HAIG’S FUNERAL
Earl Haig’s funeral on 3 February 1928 saw huge crowds lining the streets of London.
The Battle of the Somme also brought to leadership in Germany the two warlords who were to guide its fortunes for the rest of the war, and became as powerful as any dictators: FM Paul von Hindenburg as Chief of the Great General Staff, and his chief executive officer Gen. Erich Ludendorff. The latter was appointed on 20 August 1916, as the battle was unfolding, and he immediately set about building the immensely powerful and easily defensible Hindenburg Line. ‘The more important repercussions of the Somme were longer term,’ in the words of one historian; ‘ultimately it prompted Hindenburg’s and Ludendorff’s decision to step up armaments production, intensify Germany’s submarine campaign, and shorten their lines in the west.’68
Haig claimed that the Somme had relieved Verdun, fixed the German army in place, and worn it down. His first point was true: yet it did not fix the German army so successfully that they were not able to reinforce the Russian and Rumanian fronts as the battle progressed.69 Nor was the German army’s morale broken for another two years.*11 Even when its confidence did eventually break, its members were still capable of occasional unnecessary viciousness. LCpl. George Lawrence Price, of the 28th Battalion Canadian Expeditionary Force, was shot dead by a German sniper at 10.58 a.m. on 11 November 1918, two minutes before the Armistice came into effect.
*1 In 1940 the Nazis desecrated the graves of Jews who died fighting for Germany; these have since been replaced and many have several small stones on top of them indicating visits by mourners.
*2 Other Commonwealth countries have their own memorials to the missing, at Villers-Bretonneux, Vimy and elsewhere.
*3 The emergency medical kits the men were given were not intended for bad wounds, merely consisting of a cotton dressing and a small bottle of iodine.
*4 Seventy of whom came from one small mining village alone.
*5 Later, he was awarded a commission and in 1917 he returned to France to command a platoon.
*6 He of course went on to write I, Claudius (1934), amongst much else.
*7 Congreve was a true front-line general, ‘absolutely indefatigable at getting to see for himself’, even though it cost him his hand in 1917.
*8 At Amiens in 1918, tanks were to halt one of Hindenburg’s major offensives, and later that year they broke through German lines, also at Amiens.
*9 The forty men received posthumous pardons in the 1930s on the basis that they had been denied the right of appeal. In 1998 the then prime minister Lionel Jospin stated that they were ‘restored to their full place in our national collective memory’. The same has not happened to the 343 Britons shot for cowardice and other reasons in that war.
*10 When the Germans retook the Somme battlefields in a matter of hours—territory that it had taken them years to lose, with so much blood expended on both sides.
*11 In the last 12 days of September 1918 the BEF captured more Germans than during the entire five-month-long Somme campaign.
SEVEN
LESSONS LEARNED
‘There is more to be learnt from ill-success—which is, after all, the true experience—than from victories, which are often attributable less to the excellence of the victor’s plans than to the weakness or mistakes of his opponent.’1
Preface to EDMONDS,
Official History of the Great War,
*
‘The Battle of the Somme… marked the end of the first and mildest part of the war; thereafter it was like embarking on a different one altogether.’2
ERNST JÜNGER,
Storm of Steel, 1920
On 9 july 1916 Lt.-Gen. Sir Aylmer Hunter-Weston wrote to FM Sir William Robertson, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff. This was largely an exercise in covering his own back, since he had spoken to Robertson earlier the same day by telephone, but the reasons for the failure of the attack by his VIII Corps just over a week earlier were worth reiterating. ‘We were mistaken in supposing that two battalions had got through to Serre’, he wrote,
and had been cut off by the Germans getting up out of the dugouts behind them. Later and more accurate information established the fact that these battalions, and the majority of the other battalions all along the front, were defeated by the enemy’s artillery barrage, and by his machine gun fire, which in many cases simply wiped out the battalions before they reached the German trenches. The gallantry, discipline and devotion of our troops was beyond praise. But we had not knocked the German trenches about nearly enough to block their dugouts and fill up their trenches in the way the German artillery does to our trenches, and so… the German Infantry and machine-gunners were able to come out of their dugouts, and man their parapets, as soon as our men showed, and were thus able to prevent our men reaching their trenches. The reason for the lack of success… is that the Germans here had better trenches, and a much more powerful artillery.*1
It was at Gommecourt, Serre and Beaumont Hamel that they most feared attack. A contributory cause was the inadequacy of the artillery and of the ammunition available… Of ammunition we had only about one and one-third heavy howitzer shells per yard run of trench fire, whereas we should have had ten per yard run. However, this latter reason is for your ear alone, it is inadvisable to give currency to such unpleasant and dangerous facts.3
If there is any consolation for the horrors of 1 July 1916, it is that the BEF swiftly faced up to such ‘unpleasant and dangerous facts’ and embarked on a profound revolution in tactics at many levels, in what has been correctly described as ‘a steep and agonizing learning curve’.4 The ultimate result of this was to create an army that by 1918 deserved to win the war. Of course the lessons ought to have been learnt even before the war had started: in the Boer War British troops had tried and humiliatingly failed to cross what one historian has called ‘a “fire swept zone” dominated by the German-manufactured quick firing, long range rifles and field artillery’.5 Yet even if the lessons of that war should have been learned without the massacre of 1 July 1916, they certainly were after it took place. Perhaps it is part of the human condition to learn from defeat more than from victory.
It is appropriate that 1 July 1916 fell on almost the middle day of the middle year of the war, because it saw an entirely new phase of the struggle on the Western Front, with industrialized warfare the norm from then onwards. Eighty per cent of Britain’s 2.7 million war casualties occurred after 1 July 1916.6 Ten days after the attack, Maj.-Gen. de Lisle also wrote a report explaining why his 29th Division, which had numbered 11,797 men before the attack and had suffered 44 per cent casualties, had fared so badly. These included the strength of the German defensive positions, the lack of speed and surprise in the attack, the failure of the heavy artillery to demolish the German front line, the early explosion of the Hawthorn Ridge mine, and the poor performance of his sixteen Stokes mortars in their ten-minute bombardment.7 Even if one ignores the largely irrelevant last reason—Stokes mortar fire was insignificant compared to the seven days of bombardment by the entire divisional field artillery—the others are devastating.*2
British trench mortars were standardized after 1 July, with each infantry brigade operating a battery of Stokes mortars, while artillerymen operated medium and heavy mortars at the divisional level. It also now became common for brigades to group all their specialists into a bombing company of, typically, 120 men, who would operate in groups of thirty or so.
The best kind of bombardment to unleash was discussed by X Corps in 1917, which concluded that instead of a week-long preliminary bombardment of an entire region:
The hurricane bombardment had the advantage of a more demoralizing effect probably and bringing the attack more of a surprise. On the other hand wire cutting was bound to be slow and deliberate and thus nullify attempts to surprise, though this could be discounted somewhat by having wire cutting down the whole British front, this still possibly concealing the point of attack. The long slow bombar
dment meant better and more careful observation for effect, the possibility of daily aerial photographs to observe if the results were satisfactory and therefore promised to be more generally effective against the enemy’s defences. In order to put an equal number of lead on the enemy’s trenches during the short bombardment as compared with long, a larger number of guns would be necessary.8
On 1 July 1916 a lifting barrage had been used which simply moved on regardless of where the infantry was, which generally did not work; indeed the battle has been described as ‘an awful demonstration of the penalties of poor infantry-artillery co-ordination’.9 Yet by the attack of 15 September the concept of a creeping barrage, one that worked its way forward along with the attack in a scientific and co-ordinated way, had brought considerable success.
It started halfway across no man’s land in case any Germans had crawled out there during the night, and then advanced at the rate of 100 yards (91 m) every four minutes, ahead of the infantry advance. Flash-spotting and sound-ranging and the development of a system of image analysis for the RFC photographs were useful in counter-battery fire.10 After the first day on the Somme, the artillery also improved at the all-important counter-battery fire, and a new fuse for artillery shells made them much better for wire cutting. ‘Eighteen pound shrapnel was not an ideal wire-cutter’, wrote Maj. Probert years later. ‘The 106 fuse HE would have been much more effective, but it was not yet available.’11
The British also became more imaginative in thinking up ways to use machine guns to kill Germans in the trenches opposite. ‘We were especially irritated by one machine gunner’, recalled Ernst Jünger, ‘who sprayed his bullets at such an angle that they came down vertically, with acceleration produced by sheer gravity. There was absolutely no point in trying to duck behind walls.’12 The British were developing the machine gun as an offensive weapon, a major step along the way to the important ‘indirect machine gun barrage’ that became a major feature of all British assaults from September 1916 onwards.
The triangles cut from biscuit tins which the men of the 29th Division had sewn on the back of their haversacks had been a disaster on 1 July. ‘With the sun’s rays shining,’ records the historian of VIII Corps’ attack, ‘the plaque certainly showed up the position of the men lying on the ground, but as it was thought to have increased the casualties, it was never worn again.’13
Very importantly, in the weeks after the first day of the offensive, the men were ordered not to march line abreast but instead to make short rushes under covering fire in the manner of attack Haig had wanted originally but for which Rawlinson had thought the men under-trained.14 As every battalion, division and corps was required to deliver a post-battle report with recommendations, leading to the publication of two new manuals which drew on the lessons learnt, infantry tactics improved. Examples of good practice were also circulated in the form of memoranda and notes, which also went towards the codification of battle drills in training pamphlets.15
On 1 July the main infantry formation around which the attack had been organised had been the company, yet by November it was the platoon of thirty or forty men, now transformed into four sections of highly interdependent and effective specialists, with an ideal strength per platoon of one officer and forty-eight other ranks. In February 1917 GHQ of the BEF published training pamphlets SS143, Instructions for the Training of Platoons for Offensive Action and SS144, The Normal Formation for the Attack.16 The former opened by explaining that GHQ now considered the platoon the primary unit of assault. The issue of the two pamphlets together was necessitated, it said, ‘partly by the shortness of time which is available for training, and partly by the lack of experience among subordinate commanders’. It stated that it was intended to be an aid to the platoon commander in training and fighting, not necessarily applicable in all situations, but a distillation of experience and knowledge. The 46th Division had meanwhile opened a school to teach the new techniques.17
Designed to cover both trench-to-trench attacks and fighting in the open, SS143 and SS144 covered most eventualities and were both of high quality; indeed, it has recently been pointed out that ‘Any modern infantryman would recognise the principles expounded therein.’18 It covered the important practicalities of laying wire, the construction of fieldworks, appreciation of ground, and the avoidance of points covered by enemy fire.19 SS144 proposed a standard attack frontage for a battalion of just 200 yards (183 m), together with the recommendation of wide intervals between men, lines and waves of attacks, proving that the High Command now appreciated the value of highly dispersed ‘attacks in depth’.20
Whereas in 1916 the loss of officers and NCOs had left the other ranks dispirited and leaderless, by 1917 a flood of training pamphlets had changed the system to ensure that every man in the attack knew precisely what was expected of him. Similarly, on 1 July there had been no concept of battlefield doctrine, as the different timings of the mines’ explosions and the different methods of attacks employed by Jardine on the Leipzig Redoubt and the 36th (Ulster) Division on the Schwaben Redoubt all too clearly showed. Afterwards, a general doctrine began to be imposed, with positive results.
In terms of personnel, officers tended to be appointed much more on the basis of ability after 1 July, rather than on what they had done before the war broke out. Although only one divisional commander, Stuart-Wortley, had been dismissed, Lt.-Gen. Henry Horne was the only one of the corps commanders to be promoted during the rest of the war.
De Lisle’s report had also stated that since surprise mattered and ‘speed in crossing the area between our front trenches and the enemy’s is essential, the leading troops should therefore be lightly equipped and should be trained to cross this zone in a rush.’21 It helped if, as on 15 September, the attack took place at dawn rather than once the sun was up. By November the British were also using the underground trenches known as ‘Russian saps’ to dig closer to the enemy trenches, and rise up through the earth to attack, gaining the element of surprise. ‘After the attack had failed the 29th Division started immediately to advance their trenches closer to the enemy’, points out one historian.22 The German use of snipers on the first day of the offensive confirmed the need for the skill of individual marksmen in the British army too; each company provided marksmen for a detachment of sniping specialists to be attached to battalion headquarters.
GERMAN SHARPSHOOTERS
Snipers were used to great effect by the Germans during the Somme; here, a group of Germans on the river Aisne climb a tree to pick off Allied soldiers.
On 9 April 1917 the British launched the Battle of the Scarpe at Arras and put into operation many of the lessons learnt on the Somme—and particularly from its disastrous first day. The integration of Lewis gun, rifle grenade and trench mortar fire with short rushes forward of riflemen and bombers, together with an increasing confidence in the gunners’ ability to lay down effective creeping barrages, truly transformed the BEF’s battlefield performance and, in the words of one historian, had turned the British army ‘from a largely inexperienced mass army to a largely experienced one’.23 Far from ‘Kitchener’s Mob’, it was now the highly professional force that won the great victories of the last hundred days in 1918. ‘The British army learnt its lesson the hard way during the middle part of the Somme battle,’ stated Charles Carrington, an infantry officer, ‘and, for the rest of the war, was the best army in the field.’24
We may recoil from the thought of generals learning by trial and error at the expense of hundreds of thousands of men’s lives, but for all their many faults, Haig and his fellow generals were fighting a war that had no precedents in its awfulness and capacity for industrialized slaughter. Haig was a good diplomat in a Western coalition that would eventually include the French, Belgium, Dominion and American armies. He learned faster and better than any of the Allied generals how to defeat Britain’s most formidable and efficient foreign enemy since the Battle of Waterloo. Although no one—not even his greatest champions—pretends that
Douglas Haig was a Marlborough or Wellington, his recent biographer was right to dub him ‘not… the greatest military figure Britain has ever produced, but… one of the most significant—and one of the most successful.’25 Amongst military historians such as John Terraine, Brian Bond, Gary Sheffield and Hew Strachan, there has been a strong resurgence in Haig’s favour, and they have largely restored his reputation, albeit not yet with the general public.
SIX MONTHS ON (OVERLEAF)
Men of the King’s Royal Rifle Corps after the first battle of the Scarpe at Arras in 1917, where the British army put into practice many of the lessons learnt on the Somme.
In the Battle of Amiens, which began at 4.20 a.m. on 8 August 1918, Haig and his General Staff put into operation everything they had learnt two years earlier, and to devastating effect. There was no long preliminary bombardment by an insufficiently large artillery force, but instead a short, massive, surprise bombardment. Instead of wide lines of men marching slowly across no man’s land, 342 heavy tanks smashed through German lines, and 450,000 men in British Commonwealth and French divisions advanced behind a creeping barrage. Royal Air Force aeroplanes attacked the German lines, and cavalry regiments captured large numbers of prisoners of war. In that one day—which Ludendorff later described as ‘the black day of the German Army in the history of the war’—Haig’s force inflicted 27,000 casualties and broke through 4 miles (6.4 km) of German defences. ‘I had no hope of finding a strategic expedient whereby to turn the situation to our advantage’, Ludendorff later admitted.26 In reply to his report to the Kaiser two days later, Wilhelm II wrote: ‘The War must be brought to an end.’ 27
Elegy Page 17
