Battle of the Somme

12 Key excerpts on "Battle of the Somme"

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  Anglo-French Relations since the Late Eighteenth Century

  • Glyn Stone, Thomas G. Otte(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  THE ANGLO–FRENCH VICTORY ON THE SOMME William Philpott

  The 1916 Somme offensive, 141 days of hard attritional slogging over the slopes of an insignificant range of small hills in Picardy, is generally judged to epitomise the “futility and slaughter” which is shorthand for military operations on the western front in the First World War. The casualties speak for themselves: approximately 420,000 British and 205,000 French, and at least 400,000, arguably as many as 680,000 German, depending on accounting system.1 Why were over 1 million men killed or wounded in a small area of ground of no strategic significance?2 There was little to show for this blood-letting materially, and its impact on morale and fighting capacity, although hotly debated subsequently,3 was unquantifiable. Ergo, being such an unprecedented happening, the Somme has lost its context, ceasing to be an episode—the central episode—in the longer military continuum of the First World War in which allied French and British armies took on and defeated their German opponent in a lengthy war of attrition. It has become an event apart, and is so much studied and argued over that arguably today the Somme has become as much a cultural phenomenon as a military action. However, placing the battle in its proper place in the wartime continuum helps in an understanding of its true nature and impact, shorn of it subsequent notoriety and iconography.

  The allied commanders and armies judged at the time that they had won a victory—it was their enemies after all who subsequently pulled back their line to new defensive positions and began putting out peace feelers—albeit a hard-won and indecisive one. It would take two further years of fighting before their military superiority was conclusively demonstrated. Nevertheless, it is appropriate to consider why they reached this judgement, and how this battle fitted into their broader strategy.

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  Britain's 20 Worst Military Disasters

  From the Roman Conquest to the Fall of Singapore

  • John Withington(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • The History Press

    (Publisher)

  18 The Battle of the Somme, 1916 Every other disaster featured in this book was a defeat. The Somme was a victory, sort of. Although the British Army failed to achieve most of its objectives, it did push the Germans back, and the battle was seen by some as playing a crucial role in their final defeat two years later. Even if that is true, the astonishing scale of the British losses – nearly 20,000 killed on the first day alone – mean it is hard to describe the Somme as anything other than a disaster. During the opening months of the First World War, the Germans had quickly grabbed the region of north-east France that held the country’s most productive industries, as well as nearly all of Belgium. Then the conflict settled into the bloody stalemate Gallipoli was meant to circumvent, with an unbroken line of trenches running from the Channel to the Swiss border. During 1915, this front barely moved. Two big British offensives broke on the trenches, the barbed wire and the machine-gun nests. At Neuve-Chapelle in March, 11,000 were killed and wounded, while at Loos, in September, there were 61,000 casualties: in both cases for gains of less than 1,000 yards. One senior officer, General Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien, who we last met escaping from the Zulus at Isandlwana (see chapter fourteen), protested about the likely losses when told to mount a counter-attack, and was dismissed in short order. The French had lost even more heavily – 50,000 to edge the line forward 500 yards in Champagne, 60,000 at St Mihiel, 120,000 near Arras. On 6 December, the first military conference of all the Allies – Britain, France, Italy and Russia – was held at Chantilly, presided over by Marshal Joseph Joffre, generalissimo of all French forces. It agreed that the British and French should mount a joint offensive on either side of the river Somme. This was an odd choice

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  Somme 100th Anniversary

  • Tonie Holt, Valmai Holt(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Pen & Sword Military

    (Publisher)

  ISTORICAL SUMMARIES

  1916

  ‘The news about 8a.m. was not altogether good.’

  Sir Douglas Haig, 1 July

  The Battle Plan – in Brief

  T he 1916 Battle of the Somme lasted from 1 July to 17 November. It was opened by a mainly volunteer British Army, over half of which was new to battle and had, barely 18 months earlier, answered Kitchener’s call to arms.

  The Commander of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) was also new. General French had been replaced by his critic, General Haig, and now the latter had to prove his worth.

  At the end of 1915, the French and British planned for a 1916 joint offensive on the Somme, with the French playing the major role. Masterminded by Joffre, the plan was (as far as Joffre was concerned) to kill more Germans than their pool of manpower could afford. But when the German assault at Verdun drew French forces away from the Somme, the British found themselves with the major role, providing sixteen divisions on the first day to the French five.

  The British plan was based upon a steady 14-mile wide infantry assault from Serre in the north to Maricourt in the south. On the first day 100,000 soldiers were to go over the top at the end of a savage artillery bombardment. Behind the infantry – men of the Fourth Army, commanded by General Rawlinson – waited two

  General Sir Douglas Haig.

  When the early assaults failed to penetrate the German lines, the British Staff set about denying that they had ever intended to do such a thing. To many, their protestations appeared to be attempts to cover up the failure of Haig’s plan, and, as the C-in-C continued with his costly and unimaginative attacks, other voices demanded his removal. But he kept his job. He was, after all, a confidant of the King and a pillar of the Establishment.

  By the time that the battle ended, British casualties exceeded 400,000. The British secret weapon, the tank, had been used against expert advice in a ‘penny packet’ operation in September at Flers-Courcelette. Could it have been a desperate attempt by Haig to gain some sort of victory that would offset his earlier failures?

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  Landrecies to Cambrai

  Case Studies of German Offensive and Defensive Operations on the Western Front 1914-17

  • G.C. Wynne, Duncan Rogers, Duncan Rogers(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Helion and Company

    (Publisher)

  6

  The German Defence during the Battle of the Somme, July 1916

  Part I

  A number of German regimental histories, German individual diaries and other papers have recently been published dealing with the fighting on the Somme in the summer of 1916, and together they give a vivid picture of the German defence throughout the various stages of that long-drawn-out battle. The following collection of notes and extracts, made on reading such of those publications1 as deal particularly with the opening offensive of the 1st of July and the seven days' bombardment which preceded it, may be of interest.

  Introduction

  The immediate object of the offensive undertaken by the French and British Armies on the Somme Plateau in July, 1916, was, first, to relieve the German pressure on Verdun; secondly, to prevent the further transfer of German troops to other theatres of war; and thirdly, to wear down the German strength on the Western Front. The plan of operations to achieve this purpose had undergone considerable changes. At first, the main offensive was to be delivered by the French on a front of 35 miles astride and south of the Somme, while the British Fourth Army, holding the right of the British battle front, was to make a subsidiary attack on a front of some twelve miles between the Somme and the Ancre. The course of events on the Verdun front had, however, necessitated sending further considerable reinforcements to that area with the result that the extent of the French offensive had had to be modified. By the middle of June 1916, the French strength in the Somme district had been reduced by more than a third and they found themselves unable to sustain an offensive on a front greater than 9 miles. So it gradually came about that the importance of the French and British attacks was reversed. The originally intended subsidiary operation of the British Fourth Army gradually became the main operation, and the French offensive the subsidiary operation.

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  In Their Own Words

  Untold Stories of The First World War

  • Anthony Richards, Anthony Richards(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Imperial War Museum

    (Publisher)

  7 Lawrence

  THE Battle of the Somme, JULY – NOVEMBER 1916

  Soon the wounded began to arrive: some walking, some carried, some just helped along; the usual bloody, patient, battered crowd

  Chantilly, located just over 20 miles from the centre of Paris and surrounded by dense forest, played host to General Joffre’s headquarters. It would be here at the beginning of December 1915 that the French Commander-in-Chief called a conference with his fellow Allied leaders in order to establish a coordinated plan for the following year’s military offensives. 1916 was expected to be the year of the ‘Big Push’, when a concerted effort from the British and French Armies would break the deadlock of the Western Front and see the German Army forced to give up the ground which it had been holding since the end of 1914. A strategy of combined offensives by the British, French, Italians and Russians was agreed upon for the following summer, with an attack in the River Somme sector marked as the main contribution by the British and French Armies. Following a major German attack on Verdun in February 1916, however, the onus for the Somme shifted more towards the British, as French troops were diverted to the Meuse sector in order to counter the unexpected German assault.

  The British soldiers who would be involved in the Battle of the Somme included many from the Territorial Force as well as the newly recruited volunteer Kitchener’s Army. Among their number was medical officer Captain Lawrence Gameson. Born in Walsall in April 1890 from a non-conformist background, Lawrence was an Oxford graduate and, at the outbreak of war, was studying medicine at the London Hospital. His father persuaded him against enlisting in favour of completing his medical studies, which he did in December 1915, and he was commissioned into the Royal Army Medical Corps at the end of the following month. He crossed to France in May 1916 to be attached to the 45th Field Ambulance, part of the 15th Division who were then based around Loos.

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  Scorched Earth

  The Germans on the Somme, 1914–18

  • Gerhard Hirschfeld, Gerd Krumeich, Irina Renz(Authors)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Pen & Sword Military

    (Publisher)

  In mid-November 1916, after a temporary improvement in the weather, the last major attack by the British 5th Army (until 1 November the Reserve Army) under General Gough along the Ancre river was considered a disappointment, despite the capture by 51st Scottish Highland Division of Beaumont-Hamel which had been so hard-fought previously on 1 July. The French, who in September had reached Bouchavesnes north of Péronne with heavy losses – their farthest penetration eastwards of the German line, were little able to consolidate their territorial gains in this locality, and made no breakthrough.

  The towns of Bapaume and Péronne, the hard-fought objectives of the French and British attacks, remained securely in German hands. The Battle of the Somme ‘slowly burned out’, as a popular German military chronicler described it.14 Neither side achieved any noteworthy success: new military technology was tried out by both sides, new operational strategies and tactics were developed or rejected. Both sides claimed to emerge from the battle the victor – the price which they paid to do so was fearsome.

  The Balance Sheet

  The 1916 Battle of the Somme was far and away the bloodiest battle of the Great War. Between 24 June (commencement of the artillery bombardment) and 25 November (provisional end to the fighting), the British lost a total of 419,654 men dead, wounded, prisoner or missing, the French 204,353 and the Germans about 465,000.15 Thus the Allies’ losses were substantially higher than those of the German defenders. The British losses exceeded the worst estimates of their military leaders. The Somme destroyed, in the long term, the fighting ability of twenty-five British divisions;16 put another way, every second British soldier who fought on the Somme was either so seriously wounded as to be unfit for future military service or failed to return at all.

  For the Germans, the Battle of the Somme represented an enormous ‘bloodletting’ from which the Western Army, already weakened in the offensive before Verdun, would not recover. The Reich archive military historians summarized the Somme losses later: ‘The existing old nucleus of German infantry trained in peacetime bled to death on this battlefield.’17 To replace these experienced soldiers, amongst whom were numerous senior NCOs, there now arrived fresh and often inadequately trained recruits, whose chances of survival were accordingly that much slimmer. Responsibility for the extremely high losses lay not least with the German High Command, which at the beginning of the Battle of the Somme had insisted that the forward trenches be held at all costs. The German front line, as a rule heavily manned, could only be vacated voluntarily with the express authority of High Command.18

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  The Somme 1916

  Touring the French Sector

  • David O'Mara(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Pen & Sword Military

    (Publisher)

  Chapter Three

  The Battle of the Somme 1916

  Background to the Offensive

  Originally conceived as part of a war-winning simultaneous strike on three fronts by all Allied nations, initial planning for what was to eventually become the Battle of the Somme began soon after the Italian declaration of war and as early as June 1915, when it was proposed by the French Commander-in-Chief, général Joseph Joffre, that the Allies (France, Russia, Great Britain, Serbia, Belgium and Italy) should begin to operate more co-operatively with each other and co-ordinate their plans accordingly. This proposal was taken up on 7 July 1915 when the first Inter-Allied Military Conference at Chantilly, Oise (the location of Joffre’s Grand Quartier Général ) was held. Though no specific actions were decided upon at this conference, it was agreed that concentrated, co-operative actions would be the most successful way forward and the foundations were laid for a second, more proactive, conference to be held later that year.

  Following on from a meeting in Paris between the British Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, and his French counterpart, Aristide Briand, on 17 November 1915, an agreement was made and adopted to form a permanent committee co-ordinating action between the two nations. A further Anglo-French meeting was held in Calais on 4 December 1915, presided over by Lord Kitchener, with the French delegation represented by Briand. Two days later, a second Chantilly Conference was held in which the Allied strategy for 1916 was to be decided. Here it was agreed that offensives by the Allied armies on the War Fronts should be delivered simultaneously or, at least, close enough in time to each other (within a month) so that the enemy would be prevented from being able to transport reinforcements from one front to another. These offensives were planned to commence as soon as was possible, with local, limited attacks taking place in between to further incapacitate and occupy the enemy forces.

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  The Church Lads' Brigade in the Great War

  The 16th (Service) Battalion The King's Royal Rifle Corps. The Long, Long Trail

  • Jean Morris(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Pen & Sword Military

    (Publisher)

  Chapter Six

  1916: The Battle of the Somme On 27 January 1916, conscription into the armed forces of Great Britain was made compulsory. For almost the next three years, dozens of battles were fought simultaneously. Hundreds of paths were crossed by thousands of allied troops attempting to destroy their enemy.

  Before action By all the glories of the day And the cool evening’s benison, By that last sunset touch that lay Upon the hills where day was done, By beauty lavishly outpoured And blessings carelessly received, By all the days that I have lived Make me a soldier, Lord. By all of man’s hopes and fears, And all the wonders poets sing, The laughter of unclouded years, And every sad and lovely thing; By the romantic ages stored With high endeavour that was his, By all his mad catastrophes Make me a man, O Lord. I, that on my familiar hill Saw with uncomprehending eyes A hundred of Thy sunsets spill Their fresh and sanguine sacrifice, Ere the sun swings his noonday sword Must say goodbye to all of this; By all delights that I shall miss, Help me to die, O Lord. W.N. Hodgson (1893–1916).

  Serving with the 9th Battalion The Devonshire Regiment, Lieutenant Hodgson was preparing for the Battle of the Somme. The scheduled date for the start of the battle was originally to be in August 1916, but had been brought forward to 29 June. Owing to bad weather during the week leading up to the battle, the date of the attack, now planned for 11:00 hours on 28 June, was moved once again to the morning of 1 July 1916. It is believed that Noel Hodgson wrote the poem on 29 June 1916.

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  The Official History Of The New Zealand Rifle Brigade [Illustrated Edition]

  • Lieut.-Col. W. S. Austin(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Verdun Press

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER VI. THE Battle of the Somme, 1916

  PART 1.—THE EARLIER FIGHTING.

  Preparations for the summer campaign—Plan—Position—Preliminary bombardment—Opening of the attack—Progress—The French—Attack resumed—Results of second phase.

  Before proceeding to deal with the part taken by the New Zealand Rifle Brigade in the Battle of the Somme of 1916, it will be well to take a brief survey of the progress of events in that field from the commencement of the great series of engagements on July 1st up till the middle of September.

  Preparations for a summer campaign had been long in progress, but the actual date of the opening of the offensive had not been fixed. The British armies had been rapidly growing in numbers, and the supply of munitions was increasing to a highly satisfactory degree; and, in order that the reinforcements should have the fullest opportunities for intensive training, and that the accumulations of munitions on the ground should in every way satisfy all requirements, the Commander-in-Chief was desirous of postponing the attack as long as possible, subject only to the necessity of commencing operations before the season was too far advanced. The Germans, however, were continuing their pressure on Verdun, and the Austrian offensive on the Italian front was gaining ground. Relief in the latter theatre, where by the end of May the pressure of the enemy was becoming alarming, was secured by the opening of the Russian campaign early in June. The enemy, however, did not in any way lessen the fury of his attacks on Verdun, where, though the heroic defence of our Allies had gained many weeks of inestimable value to us and to them, the strain was now becoming intolerable. In view of the general situation here and elsewhere, it was agreed that a combined French and British offensive should open not later than the end of June.

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  From the Somme to Victory

  The British Army's Experience on the Western Front 1916–1918

  • Peter Simkins(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Praetorian Press

    (Publisher)

  Chapter Two

  The Lessons and Legacy of the Somme: Changing Historical Perspectives

  E ver since the mid-to-late 1920s, the conduct of the 1916 Somme campaign by the BEF under Sir Douglas Haig has generally received a bad press. On 1 July each year, on the anniversary of the start of the battle, the Somme offensive is presented to the public by the media in predominantly negative terms, with a heavy and repetitive emphasis on words such as ‘carnage’ and ‘incompetence’. Indeed, if people in Britain and the Commonwealth ever pause to reflect upon the 1916 experience, it is highly likely that their thoughts – influenced by a vaguely defined collective folk-memory of the Somme – will have turned towards the slaughter of the Pals battalions, ‘lions led by donkeys’, ‘butchers and bunglers’, a ‘lost generation’, inadequate weapons, misguided strategy and tactics, drawn blinds in countless streets in the industrial North-West, in Belfast and on Tyneside, and, not least, the death of innocence and idealism on the blood-soaked fields of Picardy.

  But is that deeply rooted public perception of the Somme wholly justified or, alternatively, did the BEF – from Haig and GHQ down to divisions, brigades, battalions and batteries – actually learn and apply the lessons of the Somme battle? Did the BEF make organisational changes and adopt new tactics and techniques as a result of the Somme experience and, if so, did these changes and new tactics lead to an overall improvement in fighting methods and battlefield performance and thereby contribute significantly to eventual victory in 1918? In other words, can one detect a learning process in the BEF which either started during, or was accelerated by, the Somme offensive? In order to answer some, or all, of these basic questions, it might first be helpful to examine the nature and content of the historical debate on such issues as it was conducted between the early 1920s and the mid-1980s. One will then try to show how, over the last twenty years or so, modern scholarship and archive-based research has not only widened and deepened our knowledge and understanding of the command, operations and infrastructure of the BEF in the First World War but has also simultaneously begun to alter the whole tone of the debate for the better, even if there is still a long road to travel in that direction.

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  The World Crisis: 1916–1918

  • Winston S. Churchill(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • RosettaBooks

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER VII

  THE Battle of the Somme

  ‘Pray God that you may never know

  The Hell where youth and laughter go. ’

  SIEGFRIED SASSOON .

  Inevitability—Strength of the German Line—Absence of Surprise—Objective of July 1—Opening of the Battle—The 8th Division—Through German Eyes—Tragedy—The Greatest British Loss in History—The Battle sinks to a Minor Scale—Its Obstinate Prolongation—The Anatomy of the Battlefield—Conditions become more Equal—The Strain on the Enemy—The Exposure of the Tanks—Their Effect—My Memorandum of August 1, 1916—The Question of Relative Losses—Accuracy of its Figures—Actual British and German Losses—Criticism of Results—Soothing Information—Inexorable Forces—Glory of the Troops.

  A sense of the inevitable broods over the battlefields of the Somme. The British armies were so ardent, their leaders so confident, the need and appeals of our Allies so clamant, and decisive results seemingly so near, that no human power could have prevented the attempt. All the spring the French had been battling and dying at Verdun, immolating their manhood upon that anvil-altar; and every chivalrous instinct in the new British armies called them to the succour of France, and inspired them with sacrifice and daring. Brusiloff’s surprising successes redoubled, if that were possible, the confidence of the British Generals. They were quite sure they were going to break their enemy and rupture his invading lines in France. They trusted to the devotion of their troops, which they knew was boundless; they trusted to masses of artillery and shells never before accumulated in war; and they launched their attack in the highest sense of duty and the strongest conviction of success.

  The military conceptions underlying the scheme of attack were characterized by simplicity. The policy of the French and British Commanders had selected as the point for their offensive what was undoubtedly the strongest and most perfectly defended position in the world.

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  The Road to St. Julien

  The Letters of a Stretcher-Bearer of the Great War

  • William St. Clair, John St. Clair, John St. Clair(Authors)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Leo Cooper

    (Publisher)

  Chapter Eight

  1916 The Battle of the Somme

  Any hopes still harboured by the governments of the belligerent nations, that there might be an easy route to victory in the European War, died in 1915. Despite defeat after defeat, Russia was still in the war, and that meant for Germany the strain of a war on two fronts – the old nightmare of Bismarck. But at least, from the German point of view, it was the German Army that was in the forward positions, holding most of Belgium and parts of France. The British and the French had no such comfort. If their failure in Artois and Champagne was not to be repeated, the scale of the military commitment on the Western Front would have to be enormous. With all the luck in the world, dislodging millions of dug-in Germans could not be done except at terrible cost in men’s lives. Escalation to all-out land warfare on the Continent of Europe appeared the only option. The alternative of using naval power in support of military operations in the east, as advocated by Churchill and Lloyd George, had been tried in 1915. It had ended in the ignominious disaster of the landings at Gallipoli. This failure of Churchill’s Dardanelles Campaign spelt victory for the so-called ‘Westerners’ in the British military establishment, those who thought that Britain’s military resources should be concentrated on the Western Front. And their victory was reflected almost immediately in changes in personnel in the Expeditionary Force. Churchill, having resigned in disgrace in November 1915 over Gallipoli, continued his descent by exiling himself to the Western Front to command a battalion of Scottish infantry, the 6th Royal Scots Fusiliers, of Willie’s 27 Brigade. General Haig, in contrast, became Commander-in- Chief of the Expeditionary Force in succession to Sir John French.

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