 yards between waves of assaulting infantry was probably too short, because when the first wave was held up the second wave was already in no man’s land and vulnerable to German fire. The move of the infantry and the artillery had to be carried out in accordance with a set timetable – fire-control methods of 1916 were not yet sophisticated enough to have ‘on call’ fire plans – and the timings allowed little flexibility.
The French, to the south of the Somme, had to attack over ground which offered more cover, in the shape of small woods and folds in the ground; they were helped by a river mist, and they had a lot more artillery. It was this superiority in artillery that allowed the French to assist the bombardment of the extreme right end of the British sector and thus allow the 17th King’s to take its objectives with only two men killed. There was more to it than just ground and artillery, however. The French army consisted of men who had at least the rudiments of military training when they were mobilised in 1914. By 1916 the French army, unlike the British, had considerable experience of major offensive operations. When the French jumped off on 1 July they used fire and movement to cover open ground: that is, one group would fire on the German trenches while another group would move forward, before stopping and providing covering fire themselves. In this way French infantry leapfrogged forward and there was always at least some fire coming down on the enemy. The British knew about fire and movement perfectly well. It had been drilled into the regular army and used to great effect in 1914. But this was not the regular army; it was an inexperienced force fighting its first major battle, and it was simply not capable of using fire and movement. If it had tried to do so, control would have been lost and more casualties inflicted on its own men than on the enemy. Afterwards it was suggested that the British soldiers were unable to think for themselves, unlike the French infantry who disobeyed orders when it suited them and used their initiative. The British as a race are no less innovative than the French, but the use of initiative requires experience on which to base it, and the British army of 1916 – at all levels – lacked that experience. Fire and movement would become a standard tactic of the British infantry again, but not yet.
Critics of the Somme make much of what they see as insistence on parade-ground precision, with men being ordered to walk and keep in line. This had nothing to do with ceremonial parades, but was a perfectly sensible rule to ensure that control was not lost, that men were not shot by their own side, and that they all arrived on the objective together and in a fit state to engage the enemy. Scorn is also poured on the need for the attacking infantry to carry packs weighing sixty pounds. This is one of the enduring myths of the First World War, and derives from an imperfect reading of Field Service Regulations. In fact, it was everything that the man carried and wore that weighed sixty pounds: the uniform he stood up in, the boots on his feet, his weapon and its ammunition. In the attack large packs were left behind, and the small pack contained only the essentials for the operation. That said, each man still had to carry his entrenching tool, extra rations, two gas helmets, wire-cutters, 220 rounds of ammunition, two grenades and two sandbags, while ten picks and fifty shovels were taken by each leading company.14 This was no light burden, and the follow-up troops, coming immediately after those who carried out the actual assault, carried a great deal more. It is one thing to capture ground, quite another to hold it. Once into a German position the objective had to be consolidated and held against the inevitable counter-attack. This meant that the existing defence works had to be turned round to face the other way, wire obstacles had to be constructed and communications had to be established. Ammunition, grenades and digging implements had to be there, to say nothing of signals cable, water and food, and there was no other way of making all this immediately available to the infantry than by having them carry it with them.
The British had been reluctant to accept an offensive on the Somme, rather than in Flanders, and would have been even more reluctant if they had known that events would force them to shoulder the greater share of the burden. For sound strategic reasons, however, there had to be an Allied offensive somewhere on the Western Front in 1916; and once the Germans began throwing their armies at Verdun, the Somme had to be persisted with at least until they gave up.
Planning was exact and the staff work preparatory to 1 July was superb. The troops were brought into position, the bombardment went as planned, even if the results were not as hoped, and it is difficult to see what else could have been done to minimise casualties. The reason that 1 July 1916 saw more British deaths than any other day in British military history is a combination of there never before or since having been a British offensive of such ferocity, against the main enemy in the main theatre of war, and the lack of experience of the troops and their leaders at battalion level. While to the British 1 July 1916 is the first day of the Somme, it was also the 121st day of the Battle of Verdun, and by then the French had already taken half a million casualties. Playing in the major league has its price: the British would learn from 1 July, and it was, after all, only the first day.
NOTES
1 Paper by the General Staff on the Future Conduct of the War, 16 December 1915 (amended 17 December), quoted in J. E. Edmonds, Official History, Military Operations France and Belgium 1915, Appendix 2, HMSO, London, 1932.
2 Edmonds, Military Operations France and Belgium 1916, Vol. I, HMSO, London, 1932, p. 10.
3 Ibid., p. 12.
4 Ibid., p. 13.
5 Ibid., p. 30.
6 Jean-Baptiste Duroselle, La Grande Guerre des Français 1914–18, Perrin, Paris, 1994.
7 Edmonds, Military Operations France and Belgium 1916, Vol. I, HMSO, London, 1932, p. 283.
8 Edmonds, Military Operations France and Belgium 1916, Appendix 13, HMSO, London, 1932.
9 The French army had only two general ranks: général de brigade and général de division. Thereafter rank was equivalent to the appointment held. Thus Fayolle, commanding the Sixth Army, was a général de division, with the same rank as, but senior to, his corps and divisional commanders; he in turn was junior to Foch, also a général de division but senior by his appointment as Commander of the Northern Group of Armies. The rank of marshal was by now usually honorary, although in Napoleon I’s time corps commanders were often marshals.
10 Although 15 (Scottish) Division, also a New Army formation, had done well.
11 By joining the UVF Nugent was breaking the law: despite being on half pay he was still a serving officer. His view was that had he not accepted the post, a local Cavan hothead would have. Hickie became a senator (member of the upper house of Parliament) in the Irish Free State after the war.
12 Most German soldiers were Protestants, but never mind...
13 A Russian sap was a t
unnel dug just below the surface (so shoring up was not needed) and through which the troops could break out when the moment came.
14 Edmonds, Military Operations France and Belgium 1916, Vol. I, HMSO, London, 1932, p. 313.
10
MORE NEEDLESS SLAUGHTER
During the evening and night of 1 July 1916 reports were coming in to the headquarters of the Fourth Army and information was being collated and passed on to GHQ. At first it was thought that around 8,000 British soldiers had been killed on the first day of the Somme, but as many of the missing were found to be dead, that total mounted. North of the Albert–Bapaume road very little had been achieved. On the credit side, however, on over half of the attacking front – the whole of the French sector and from Fricourt to Maricourt for the British – there had been considerable success. In the air the Allies had established complete air superiority; 110 British aircraft had been in action, and forty bombers each carrying two 112-pound bombs had attacked Bapaume and numerous German-held villages, as well as railway trains and stores dumps. The German infantry had not escaped lightly: the 109th Bavarian Reserve Regiment, with a strength of around 2,500 all ranks, suffered 2,147 casualties (around 700 of them killed) where they faced the Anglo-French junction point at Maricourt, and many of the Germans along the front of the attack had received no rations for several days owing to the attentions of the Allied artillery.
The question now was what to do next. The obvious move was to reinforce success and switch all resources down to the Fricourt–Mametz–Maricourt sector and, in conjunction with the French, push on next day. That was what Generals Haig, Rawlinson and Fayolle would have liked to do, but it simply could not be achieved. There was complete gridlock behind the Allied junction point. Roads were incapable of supporting the necessary move of artillery and resupply columns; fresh divisions could not be moved up in time. Traffic control on this scale was still a new art for the British. At 2000 hours on the night of 1 July General Rawlinson ordered the attack to be continued all along the front the next day, and while he was now beginning to regard the offensive as being in the nature of a siege operation, both he and Haig still had their eyes on the south of the British front. Three fresh divisions (17, 19 and 12) were fed in during the night, and while there were some German counter-attacks, nearly all beaten off by artillery firing shrapnel before they could close on the British held positions, it was a relatively quiet night. Next day only six British divisions did anything very much, and these were mainly tidying-up operations in which Fricourt and Mametz were cleared of Germans and the village of La Boisselle was captured. A new chapter of beastliness was opened when the British artillery carried out its first test of incendiary shells, containing thermite, in an attempt to set Bernafray Wood, east of Montauban, on fire. Five hundred shells failed to ignite the wood, but roasted a large number of German soldiers.
There was another opportunity that might have led to a real strategic gain had it been seized. On the morning of 2 July the French were only four miles from Péronne. General Fayolle wrote in his diary: ‘All the front positions of the Boche have been taken with great élan, and 4,500 prisoners captured. Saw Joffre. He is radiant.’1 By 3 July the French had taken Frise, Herbécourt and Assevillers and were poised on the plain of Flaucourt. They had achieved complete surprise south of the Somme and Falkenhayn ordered the evacuation of the German second line. For two days there was but a very thin crust of defenders covering the southern approaches to Péronne, and Fayolle wanted to smash through it. Had he been able to do so, the German forces to the north of the Somme would have had their left flank exposed, and would have had little choice but to withdraw. Joffre and Foch considered the position, and demurred. It was too risky an operation to undertake without massive artillery support, and the artillery would take days to move into position. By noon on 4 July German reserves brought down from the Arras front had filled the gap and the opportunity was lost.2
On 3 July came the first major disagreement between the British and the French. According to the French accounts Joffre and Foch arrived at the British GHQ, demanding that the British alter their plans for further assault to conform with those of the French. Joffre was furious that whereas the French axis was from west to east, towards Péronne, an important centre of road and rail communication for the Germans, the British intended to attack to the north-east towards Bapaume, also an important junction. Joffre said that if this went ahead, it would be impossible for the Allies to attack ‘shoulder to shoulder’.3 The British account says the opposite, and claims that Haig wanted to reinforce success in the area of Montauban, whereas the French wanted him to renew the failed attack on the Thiepval–Pozières sector.4 Whatever the truth of these conflicting accounts, Haig determined to make his next major effort in the Mametz–Montauban sector; but from now on, while the Allies would cooperate where they could, the offensive would often be two separate battles.
There were disagreements within the French ranks too. General Fayolle considered that his superior, Foch, had no conception of a war of manoeuvre. Foch had already made it clear that in his view the Somme was ‘a battle of wearing down, yes; a battle of rupture, no’. He thought that Fayolle ‘is an excellent man, but he is afraid of grinding’.5
The next phase of the battle began on 14 July. The British had learned much from 1 July, and from 2 July onwards memos, reports and notes of advice trickled up and down between army, corps, division, brigade, battalion and company. Rawlinson now determined to capitalise on the successes gained around Montauban and wished to mount an attack out of the salient gained there, but using a rather different approach from that employed at the beginning of the battle. The suggestion put up to Haig by Rawlinson was for a dawn attack on the villages of Bazentin-le-Grand, Bazentin-le-Petit and Longueval, and the woods around and between those locations. Haig was fully in favour of the objectives suggested, but was firmly against the attack being made at dawn, as he did not consider the troops to be up to it. A dawn attack confers great advantages on the attacker: surprise, cover of darkness for the move of the troops to the assembly areas, little visibility for enemy machine-gunners once the jump-off line has been crossed, and the whole of the day to consolidate positions taken. It also has disadvantages. Control and navigation are difficult; movement is slow, and if the enemy do find out what is up then the troops are very vulnerable if caught by artillery in open ground in the dark. Haig did not consider that the staff was capable of moving four divisions half a mile in the dark, and of getting them into their attack formations and facing the right way before dawn broke.
Haig’s views were reinforced by an unsuccessful night attack at 0200 hours on 7 July, when 52 Brigade had attempted to capture German positions lying between Contalmaison and Mametz Wood in order to obtain a better jump-off line for 14 July. The 9th Battalion the Northumberland Fusiliers lost five officers and sixty soldiers killed, the 10th Lancashire Fusiliers six and seventy nine, and the 10th Sherwood Foresters, in support, two and thirty-five. The attack failed less because it was done at night than because the objective was well supported by German positions on its flanks, and because the defenders were well equipped with flares and other forms of illumination. Initially this cut no ice with Haig, but eventually, on 12 July, he bowed to Rawlinson’s insistence that his men were capable of a dawn attack.
The objectives were bombarded from 11 July, but there was a severe shortage of heavy artillery ammunition: the fifteen-inch guns were restricted to twenty-five rounds per day, the 9.2-inch to fifty and the eight-inch to 110, while the six-inch guns had a more generous 250 rounds per day. For the bombardment and the battle itself, two thousand rounds were available for each eighteen-pounder gun in the field artillery. Instead of the standard thirty-minute intense bombardment before zero hour, there would only be five-minutes. This was not to save ammunition – Haig had made it clear to Rawlinson that all reserves of artillery ammunition could be expended if necessary – but as a surprise measure, the Germans having become accusto
med to a thirty-minute ‘hate’ prior to an assault. Haig and Rawlinson had hoped that this would be a joint Anglo-French attack, but the French declined to play. They did not consider the artillery bombardment to be sufficiently intense, and in any case they thought a dawn attack had no chance of success.
Mud, Blood and Poppycock: Britain and the Great War (Cassel Military) Page 32
