The troops were brought into position after dark on 13 July and lay down along taped-out jump-off lines, or in specially prepared advance trenches. In order to secure the right flank of the attack 18 Division was ordered to complete the capture of the Bois des Troncs, known to the British as Trones Wood, in which fighting had gone on since the first phase of the attack on 1 July. The battalions involved in the Trones Wood attack in the small hours of 14 July had not been in action since 1 July, when they had got off relatively lightly. The fighting inside the wood was severe, but by 0930 hours it was in British hands. This was well after the dawn attack had started, but the German defenders of Trones Wood were far too busy in the defence of their own position to be able to interfere with the advance on their right. The casualties of the six battalions of 18 Division engaged in the Trones Wood battle on 14 July included seven officers and seventy-four other ranks killed, ranging from one private soldier in the 7th Bedfords to five officers and thirty-six men killed in the 6th Northamptonshires. Given the importance of securing the British right flank, this was not an exorbitant price.
At 0320 hours the artillery ranged all its guns on the main German positions and at 0325, as the first glimmer of light showed on the horizon, the troops moved off. They moved behind a creeping barrage, but this time the barrage was exclusively of high explosive rather than of a mix containing shrapnel. Experience gained on 1 July showed that shrapnel did not cut wire, and from now on it would be used less and less by the British. On the right the 9th Scottish Division deployed two of its brigades. There were four battalions in the assault, two in support and one in reserve. A third brigade, the South African Brigade, was also in reserve. The division had not been engaged on 1 July, and this was its first major action on the Somme. The plan worked, and the men had crossed 800 yards and reached the outskirts of Longueval village and the edge of Delville Wood before the Germans fired a shot. Total deaths were 287, ranging from sixty other ranks of the 7th Seaforth Highlanders to nine men of the 5th Cameron Highlanders.
In the centre, 3 Division, in its first action on the Somme, was to attack in the direction of Bazentin-le-Grand. On moving into the line this division had established an outpost line 1,000 yards out into no man’s land, from which active patrolling and raiding allowed them to dominate the ground between the opposing trenches. On the night of 13/14 July they dug communication trenches even further out, making a jump-off line about 250 yards from the German positions. Within two hours of zero the division had captured Bazentin-le-Grand. At one stage 8 Brigade was briefly held up by uncut wire until the brigade major, with a machine gun and a company of 2 Royal Scots, led an attack on a flanking trench and bombed his way along it, allowing the rest of the brigade to get through. The brigade major may well have been brushing the crumbs of a good dinner from his immaculate service dress jacket; what he was not doing was skulking back at the base. The five battalions chiefly involved had a total of thirteen officers and 352 other ranks killed, most of them in the 8th East Yorks and the 7th Shropshire Light Infantry, the first to assault. It was a serious bill, but far less than some battalions suffered on 1 July, and for more gain.
The 7th and 21st Divisions were to cooperate in the capture of Bazentin Wood and the village of Bazentin-le-Petit. For 21 Division this was their first attack of the battle, but 7 Division had only been out of the line for five days and were still absorbing reinforcements, some of whom only joined their battalions on the way up to the line. No man’s land was 1200 yards from the British trenches, so the battalions moved out under cover of darkness until they were around 300 yards away from the Germans. The wood was taken by 0430 hours and the village by 0700. Casualties were light: 164 deaths all told in the seven battalions involved, with the heaviest losses being in 2nd Battalion the Royal Irish Regiment which had fifty-nine other ranks killed, and the smallest in the 2nd Gordon Highlanders who lost three.
All in all the new methods, learned the hard way from the experiences of 1 July, had worked. The troops had shown that they could move into position at night, jump-off lines were established close to the German positions, the staff officers were able to arrange all the preliminaries and the creeping barrage of HE had done most of what it was supposed to do. Casualties had been moderate and a real advance had been achieved. Such an operation would not have been possible a fortnight earlier but everybody, from corps and divisional commanders down to corporals commanding sections, was learning.
The British experience in the First War is often referred to in the modern idiom as a ‘learning curve’. In fact the process of gaining experience, learning from it and improving methods and equipment was not a curve at all, but more of a staircase. Lessons were learned and implemented, and then followed by consolidation before the next intellectual leap forward. After the initial success of the dawn attack there followed a period of hard slogging. The Germans held on grimly to Delville Wood, and once 9 Division had captured the village of Longueval, its third brigade, the South African Brigade, was ordered to take the wood.
South Africa was the one part of the Empire where British entry into the war was not greeted with near-universal approval. As the law stood in 1914, once Britain declared war the whole of the Empire was automatically at war. In South Africa there was a revolt, led by two former Boer generals, Christiaan de Wet and Salomon Maritz, which was promptly put down by two other former Boer generals, Jan Smuts and Louis Botha. South Africa had a tiny regular army and her defence was based on the militia, which all males of European descent had to join. While South Africa’s main war effort was concentrated on German South West Africa (now Namibia), and German East Africa (Tanganyika, now Tanzania), she sent an infantry brigade and supporting arms to Egypt and then to the Western Front.
The South African Brigade attacked Delville Wood at dawn on 15 July. For six days they fought in appalling conditions, finally managing to force the Germans into the north-west corner of the wood. By this time the brigade’s casualties were such that they could do no more, and they were relieved by 26 Brigade on the night of 20/21 July. It might be wondered why on the earth the Germans should fight so hard for an insignificant clump of trees. Delville Wood itself appears to have no importance, but it supports and is supported by other woods on the ridge line that the British wanted to establish themselves on. MametzWood, Bazentin Wood, High Wood, Delville Wood and Trones Wood formed strongpoints in the German defences that had been hastily cobbled together after the capture of Montauban on 1 July. If they could be held then the British could not advance over the open ground between, and German observers in one wood could see, and support, their comrades in another. Mametz, Bazentin and Trones Woods had gone, but if the Germans could keep Delville Wood and High Wood then they could hold the British up for a long time – as happened. The north-west corner of Delville Wood was not finally cleared of Germans until 25 August, and even then one small party hung on at the extreme eastern edge until 15 September.
Having taken the two Bazentin villages and the wood of the same name, the British were poised on the northern edge of what was known as Caterpillar Valley, looking across at High Wood about 1,200 yards away and across open fields of grass. The valley was in dead ground to Delville and High Woods, and Bazentin Wood, whence fire could have been directed into the valley, had been taken. Into the valley came medical units, artillery guns and ammunition columns, brigade and battalion advanced headquarters, and the Secunderabad Cavalry Brigade. All was now ready to push on and take the next ridge.
If High Wood and its supporting strongpoint of Delville Wood could be taken, then the way to Flers, Gueudecourt and the German third line of defences was open. It was not to be. The cavalry was sent in and succeeded in driving in the German outposts, but successive attacks by infantry could not get across the open ground and into the wood. In the following weeks, attack after attack was launched against High Wood using infantry, gas, flame-throwers and machine-gun barrages. All was to no avail, and the wood would not be taken until the next phase
of the battle, by infantry of 47 Division, with tanks in support.
The success of 14 July was followed by more hard grinding, the British trying to get onto the Pozières Ridge, the French hammering at Péronne. For a few days the offensive became a series of isolated battles. On 20 July General Fayolle noted in his diary: ‘Visited the 1st Colonial Corps. They strike me as having a great desire to do nothing...The English mean to do nothing!’6 The British army did, at this stage of the war, take longer to deploy and prepare than did the French, but on 26 July the 1st Australian Division took Pozières village, with around 1,000 men killed in so doing, and the 2nd Australian Division got onto the ridge on 4 August. There was now a pause and a period of tidying-up, as the British prepared for the next phase of the offensive.
The Australians defended Pozières village and the ridge to the east of it, and at first light on 6 August the Germans launched a counter-attack on the village, astride the road running from Courcelette south-west to Pozières. The Australian platoon dug in either side of the road was commanded by Second Lieutenant Albert Jacka, one of the great characters of Australian military history. As a lance corporal in Gallipoli in May 1915 he had earned the Victoria Cross, the first to an Australian during the war, and had risen to the rank of sergeant before being commissioned in the 14th Battalion, Australian Imperial Force.
In the morning of 6 August the Germans rolled over Jacka’s position and into the village. The first Jacka knew about what was happening was when a grenade came tumbling down the steps of his dugout (originally constructed by the Germans and now taken into use by the British). Emerging from the dugout, Jacka saw that a party of Australian prisoners was being hustled along the road by German soldiers. Grabbing what men of his own he could, Jacka led a very gallant counter-attack using boots, fists, rifle butts and bayonets, with the result that the prisoners were freed and the Germans sent scurrying back to their own lines. Jacka himself was wounded in the affair, and there can be no doubt that it was his swift action that prevented a local counter-attack from developing into the recapture of Pozières Ridge.
Jacka was awarded the Military Cross, but he felt he had been harshly treated and should have been given a bar to his Victoria Cross. Many Australians, at the time and since, agreed, and felt that Jacka did not receive the recognition that he deserved. This became something of a cause célèbre after the war, and there were suggestions that it was the stuffy British who would not sanction a second VC to a working-class colonial. It was not, of course, for the British to recommend or reject Jacka for anything, but the responsibility of his own, Australian, officers. Jacka was outspoken, no respecter of rank and certainly seen by some as a disruptive influence, despite his undoubted gallantry. This may have had something to do with the non-recommendation – assuming of course that the action was worthy of a VC, and we only have Jacka’s and some of his colleagues’ word for that.
One has to ask, however, how it was that the Germans were able to mount an attack across 1,200 yards of open ground in daylight, with at least 100 yards to cover when the artillery lifted, without the alarm being given. The suspicion must be that the sentries were asleep, or below ground in their dugouts. Fair enough while the bombardment was going on, but they should have been up on the fire-step as soon as the shelling stopped. As Jacka was in command of that sector he must take the blame for the defenders being caught by surprise, and despite his recovering a potentially very nasty situation, perhaps he was lucky to get an MC rather than a court martial.
The Australians were relieved on Pozières Ridge by the Canadian Corps on 2 and 3 September. Like those of the other Dominions, Canada’s army was tiny before the war, with only around 3,000 regulars stationed in important garrisons or employed as training teams, and Canada’s defence was based on the Militia, equivalent to the British Territorial Force. Unlike Australia, where the vast majority of the population was of British origin and only half of one per cent of Australians were of German or Austrian descent, in Canada seven per cent of the population was of enemy extraction. Canada nevertheless very quickly began to raise an army, and the first Canadian division arrived on the Western Front in February 1915, another in September of the same year, and two more in 1916. The Canadian government had hoped that the raising of a mass army for the war would be a form of nation-building exercise, and would help weld the French-speaking and English-speaking communities together. Although French Canadian battalions did join the BEF and a French Canadian won a Victoria Cross, in general the French Canadians did not join. In Quebec a French-speaking population of 1,700,000 produced only 7,000 recruits, whereas the 400,000 English-speakers of the same province provided 22,000. Initially this was a puzzle. This was a French war, so why would the French Canadians not join? The answer lay in the history of Canada. When General Wolfe scaled the Heights of Abraham on 12 September 1759 and resolved once and for all that it should be the British and not the French who would rule North America, the French aristocracy, the officers, the wealthy and the educated returned to France; left behind were the furtrappers and the peasant farmers, who saw themselves abandoned by those to whom they looked for leadership. Their descendants saw themselves not as Frenchmen, but as Canadians who spoke French. They had no loyalty to France nor any to England, and the bulk were not interested in involving themselves in a European war. Despite this, Canada sent 400,000 men to the Western Front. They were well led and highly motivated, and by 1918 they were almost the shock troops of the BEF.
By late August 1916 the Somme offensive, combined with a gradual turning of the tide at Verdun – itself precipitated by what was happening on the Somme – was beginning to have its effect on the German army. On 25 August Falkenhayn was dismissed as Chief of the General Staff and sent off to the Romanian front. His successor was the sixty-nine-year-old Paul Ludwig von Beneckendorff und von Hindenburg, known as von Hindenburg for short, and a field marshal since November 1914, supported by his éminence grise General Erich von Ludendorff (the ‘von’ was a recent acquisition) as First Quartermaster General.
The next major phase of the Somme offensive began on 3 September, with the French attacking in the direction of Maurepas. The French infantry had recovered from what their commander considered to be an outbreak of idleness and, incredibly, French regiments carried their colours into the attack, sounded trumpets, and sang the ‘Marseillaise’ as they advanced. In five hours they had captured Leforest and Cléry, only two miles north-west of Péronne. Once again, according to General Fayolle, ‘Father Joffre is radiant.’ By 12 September the French had taken Bouchavesnes, five miles behind the German lines, and were astride the vital north–south road from Béthune to Péronne. Meanwhile the British took Guillemont between 3 and 8 September, and on 9 September the 16th (Irish) Division captured Ginchy. The seven Irish battalions chiefly involved in the fighting for Ginchy lost eight officers and 220 soldiers killed on 9 September, ranging from none in the 6th Battalion Royal Irish Rifles to six officers and sixty-one men in the 9th Battalion the Royal Dublin Fusiliers.
It is sad that the actions of 16 Division, formed from Redmond’s Irish Volunteers, have been all but forgotten in British and Irish history. When the division’s demobilised soldiers returned to Ireland after the war the political situation had changed, and many Irish people considered that these men had supported the oppressor. Some were even assassinated. Although all Ireland was part of the United Kingdom until 1921, conscription was never applied there, and its status as a traditional source of recruits for the British army had been declining for many years. The so-called Easter Rising of 1916 in Dublin, a petty failure in military terms, was opposed by the great majority of the Irish people; but the British reaction to it, with eighty-eight of the ringleaders being tried for rebellion and sentenced to death by military courts, and fifteen actually being executed, turned Irish opinion from merely wishing for Dominion status to demanding complete severance from Britain. It also horrified neutral opinion, particularly in the United States, and was a rare
– and seized-upon – opportunity for German propaganda. The trials were fair and the sentences legal. The British view at the time was that the actions of the rising’s organisers amounted to a stab in the back and a betrayal of all that their countrymen were doing in France. While it is difficult to conceive of a more serious offence than rebellion in the middle of a war, in hindsight it might have been wiser to lock the rebels up rather than execute them. The morale of the 16th Division seems to have been largely unaffected, but the outcome of the affair had major repercussions on recruiting in Ireland.
When most of Ireland left the United Kingdom on the formation of the Irish Free State in 1921, the six old Irish regiments that had marched with Marlborough and Wellington, and that had shed so much blood in the Great War, were disbanded, and forgotten except by those who had served in them. Today, while there is an imposing monument to the 36th (Ulster) Division at Thiepval, there are but two little Celtic crosses to commemorate the 16th Division at the Somme.7
The next phase of the Somme offensive was to inaugurate a seminal change in the shape of battle, although it would take another war for the innovation to reach full fruition. On 15 September the British attacked High Wood, Mouquet Farm, Courcelette and Flers while the French went on in the direction of Combles. It was the first day on which tanks were ever used in battle.
Winston Churchill was a man whose true character may never be truly fathomed. On the one hand he was a charismatic, inspirational leader, and on the other a man whose mind could never be focussed on any one thing for very long. He constantly sought what would later be known as the indirect approach to warfare. Out of every hundred of his great ideas and schemes, ninety-nine were hopelessly impracticable while one would be breathtakingly brilliant. The trick for those around him was to recognise the brilliant one. Since at least 1910 Churchill had been interested in some sort of machine that could roam the battlefield and provide support to the infantry, and if the original concept was not his, it was he who was the driving force behind its development as long as he was at the Admiralty. Initially experiments were conducted with steam propulsion, and by 1914 thought was being given to a caterpillar-tracked vehicle to serve as a ‘machine-gun destroyer’. In January 1915 the Admiralty, under Churchill, set up the Admiralty Landships Committee and by Christmas 1915 the prototype vehicle was given the code name of ‘tank’, the cover being that it was a self-propelled water-carrier. When Sir Douglas Haig took over as Commander-in-Chief of the BEF in December 1915, he heard of this committee and immediately sent a staff officer off to England to find out all about it. Contrary to his popular image as a hidebound cavalryman who distrusted technology, Haig was anxious to seize any development that might save lives, and he became an ardent supporter of the tank. After discussions between the BEF and the developers, it was agreed that the tank must be able to cross trenches, go through barbed-wire obstacles, travel over any ground, and be able to provide intimate fire support to the infantry. It was to be protected by armour and capable of moving at the same speed as the infantry walked.
Mud, Blood and Poppycock: Britain and the Great War (Cassel Military) Page 33
