Elegy
Page 7
‘Dumps as big as small towns grew up almost overnight prepared to issue anything,’ wrote John Harris in Covenant with Death, ‘periscopes, grenades, compasses, rations, mortar bombs,smoke helmets, tools.’10 These camouflage-covered dumps seemed to expand all over the forward area. An order for Very lights or Stokes bombs would bring men to a store packed with rough wooden boxes full of lethal weaponry. Casualty clearing stations and advanced field dressing stations were erected, and gas cylinders weighing 180 lbs (81.5 kg) were carried forward on poles by two men each, who had to wear gas masks in case of leakages. Cart-loads of empty biscuit tins were meanwhile driven up and down behind the lines to drown the noise of work parties excavating mines, saps and jumping-off trenches. Huge barbed wire compounds of several acres each were also constructed for the thousands of prisoners who were expected to be captured. ‘Great preparations have been made for the offensive,’ Gunner Gwilym Ewart Davies of the Royal Artillery, who only landed at Rouen on 13 June and had not yet been issued with a steel helmet, noted in his diary eight days later: ‘Signs directing the way to different hospitals are nailed up in the trenches… Trolleys specially reserved for the wounded are to be found on the railway lines… Our airmen brought down two German observation balloons today. They set them ablaze by dropping bombs on them.’11
A TRENCH MORTAR DUMP
Mortars were an ideal weapon in trench warfare: a high-trajectory weapon, its bomb would drop down into trenches and wire emplacements.
‘It was evident to all that something out of the ordinary was impending, for men and guns continued to appear in ever growing quantities,’ recalled 2nd-Lt. Geoffrey Fildes of the 2nd Battalion Coldstream Guards. ‘Valleys that only a week before had been devoid of all occupants now began to assume an aspect of busy preparation. Huts and dugouts were being constantly erected, and the masses of materials assembled for the Royal Engineers became exceedingly great… Once again, as on the eve of Loos, we lived in an atmosphere of endless speculation.’12 Fildes noted the new single-track railway built across the countryside to the north of the Coldstreams’ position and how ‘Every ravine and hollow behind the Fricourt ridge was being converted into a battery position, and trenching and mining operations were being pushed on at all possible speed throughout the neighbourhood.’13 In his official report, Haig said that over one hundred pumping plants were installed for water and more than 120 miles (193 km) of water mains were laid.14 Yet it has been estimated that even if Haig had broken through, the badly stretched BEF might not have been able to exploit the advantage due to sheer logistical difficulties.15
The visit the men dreaded more than any other was that from the Deputy Assistant Director of Medical Services (DADMS), whom Lt. Cecil Down of the 1/4th Gordon Highlanders described as ‘the stormy petrel of the Western Front. Whenever he appears in the front system, there is trouble ahead. He comes into your dugout and says a few well-chosen words on the sanitation, or lack thereof, in your trenches, but all the time his eye is roving around your abode deciding how many stretcher cases could be accommodated in it.’16 For the men in the trenches, the sight of the cerise band on the hat of the DADMS meant ‘worse was in store’ and the General Staff were expecting high casualties in their sector. Thereafter, Down recalled, one knew it was only a matter of time before you were called to the colonel’s dugout along with all the other officers, where one would ‘have a large document, labelled Secret and Confidential, in blue pencil, read out to you on the subject of your assaulting the German trenches, marked in red pencil, on the near date and at a time to be communicated later by special messenger.’17
At 5 a.m. on Friday, 24 June 1916, the Allied bombardment opened up along the whole 18 mile (29 km) front.18 The rumble of artillery firing could be heard across the English Channel in Kent for the next month as the battle went on.19 ‘The din was terrific,’ Capt. Herries of the 22nd Battalion Northumberland Fusiliers (Tyneside Scottish) wrote to his father in Newcastle just before the attack, ‘so great in fact was the noise that although 20 feet [6 m] down in dugouts we were unable to sleep.’20 The 4th Army deployed its 1,010 field guns and howitzers, 182 heavy guns and 245 heavy howitzers for this bombardment, and the French 40 guns and howitzers and 60 75 mm guns for gas shells.21
Designating 1 July as the first day of the Somme Offensive is slightly inaccurate, as the preliminary bombardment went on for a week beforehand. The infantry attack took place on the eighth day of the campaign from the point of view of the British artillery, and of course of the Germans on the receiving end. Since some 59 per cent of the casualties on the Western Front in the First World War were the result of artillery fire—soldiers rarely saw a live enemy from head to foot—it was vital that the bombardment should succeed.22 For the moment it ended there would take place what has been called ‘the race to the parapet’, when the Germans who had survived the bombardment would try to get to the firing positions on their front-line trenches and the British would advance across no man’s land. The Germans issuing out of their dugouts were of course much closer to their positions than the British coming forward under the protection of the barrage, who had to get past the barbed wire, all the while heavily encumbered by the absurd amounts of equipment they had to carry. On the first day of the Somme the Germans, who had survived the bombardment unscathed in their deep dugouts, got to the parapets long before the British, and had set up their machine guns in time for the appearance of the British infantry advancing towards them at walking pace.
At first, as memoranda between GHQ and the 4th Army tell us, it had been suggested that a forty-eight-hour preliminary bombardment would be enough, but the 4th Army argued that this would not succeed in cutting the barbed wire, so the shelling was extended to five days. The bombardment was divided into two general phases, the first two days entirely devoted to field artillery cutting the wire in no man’s land while the heavy guns registered other targets. The next three days were for the bombarding of German trenches and fortified villages, with further shelling directed at points where the Germans had repaired the wire. The 2-in. mortars were relied upon to deal with the first lines of German wire, with 18 lb guns firing deeper, and the second-line German positions—4,000 yards (3,658 m) from the British lines—were pulverized by medium artillery. However, this meant that the medium guns, of which there were far too few, had too much to do, including counter-battery fire at German guns, attacking anything that moved on roads, and additional wire-cutting duties. Destroying the wire in front of the second line of German defences, the hardest of the tasks, was given the lowest priority, though in the event this would matter very little as so few British troops ever got that far.
In the southern sector the French artillery barrage was far more concentrated and saturated the German front line, preventing the Germans from winning the race to the parapets. The French 75 mm gun could fire 15 shells a minute, and despite there being more than twice the number of British infantry as French, the French put down twice the weight of bombardment.23 Because tactical surprise was achieved in the French sector and by XIII Corps, which was also where the counter-battery fire had been the strongest, it was the most successful part of the battlefield from the Allied perspective. The French attack took place between Maricourt and Curlu south of the Somme at 9.30 a.m., allowing their artillery to support the British for the first two hours of the attack. Indeed, the only place where the German deep dugouts were penetrated by shellfire was on the Montauban front, where the artillery batteries were largely French.24 The three French corps had nearly one hundred more heavy guns than the five British corps.25 French shells also worked far better than those of their British counterparts, because they had more sensitive fuses that exploded on immediate impact with the ground rather than when they were buried into it.
FRENCH 75MM FIELD GUN
This field gun with the highest rate of fire of its generation enabled the French to put down twice the weight of bombardment as the British.
In fact, very worryingly, a large number of British sh
ells—three-quarters of which were made in America—simply did not go off.26 According to German observers, 60 per cent of British medium-calibre shells and nearly every shrapnel shell failed to explode, although British sources suggest it was closer to one-third.27 Such was the desperate need for artillery ammunition that normal quality controls were ignored by the War Office, to disastrous effect. When ground was captured, it was often found to be pitted with unexploded British shells as large as 9.2 in. calibre. Other shells went off prematurely, killing British artillerymen and destroying guns. Historians still debate why there were quite so many dud shells. Shortages of skilled labour, lack of advanced machinery and a lack of precision in the manufacturing of shells and fuses on behalf of the mass of sub-contractors that the Ordnance Department, Ministry of Munitions and War Office were forced to rely upon after the breakdown in supply in the spring of 1915 probably explain most of it.28 Britain was strong in heavy industry, but had tended to lag behind Germany in precision machine-tooling and the light engineering of products needed to produce working shells. Live, unexploded shells would turn up on the battlefield regularly for the next century.29 (I saw some freshly discovered ones by the roadside near Serre in 2014.)
Maj. Ynyr*3 Probert of the Royal Artillery won a Military Cross at the storming of the Hindenburg Line in 1918 after recovering from severe wounds received on the Somme in the autumn of 1916, but he lived to be one hundred years old and become the oldest Old Etonian.*4 His father, who also fought in the First World War, was Queen Victoria’s daughter Princess Louise’s comptroller and his mother was Mary Badcock, the little girl whose photograph Lewis Carroll and John Tenniel took as their inspiration for the original illustrations of Alice in Wonderland. Probert left school aged seventeen and spent six months at the Royal Arsenal at Woolwich (‘The Shop’) before being commissioned to go to France in October 1915. He took part in the 1 July 1916 offensive as an artillery forward observation officer, and kept a diary which became covered in mud and blood but is still readable.
In January 1916 he noted: ‘Ammunition was very short and although we were already getting some supplies from America it was of very dubious quality resulting in many [British] casualties from “prematures”. There were also many duds.’30 (Only five weeks before, on 26 May, he had recorded: ‘One of the hazards of returning from the Observation Post in the evenings walking across the open was the crowd of heavy, noisy Maybugs which lived in the oakwoods.*5 They struck with considerable force, necessitating carrying something like your tin hat in front of your face.’31
Probert noted how only heavy shells were capable of destroying the German deep dugouts, but although the British fired 188,500 of them they were not effective in the centre and north of the battlefield. Moreover, two-thirds of the shells were fired at the barbed wire rather than the enemy trenches. The British could devote only 180 guns to fire at enemy batteries, and this was not enough to suppress the German artillery, which could cut off those British troops who did manage to make it into the German trenches by making no man’s land impassable for reinforcement and resupply.32
The responsibility for counter-battery fire as well as the destruction of German trenches, dugouts and strongpoints was kept at corps level in the British army, unlike the French, who devolved such decision-making to the divisions. After the first day, Major-Gen. de Lisle recommended that heavy howitzers at least should be placed under divisional control so that ‘all the local knowledge of the Divisional artillery would be utilized in the important work of the destruction of the enemy’s main trench line’.33 Of course this could only have been achieved with far more limited objectives than the three defensive lines that Haig wanted to attack. Because reports from minus 30 hours right down to near Zero Hour were telling divisional commanders that the entrances to the German dugouts had not been blocked by the bombardment, the British guns should all have been directed onto the front-line trenches rather than further back. The French 6th Army in the southern sector devolved artillery to the divisional level with great success, devastating the German front-line trenches with trench mortar and howitzer fire. The French also enthusiastically engaged in the all-important counter-battery fire that the British corps to the north neglected. French 75s poured shells and often gas into the German artillery positions on the southern sector and in front of XIII Corps at Montauban.
The sheer multiplicity of targets required to put into effect Haig’s ambitious plans meant that the German front-line trenches were battered but survived. ‘I consider that one of the chief factors that contributed to the failure of our infantry in [the 86th Brigade at Auchonvillers] sector to penetrate the line anywhere’, wrote Lt.-Col. Douglas Evans Forman of 147th Brigade Royal Field Artillery after the war, ‘was the fact that the enemy front trench had not been sufficiently crumpled up by our heavy artillery beforehand, with the result that the Germans were able to circulate freely in it once our attack was launched.’34 This estimation echoes the contemporary views of the official war diarists of the 87th and 88th Brigades. In the last ten days of June, the German 2nd Army only lost 2,478 killed and missing and 4,482 wounded from the bombardment, two-thirds of them the result of French bombardment in the south.35
The limiting factor with field guns since the Napoleonic War had always been the hauling strength of six horses, which was around 4,000 lbs (1,814 kg). This included the carriage and limber as well as the metal of the gun itself. Improved materials and techniques had halved the weight of cannon, allowing armour-plated shields and recoil mechanisms to be added, so that a century after the Napoleonic Wars, an 800 lb nickel steel gun could fire the same 12 or 15 lb projectile as a Napoleonic gun of twice the weight. It also had significantly greater muzzle velocity, a flatter trajectory, longer range and a more powerful propellant charge. The 75 mm shell, for example, contained 1.76 lb of high explosive (HE) compared to about half a pound of black powder in pre-1893 shells.36 A gun of the American Civil War could fire shrapnel 2,000 yards (1,828 m), or shell nearly 4,000 (3,657 m) at a speed of 1,090 ft (c. 332 m) per second, whereas an artillery piece in 1914 was capable of firing 6,500 yards (5,943 m) with shrapnel, or 8,500 yards (7,772 m) with shell at 1,770 ft (c. 540 m) per second.37 The sheer expenditure of shells massively increased also: at the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863 the Union army fired 32,780, at Sha Ho in 1904 the Russians fired 274,360, at Neuve Chapelle in 1915 the British fired 197,000, but at the Somme the Allies fired 1,627,824 during the seven days preceding the assault. Yet, as the official historian noted, even this ‘did not accomplish what had been confidently predicted’.38
Two-thirds of the Allied shellfire was of shrapnel rather than HE.39 The army’s nickname for HE shells was ‘whizzbangs’.*6 ‘I learned to disregard whatever noise didn’t immediately concern me’, states the hero of Covenant with Death. ‘The howitzer shells that sounded like express trains rushing through the air didn’t concern us at all—they were heading for the rear areas—but I kept my eyes and ears well open for the local stuff—the whizzbangs which exploded again and again like a lumping cracker, and the grotesquely somersaulting minenwerfer bombs.’40 The men could not cook their own meals in case they attracted attention from the minenwerfer.
Of the heavy guns and howitzers used by the British, many were obsolete or of extemporized patterns. The British artillery could not prevail in counter-battery fire for the simple reason that the German heavy batteries were out of range of the British 60-pounders and 6 in. howitzers and the older 4.7 in guns. Only a few super-heavy guns could reach the German heavy batteries, which were therefore capable of operating in relative safety throughout the battle, except in the French sector.41
Barbed wire was originally invented as a means of enclosing livestock in the American West, but its military application in holding up infantry attacks was soon appreciated. German barbed wire on the Somme could be 6 feet (1.8 m) high—often twice as high as Allied barbed wire—and was laid twice as thickly, anywhere between 4.5 yards (4.1 m) and 9 yards (8.2 m) wide.42 The ba
rbed wire in front of the trenches on the Somme was strung fairly loosely from screw pickets or iron posts, or more rarely wooden posts, which were much more vulnerable. German barbed wire had to be 30 yards (27.4 m) from their trenches, otherwise the British could throw Mills bombs from behind it.43 There were often narrow lanes in the wire through which patrols and raiding parties could pass. The Germans stored wire in forward trenches, to be pushed out into no man’s land even when under fire.44 Clearing barbed wire in preparation for an attack was notoriously hard. The infantry used wire-cutters, though this had to be done at night. The Royal Engineer sappers could also plant small demolition charges to clear the wire on such nocturnal raids. Bangalore torpedoes blasted gaps in the wire. But all these expedients were necessarily small scale and highly risky; the bulk of the work was left to the artillery. A useful tool in 1916 was the 3 in. trench mortar which had a fuse to burst the shell on impact, so a 50 lb bomb could cut a large circle of wire.45 (Firing at barbed wire with HE has been likened to shooting at a fishing net with a shotgun.)46
6-INCH HOWITZER
A mainstay of the Royal Garrison Artillery, there were 104 of them in action on 1 July.
Shrapnel was the best available method for destroying barbed wire in 1916, even though it lost effectiveness at long range and was not much use against German second-line wire defences. It also required skill in firing and observing, and the Territorial and Kitchener volunteer gunners were still learning on the job. Wire could not be seen on the reverse slopes, and was hard to spot from long distances. Sometimes long grass grew up around it, further hampering observation. Yet Lt.-Gen. Hunter-Weston of VIII Corps reported before 1 July that the enemy wire was so badly damaged that ‘the troops could walk in’, even though other more junior officers ‘could see it standing strong and well’.47